Archive | July, 2004

One of the great things about living in Boston is the summer concert scene. So much to pick from, so close at hand. Tonight was the best Boston Pops program I ever heard. In its season finale, Keith Lockhart conducted a Gershwin tribute including American In Paris, Three Preludes (scored for orchestra) and Rhapsody and […]

Adam Charnes, a very smart lawyer who has briefed this issue, reports that he “did a lot of research on the question and was unable to find any commentator who read article 5 of [the Third Geneva Convention] as requiring a hearing to determine whether the detainee was a belligerent. Nor did Hamdi’s amici so […]

Readers Matthew Bower and Scipio (Scipio Mississippiensis, not Africanus) report that the Mississippi judge who published that homosexuals-should-be-locked-up rant was the equivalent of a Justice of the Peace; people who hold this post in Mississippi have relatively modest powers compared to normal judges. They also needn’t be lawyers, or even college graduates; Scipio mentions that […]

Some people have said that the Supreme Court’s Guantanamo detainee decision might have been influenced by the Administration’s refusal to give the detainees the procedures to which they’re entitled by the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Conventions are a treaty that we signed, the argument goes, the government is bound to give this procedure, so we […]

Alex Sundstrom suggests this answer to the statutory rape problem (again, note that I do not necessarily endorse any of the readers’ views that I post here): I think the most justifiable statutory rape law would apply only to men sleeping with teenage girls (retaining the standard 4-year age gap). My reasons are utilitarian ones, […]

Last week, Slate posted a response to some criticisms of its Kerryisms column, including to my criticisms. Kerryisms, the author says, aren’t really attempts to translate Kerry’s words into “plain English,” though they were originally billed that way. OK, that’s fine — but what then are they? The response talks about “get[ting] the joke,” but […]

Interesting Cleveland Plain-Dealer story: Lawyer Dean Boland has testified as a defense expert in three child-pornography cases in Northeast Ohio . . . . Charges were thrown out in two of the . . . cases, which sent waves of alarm through the law-enforcement community. . . . Boland, 37, of Lakewood, is one of […]

Robert Novak at Town Hall calls the Zarqawi story an “urban legend,” and says his source at the CIA agrees. One CIA source puts this aborted Zarqawi raid in the same category as Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9-11,” which spreads such false information as George W. Bush’s conspiring to get Osama bin Laden’s relatives out of […]

about her lesbian ex-partner, who has joint custody: I blogged about this case last November, when the judge entered the order; here’s a brief excerpt from the original news story: A Christian mother is appealing a judge’s decision that prohibits her from teaching her daughter that homosexuality is wrong. Cheryl Clark, who left a lesbian […]

The Mississippi Supreme Court just decided a very interesting judicial free speech case. A state judge sent the following letter to a newspaper (and followed it up with comments to a radio station): Dear Editor: I got sick on my stomach today as I read the (AP) news story on the Dog attach [sic] on […]

A Slate article reports: Following the recent beheadings of Americans and other foreigners in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. press turned to various experts to identify a precedent in the Quran or Islamic history for this kind of gory murder. “Beheadings are not mentioned in the Koran at all,” Imam Muhammad Adam El-Sheikh, co-founder […]

The complaint is linked to here. The story about Justice Breyer’s response is here. An excerpt: A justice of the Supreme Court yesterday rebuffed a call by members of Congress for an investigation of a federal judge’s statement last month that President Bush came to power in a similar way to dictators such as Hitler […]

Reader Pat Birmingham points to this table of state marriage statutes, including the age requirements (which tend to be 18 without parental consent, 14 to 16 with parental consent, and in a couple of instances 12 for girls, though that might require judicial consent, too — I can’t tell just by looking at the table).

Jesse Helms turns against the tax cuts. William F. Buckley turns against the war. Bruce Bartlett makes the fiscal case for Clinton nostalgia, and Julian Sanchez says he’s hearing a lot of that sort of thing. Tyler Cowen requests an invitation to join the Ranks of the Shrill, over the tightening of the Cuban embargo. […]

This is not a huge problem — errors always happen — but I thought it was worth flagging. Ted Frank reports that on page 337 of Clinton’s book, Clinton mistakenly says that Reagan nominated Scalia after the Bork nomination was rejected. “President Reagan then nominated Judge Antonin Scalia, who was as conservative as Bork, but […]