Archive | July, 2007

With the Mearsheimer and Walt book “The Israel Lobby” due out next month, I thought I’d preemptively discuss “the anti-Israel Lobby,” using a similarly broad definition for the “anti-Israel Lobby” as M & W do for the “Israel Lobby”. In the United States, the presumptive anti-Israel lobby includes the 20% or so of Americans who […]

In this column, NY Times reporter Adam Cohen attacks the “conservative judicial activism” of the Roberts Court. Unfortunately, Cohen’s argument is riddled with flaws and misrepresentations. Here are his main points: The [conservative] individuals and groups that have been railing against judicial activism should be outraged. They are not, though, because their criticism has always […]

Recent criticism of the Federalist Society for hosting some all-male panels and conferences is, as Eugene explains, seriously misguided. As Eugene implies, the main goal for a conference or panel (in addition to quality) should be ideological and viewpoint diversity. Gender, like race and religion, sometimes correlates with ideological orientation and can serve as a […]

I suspect that readers do not come the Volokh Conspiracy to read about show business topics, but I just happened across this great reminiscence on Powerline by William Katz, a most interesting man who happened to work for a time as a talent coordinator for the Tonight Show during its zenith under Johnny Carson. Reading […]

The Federalist Society general tries very hard to make sure that panels as its conferences represent many different views, and not just those within the Society itself. There may be some exceptions (the tribute to Judge Bork seems to have had fewer liberal speakers than is the norm for us, though I expect that some […]

The recent posts about the picture of Jesus in the Louisiana courthouse, with the inscription “To know peace, obey these laws,” has again brought up some of the arguments that the ACLU is anti-Christian or anti-religious. There is much I disagree with the ACLU about, including about the Establishment Clause. (I’ve criticized the Executive Director […]

A while back, I switched from using a calculator (the calculator program on Windows, as it happens) to a spreadsheet (Excel). I’ve been very happy with the results; so has a friend of mine to whom I recommended this. It’s probably obvious to most of you, but we didn’t do it for many years after […]

Clarence Thomas Is Right, reads the headline to Fish’s New York Times op-ed. (Recall that newspapers headlines generally aren’t written by the authors of the articles, but here the headline is an accurate summary of Fish’s view.) An excerpt: Although Thomas does not make this point explicitly, it seems clear that his approval of an […]

In yesterday’s New York Times Week in Review section, Linda Greenhouse has an article on the barriers liberals face in repopularizing the notion of using the courts to enact “profound social change.”   I was particularly interested in something Greenhouse notes more or less in passing: namely, that there is a relatively clear vision of the […]

Check out The Conglomerate (“The Glom” for the cool kids), where, as part of their Junior Scholars Workshop, today they’re commenting on my paper, Privatization and the Law and Economics of Political Advocacy (forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review). There are comments up by Tom Ulen, Paul Rubin, and Brian Galle. Comments on the paper […]

I posted a comment to Jonathan’s post below that I thought I’d promote to an actual post (with some slight changes). It’s about the recurring question whether there’s anything anti-Semitic about singling out Israel for criticism when, for anything bad that Israel arguably does, a ton of other countries (China, Sudan, etc.) do it worse. […]

In 2002, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, working with other federal agencies, constructed an underwater electric fence across the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to prevent aliens — in this case, Asian carp — from making their way into Lake Michigan. Five years later, it appears to be working, at least for now. The […]

Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri reminds us that “post-Zionism” among Israeli leftist academics is, for the most part, just anti-Zionism made more fashionable. The post-Zionists are the intellectual, and in many cases literal, heirs of the small but vocal anti-Zionist far Left that managed to accompany the Zionist movement to Israel. Even at the height […]

The New York Times has an interesting report on this question.

In a Washington Post essay on the Bush Administration, Byron York writes that recent events “have left Republicans saying, at least among themselves, something blunt and devastating: It’s over.”