Archive | December, 2004

Google will have its IPO shortly, and just in time arch-rival-for-advertising-dollars Yahoo leaks word that it plans to dump Google technology for its own search engine technology. I used to love Google; it was a vast improvement over other search engines when it appeared, and, for my purposes, it’s still the best around. But it […]

A very interesting report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Today’s New York Times contains a troubling article about Judge George Daniels of the Southern District of New York, who the Times reports is the “unchallenged king of delayed decisions.” (Link: Howard) Acccording to the Times, Judge Daniels “had 289 motions in civil cases pending for more than six months, by far the highest total […]

When you tell someone that a photograph of them is particularly great, aren’t you really saying that actually they don’t look that good?

The thrust of my NRO piece is that there was no lost Golden Age of free speech, where the First Amendment was read broadly or even literally. In general, the constitutional protections for free speech are broader now than they ever have been; they’re certainly broader than they were for most of the nation’s history, […]

Several correspondents e-mailed me about my NRO piece to argue that I was wrong to talk about the First Amendment cases interchangeably with cases challenging state laws under state free speech guarantees. Let me briefly defend my decision to do that.      To begin with, a bit of historical background: The Bill of Rights was pretty […]

Last night I attended a talk by Northwestern Law School professor John McGinnis detailing, based on political contribution data, the overwhelming Democrat-leaning orientation of law professors. The talk was cosponsored by the Federalist Society and the National Association of Scholars, and had an attendance of about fifty, which included a substantial percentage of the law […]

My National Review Online piece this morning deals with the argument — made by some conservatives and libertarians — that we’re somehow losing traditionally understood First Amendment protections. One can certainly condemn particular government actions as unconstitutional, I argue; but if anything, free speech protections are on balance as strong now than they have ever […]

From Reuters: A suburban Paris mayor who banned all religious symbols from civil weddings as part of France’s campaign against the Islamic veil [has] brushed off criticism that his hard line will alienate Muslims. . . . [Martin] banned the veil at civil weddings in November. Patrick Devedjian, a minister in Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s […]

Daniel Okrent reprints a telling comment about how newspapers report the news, attributed to veteran New York Times editor Lester Markel:   The reporter, the most objective reporter, collects fifty facts. Out of the fifty he selects twelve to include in his story (there is such a thing as space limitation). Thus he discards thirty-eight. This […]

The Washington Post has a story today about the blog Fallujah in Pictures. According to the Post, the blog’s reproduction of photographs from Iraq seen widely in the Muslim world but not reprinted in U.S. papers demonstrates “how the might of the U.S. military can be matched by a single blogger working part time.”   In […]

I had dinner and drinks last night in Atlanta, site of the annual AALS law professors’ conference (and the concurrent one-day Federalist Society faculty conference) with co-Conspirator Jacob Levy, whom I’d only met once before, Right Coast blogger Michael Rappaport, Glenn Reynolds the Instapundit, co-Conspirator Randy Barnett, The Corner contributor Jonathan Adler, and some like-minded […]

2004, of course, is a Senate election year. As in past election years, there will likely be a few very close Senate races in which the vote totals of the Libertarian candidate will threaten to be greater than the difference between the Republican and Democratic candidates. Republican strategists will call on the Libertarians to drop […]

To me the big puzzle remains why Al Qaeda has not pulled off another successful attack on American soil. Look at the two snipers, they almost brought the Washington area to a standstill, and neither was close to an organizational genius. Over the last two weeks we have instead seen terrorist “chatter” leading to foiled […]

I criticize them in this National Review Online column. Here’s the introduction: The liberals on the Supreme Court, and in universities, have been undermining the Framers’ First Amendment handiwork. The Court’s decision upholding campaign-finance restrictions show that Americans are losing the liberties that they’ve long enjoyed; likewise with the speech codes that some public universities […]