Archive | September, 2007

Paul Desmond is mostly known for being the saxophonist in the Dave Brubeck Quartet for many years, and in particular for having written “Take Five” on the ever-popular Time Out. Here’s a clip of Desmond leading a quartet at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1975 playing Desmond’s ballad “Emily”:Incidentally, there are several versions of the […]

Lately, it has become common for critics of free markets to argue that they give us too many choices, and making all those decisions is too burdensome. Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice is the best-known defense of this argument. Tyler Cowen links to a good statement of it by Megan of the From […]

In today’s Rocky Mountain News media column, I praise the Denver Post’s new website, PoliticsWest.com, which uses blog power to expand the paper’s coverage of politics throughout the Rocky Mountains. My previous column dealt with a topic which I had first raised on the VC (and on which the comments provided good insight): the law […]

That is the title of a new book by Elyn R. Saks, law professor at USC, and it seems now a psychology and psychiatry professor there as well. I was very taken by the gripping narrative of this book. The subtitle is My Journey Through Madness. Here is one short review. Here is an excerpt. […]

There was a lot that was cartoonish, and even occasionally embarrassing, about Pavarotti and his career — the hankie, the big smile, the mediocre crossover stuff he performed in the late stages of his career … he was a little too much, sometimes, like the Italian Tenor right out of central casting … But man, […]

Many commenters on my post on “Israeli Kibbutzim and the Failure of Socialism” argue that socialism is a dead issue. Why, they ask, should we bother arguing against an ideology that is already so completely discredited? Their point is not without some merit. In most of the world, socialism has far fewer adherents today than […]

The audio of yesterday’s Federalist Society program, “Enforcement of the Clean Water Act,” discussing whether Congress needs to “fix” the Clean Water Act to extend federal regulatory jurisdiction after the Supreme Court’s decision in Rapanos v. United States is available on-line here. I plan to post some of my thoughts about the program over the […]

Below are the questions from VC readers which I just sent to Senator Thompson, purusant to his invitation. The readers came up with an excellent variety of questions, and I would be interested in Senator Thompson’s answers to almost all of them. The campaign had only asked for 4-5 questions, and I streched by submitting […]

I just read the Ninth Circuit’s decision from yesterday in Buono v. Kempthorne, and it strikes me as having a good chance of going up to the Supreme Court. Buono is the latest decision in the Mojave Sunrise Rock cross case: A Latin cross sits atop a prominent rock outcropping known as “Sunrise Rock” in […]

Story here. Voting for gay marriage in 2005 had no discernible effect on the careers of those voting for it. California’s remains the only state legislature to vote for this. The governor will veto the bill, as he did in 2005, citing a popular referendum vote in 2000 against gay marriage. However, unless the state […]

This excerpt from Jack Goldsmith’s new book is fascinating. Among other things, it seems to explain why the Bush Administration always responded to the prospect of Supreme Court review of terrorism cases by tempering its previously hard line: the significant prospect of Supreme Court reversal in the near term was just about the only thing […]

Here’s an update on Warshak v. United States, the Sixth Circuit case on e-mail privacy that I have blogged a lot about. There are two significant developments in the case. The first development is that counsel for Warshak filed his opposition to the petition for rehearing last week. You can read that brief here. I […]

Among other things, the court held that even copying a long string citation, including the parentheticals, constituted plagiarism. Also, the court’s reasoning would seem to apply to copying from others’ briefs as well as to copying from others’ articles. In support of his argument for removal of counsel, Mr. [Peter] Cannon, on behalf of his […]

Some of Glenn Reynolds/Instapundit’s readers claim that there is a contradiction between his claim that Jack Goldsmith’s new book on the War On Terror criticizes excessive legal constraints on presidential wartime authority, and Jonathan Adler and Orin Kerr’s characterization of Goldsmith as criticizing the Bush Administration’s assertions of virtually unlimited presidential power in time of […]

Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker has a fascinating post on Israel’s kibbutzim. The kibbutzim are Israeli agricultural communities initially organized on socialist lines, mostly between the 1910s and 1950s. Originally, most kibbutzim followed strict socialist policies forbidding private property; they also required near-total equality of income regardless of differences in productivity, and in some cases […]