Archive | September, 2004

With all the apparent media gaffes in Rathergate, it would be helpful if someone put up a page listing (1) each error or likely error by a major media outlet, (2) an explanation of why it’s an error, preferably with links to evidence that it’s an error, (3) a description of what the media outlet […]

The October 2004 Vanity Fair has hit the newsstands, and it offers an insider’s view of what happened in Bush v. Gore. (It’s not online, unfortunately; yes, I actually had to plunk down $4.50 for a very glossy paper copy.) To be more precise, the article offers the view of a group of the law […]

Just ran across LibraryLaw Blog, an interesting blog focused on law and libraries. Definitely worth checking out. Here’s one interesting story the blog points to: [The ACLU] filed a lawsuit on behalf of Carlos Hernandez, a Honolulu man who said he was banned from the Hawaii State Library for a year for using its computers […]

Now here’s a hoax involving Clinton Portis that I and many other fantasy footballers really care about.

A bunch of people e-mailed me to say that surely forging a letter from a military officer, which ostensibly came from a military file, must violate some federal statute, and not just the couple of state election law statutes I mentioned here. Well, that was my intuition, too, but a quick search didn’t reveal any […]

I would like to thank Professor John Mogk for his response to my most recent post on the Michigan Supreme Court’s overruling of Poletown in the recent case of County of Wayne v. Hathcock. Under normal circumstances, I would hesitate to renew a debate like this such a long time after it began. However, Hathcock’s […]

If the Killian letters (the ones that purport to relate to aspects of President Bush’s National Guard service) are indeed forged, the forger might be criminally prosecuted. My sense is that most forgery statutes don’t apply to frauds aimed at influencing votes, rather than to getting money or property or the like. I might be […]

I just heard back from Dr. Sisley, who was quoted by Reuters about spinal cord injuries and firearms (see this post). She reports that what she told Reuters — and what Reuters should have said — is that 90 percent of spinal cord injuries caused by violence (which are a minority of all spinal cord […]

has just been struck down, both on First Amendment grounds and dormant Commerce Clause grounds. I haven’t read the entire opinion, but what I have read suggests that the court’s main reasons were: (1) given existing technical limitations, the law essentially pressures ISPs into blocking a lot of fully protected material as well as the […]

Scott Martens (Fistful of Euros) criticizes Dan Pipes, arguing that he misrepresents certain French-language writings by Tariq Ramadan. In passing, he also mentions: Monolingualism has costs. Eugene Volokh, for example, has posted a link to Pipes’ piece but says that he does not know the facts of the case well enough to judge. Ted over […]

their confusion of machine guns for assault weapons in the opening paragraph of Tuesday’s editorial. Looking forward to seeing the item when it’s published.

I don’t care much about Swift Vets, Winter Soldiers, Air National Guard stories or draft deferments. I am more concerned about what a prospective President will do over the next four years than what he may have done (or not done) decades ago. And I have no idea what to think about this new bombshell, […]

Professor John Mogk wanted to jump in again to the thread we had on the subject in August; the latest entry was Ilya Somin’s post, which links back to the older posts, and here’s Professor Mogk’s response: OVERRULING POLETOWN On August 17 I replied to Professor Somin’s comments posted on August 9, 2004, regarding my […]

In about two weeks, the Second Circuit will hold oral argument in the case of Hall v. Earthlink. In this case, an ISP cut off access to a customer’s e-mail account after wrongly concluding that the customer was a spammer. It took six days for the ISP to realize the error and apologize; rather than […]