Archive | August, 2004

On Tuesday, a panel of the Third Circuit reversed and remanded an order of a district court judge who had simply copied verbatim the appellee’s proposed opinion in the case. Here is an excerpt from the Third Circuit’s opinion:   Judicial opinions are the core workproduct of judges. They are much more than findings of fact […]

Justice Brown, whose nomination to the D.C. Circuit has been stalled by Senate Democrats, easily gets the better of her California Supreme Court colleagues in a dissent. The majority’s opinion makes it absurdly easy for a prosecutor to present expert testimony claiming that a woman’s recantation of a prior claim of a single incident of […]

I’m amazed how often people think there’s some puzzle about whether zero is odd or even. (Do a google search on “is zero even” and you’ll see.) The question has even made its way into news stories, usually when some government institutes “odd-even” gasoline rationing in which the days you can buy gas depend on […]

I should be on Bill O’Reilly’s radio show today at 10 am Pacific, talking about the First Amendment rules that would apply to protests at the Republican National Convention.

Disappointing decision by the 10th Circuit in Powers v. Oklahoma this week upholding Oklahoma’s law permitting only licensed funeral directors to sell caskets. Why someone would need a to embalm 25 bodies, pass a licensing examination, and complete a specified 60-credit program of undergraduate training for the required funeral director’s license just to sell a […]

I called Harper’s, and was told that Lewis Lapham would have an explanation of the error (they acknowledged it was an error) in the October issue, which should be out about a month from now. To their credit, by the way, someone called me back from Harper’s within an hour. I should have asked — […]

While on the topic of great speeches by public figures, I commend to all a remarkable speech by Carly Fiorina of HP in support of globalization. She is extremely effective in providing anecdotes and personal stories that support the abstract insights of economic theory on why globalization is good for the poor. Using Thomas Sowell’s […]

In response to my earlier designation of the Washington Times as the “Good” Times, a friend of mine remarked that I’m the only person in America who reads the New York Times solely for the sports news (last year I had 2 Giants and 1 Jet on my fantasy football team). Strange, but true.

When President Bush signed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, he made clear that he did not care all that much about legal protection for political speech. (Ditto the Supreme Court when it upheld the law.) So no one should be surprised that Bush is now calling for an end to independent political advertisements, such as […]

t has long been my belief that environmentalism in practice is really more of a religious lifestyle, rather than a science-based effort to actually protect the environment. My article “Baptists? The Political Economy of Environmental Interest Groups” makes this argument. Two articles from yesterday’s headlines shed some light on the subject of whether environmentalists are […]

An alternative argument that has been offered is that even if the 21st Amendment does not transfer Congress’s commerce clause authority to the states, Congress essentially reconveyed its commerce clause power to the states legislatively through the Webb-Kenyon Act. Thus, the dormant Commerce Clause is said to be irrelevant to this case, because protectionist state […]

My colleague Rick Sander is one of the researchers on the “After the JD” project; they’re interviewing a huge (about 3800) and fairly representative sample of people who graduated from law school in 2000, and they’re just beginning to come up with data. (They intend to interview them again on several occasions in the years […]

I at first didn’t want to get too outraged about Lewis Lapham’s writing — before he actually had a chance to see the Republican convention — about “the platform on which [George W. Bush] was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the heavy law enforcement, and the paper elephants,” and adding […]

here. I linked to Cathy’s column, and provided an excerpt here.

Good thing that people still read the reliable, credible Real Media instead of those nasty inaccurate, un-fact-checked blogs. That way, they get the benefit of what Jacob Sullum (whose work I have generally found quite trustworthy) says is Lewis Lapham’s clairvoyance: In the latest issue of Harper’s, Lewis Lapham has a long, tiresome essay on […]