Archive | October, 2004

On Friday of this week I will be giving a distinguished lecture at Syracuse University School of Law. I will be talking about Restoring the Lost Constitution. Details can be found here.

Speaking at the Stanford University Law School on Saturday, Justice Breyer reportedly said about his vote in Bush v. Gore: “I had to ask myself: Would I vote the same way if the names were reversed? I said ‘yes.’ But I’ll never know for sure — because people are great self-kidders — if I reached […]

Brian Leiter offers some comments on Richard Posner’s recent Legal Affairs article, Against the Law Reviews.

A reader, responding to my post criticizing the Guardian column writes: [F]or a Professor of Free Speech, you don’t seem very enamoured with the concept of free speech. Actually, as a professor of free speech, I rather like exercising my own free speech. Part of my free speech rights is the right to criticize others. […]

Today’s New York Times has a very interesting investigative report on how the Bush Administration decided to set up military trubunals to try captured Al Qaeda suspects. The article spends a lot of time on the process of the decision rather than its substance, and isn’t without its underlying view of the merits, but it’s […]

I think I’m with David Bernstein on this. I suspect that voters of all political stripes have many misperceptions; and of course their misperceptions align with their political views — they’re more likely to believe things that they’d like to be true. My guess, for instance, is that more Democrats than Republicans erroneously think that […]

The Guardian (U.K.) publishes a columnist’s piece filled mostly with abuse of Bush, culminating with “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr — where are you now that we need you?” Disgusting. Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer. UPDATE: The Guardian has posted the following at the page formerly associated with the column: […]

Regarding Stuart Benjamin’s post below, the study he cites is just one example of the broader problem of political ignorance, well-documented by my colleague Ilya Somin. Since, as I recall, studies show that conservatives are overall better-informed than are liberals, I suspect that the study Stuart cites is an artifact of two factors: (1)Bush supporters […]

My student Elliot Fladen reports.

I just ran across a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland (a group that calls itself nonpartisan, that apparently is regarded as nonpartisan, and whose board contains both Republicans and Democrats). I find its results stunning. Rather than summarize them, I’ll just quote from their press […]

Reader Sean Starke writes: I just got some confirmation that New Jersey will actually be competitive this year: we just got a phone call from the Monmouth County GOP inviting us to a rally tomorrow that Rudy Giuliani will be speaking at here in town (my town, Middletown, lost a lot of people in the […]

I’m using Word 2002, and my file contains both endnotes — which have to go near the end of the book, not after each chapter — and an index. I’d like, though, to put the endnotes as the second-to-last item, and the index after them as the last. Does anyone have any suggestions for that, […]

An administrator at Culpeper County High School pulled [14-year-old Ellen Sonifrank] out of her second block class [on Sept. 27] and took her to see Principal Eric Porter. The principal asked the freshman to remove a sweatshirt displaying a message that upset one of her classmates. The front of Ellen’s black, hooded sweatshirt reads, “Abortion […]

You’ll have to read it to believe it. (Hat tip: Talkleft.)

A reader asks, apropos the post on last week’s Supreme Court decisions, what a “CVSG” is. “CVSG” means “Call for the Views of the Solicitor General.” If the Justices are considering whether to grant a petition for certiorari (i.e., to agree to hear a case), and they think the case raises issues on which the […]