Archive | November, 2004

Reader Gerald Kanapathy writes: Along similar lines to your item on Montana voting for medical marijuana but also for Bush, take a look at the Churchill County, Nevada election results: The county had a vote on whether to continue to allow legalized prostitution, or to ban it. (In Nevada, outside of Vegas and Reno, the […]

I wish more people knew this word, in part because then it could be used more effectively to admonish people (and especially lawyers and politicians who go on for paragraphs while saying nothing). According to dictionary.com, it means “To discourse at length in a pompous or boastful manner.” And to my knowledge, there are no […]

M. Simon (Power and Control) points out that Montana voted for Bush 59-39, but for medical marijuana 62-38 (see CNN’s Montana election results page).

Brannon Denning and I had a delightful conversation at AEI on the Supreme Court wine cases, followed by an terrific discussion of the medical marijuana cases as well. Or as the moderator put it, “For today’s purposes, alcohol is just a gateway to marijuana.” For interested readers, you can find my collected VC blogs collected […]

A new one-minute film from Honestreporting.com sums up the legacy of the founder of modern terrorism. With one despot already gone, another Middle East despot may not survive much longer, according to a report from the indispensible StrategyPage.com: “With its military falling apart and all its traditional sources of foreign aid drying up, the Syrian […]

The Organization of American Historians (OAH) has issued a rather superficial report on academic freedom. Ralph Luker and KC Johnson have interesting comments. UPDATE: David Beito at Liberty & Power agrees with Luker that the OAH makes much of the Patriot Act, but fails to mention campus speech codes, which result in almost daily restrictions […]

Entry Four: What Would the Black Bar Look Like With a Reduction or Elimination of Law School Racial Preferences? Perhaps one of the reasons that few legal academics have delved very far into the issue of law school racial preferences is the widespread assumption that, whatever the other costs and benefits of the system, admissions […]

The faculty at my law school voted to recommend me for tenure this afternoon. It will take a few months for the recommendation to work its way through the university administration, but this was the major hurdle. Off to celebrate.

Legal Affairs has hosted a debate this week about the pros and cons of splitting up the Ninth Circuit. The debate raises an interesting question: why is it that an unusually high number of Ninth Circuit decisions can be characterized as outliers? I am interested less in the occasional high-profile opinions than in the run-of-the-mill […]

The L.A. Times has a story (thanks to Cathy Seipp for the pointer, and for the amusing link to the movie The Grudge). My favorite line from the L.A. Times story comes from psychologist Alan Hilfer: “They’re allowed to be angry. They’re allowed to be frustrated . . .,” said Hilfer. “And they should talk […]

The New York Times writes about how claims that the election result was affected by vote fraud were made on various blogs, and how they were then rebutted, also often on blogs.

This letter on Dean’s World says it all. A few of the great quotes: “A lot of us grew up being told to question authority, and a lot of that authority we now question is the left-wing orthodoxy of your generation…” “In other words, I’ve experienced firsthand just how hateful, intolerant, and irrational you guys […]

The New York Times has a story purporting to offer an inside scoop of the Administration’s strategy for future Supreme Court nominations:   Republicans close to the White House said on Thursday that the choice of Alberto R. Gonzales as attorney general was part of a political strategy to bolster Mr. Gonzales’s credentials with conservatives and […]

Mark Bauerlein, “a professor of English at Emory University and director of research at the National Endowment for the Arts,” has a long essay on liberal dominance of the universities. Elsewhere I have suggested a thought experiment. Imagine that law faculties were 80% Republican and leaning Republican and 10% Democrats and Democratic leaners. Would Democratic […]