Archive | September, 2007

On Tuesday, David A. Tomlinson passed away. For three decades, David had been the President of the National Firearms Association of Canada and an outstanding advocate of the rights of law-abiding Canadian firearms owners. I had the privilege of meeting David several times, and found him to be a true gentleman, and a gentle man. […]

I blogged below about some factual errors in The Nine that worried me. But I was also troubled by a couple of other things; they are judgment calls, and perhaps you might agree with the author’s judgment more than mine, but I thought I’d mention them. In particular, let me start with the book’s treatment […]

Mark Liberman at Language Log has a post on the subject, and in particular on “the second extraordinary feature of Mapes’ screed, namely her view that the only people who raised questions about the memos’ authenticity were members of ‘the conservative blogosphere, particularly the extremists among them’”: [Y]ou didn’t have to be an expert on […]

Sentencing Law & Policy has the story. I don’t know Judge Cassell well, though we’ve met a couple of times; but I have long respected his scholarship, of which there’s been a great deal. Here are Judge Cassell’s reasons: In the past few weeks, two primary factors have led me to do something that I […]

Someone just dropped by my office asking for one Caryn Voland, an admissions officer here at Georgetown Law with an office number similar to my own. See how life imitates art: This is how Bulgakov, in his novel The Master and Margarita, describes the aftermath of the plot involving the character Voland, who is Satan […]

In the early fall of 1994, the gun control movement achieved unprecedented success in Congress. The “Brady Bill” had been enacted in November 1993, and went into effect in February 1994. After a very tough political fight, President Clinton’s omnibus crime bill was passed in August 1994. The bill included a 10-year ban on so-called […]

This morning, KC (who co-authored this post) and I looked at two principal enablers of Mike Nifong’s efforts – – SANE nurse Tara Levicy and Durham Police Dept. sergeant Mark Gottlieb. Levicy is no longer working for Duke Hospital; Gottlieb remains on the job at the DPD. More broadly, this case provided a depressing glimpse […]

Remember the FTC’s “Do Not Call” list? Well, individual listings expire after five years, so numbers will begin to drop off the list in 2008 if not renewed. The AP reports here.

I reviewed Roger A. Pielke, Jr.’s The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science and Policy in Politics in the summer issue of The New Atlantis. The review is now available on-line here. Pielke makes many interesting points in the course of his discussion of science politicization (and policy scientization), and the threat posed to science […]

I’d heard great things about this book, and so I read it with high expectations. It is indeed well-written, interesting, and, though it’s opinionated, it is generally fairly balanced (though not entirely so). I didn’t find much that was strikingly new there, but I’ve followed the Court quite closely; I expect that others will find […]

NY Times: The appointment of Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution is drawing fierce protests from faculty members and students at Stanford University and is threatening to rekindle tensions between the institution, a conservative research body, and the more liberal campus. Some 2,100 professors, staff […]

For those who believed the lacrosse case was over, the past two weeks brought news on two fronts. First, Brendan Sullivan and Barry Scheck, on behalf of the three falsely accused players and their families, presented representatives of the City of Durham with the outlines of a devastating potential lawsuit against the city, former DA […]

It’s not working too well in relatively peaceful, prosperous places like Belgium, which makes me believe that when people like Tony Judt suggest it for Israel/Palestine, they are either being facetious or really mean “let the Arabs take over and the Jews disperse.” UPDATE: A seemingly informed commenter says that the Times story is overblown. […]

dated, but still funny.

I’m with Glenn Reynolds on this. I’d really like to blog about the case, and I spent about 30 minutes this morning trying to research it, but I couldn’t get a good enough sense of what the facts are or what the precise cause of the protest is to really know what to make of […]