Archive | September, 2007

Some excerpts from my op-ed, which appears in today’s L.A. Times: The saga of controversial liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky’s on-again, off-again deanship at the new UC Irvine law school was highly unusual in two ways. First, the pressure to enforce political orthodoxy at Chemerinsky’s expense came from the right, not the left, and second, […]

In a column discussing the debate over Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It (which I reviewed here), John Tierney notes that some of Lomborg’s sharpest critics have not been the best prognosticators themselves: Yes, Dr. Lomborg thinks like an economist instead of a climate scientist, and he doesn’t have a degree in climatology. Critics say his lack […]

As expected, the Judicial Conference has adopted rules that will limit the use of career clerks by federal judges, largely due to cost concerns. The Legal Times reports: Chief Judge Thomas Hogan, chairman of the conference’s executive committee, told reporters that tens of millions of dollars would be saved over the next decade by managing […]

In late March of 2006, the journalistic echo chamber quickly spread the image of drunken, disorderly, publicly urinating lacrosse thugs around the world. It began with an appallingly biased five-column, front-page March 25 article in the Raleigh News & Observer. The headline — “Dancer Gives Details of Ordeal” — conspicuously omitted the word “alleged.” So […]

While teaching my Federalism seminar recently, I made an analogy to Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets. That got me thinking about the role of federalism in Star Trek. How much power does the Federation’s central government have, and how much is left to the individual planets? Does the central government’s Star Fleet have a […]

The University of Chicago Law Review has posted a series of short essays commemorating the late Professor Bernard Meltzer; among them is this quite interesting piece by Richard Posner on law professors’ relationship to the legal profession. Thanks to Adam White — a mere practicing attorney, harumph — for the link.

Many states and nations have begun offering “incentives” (corporate welfare) for movie-making in their jurisdiction. The subsidies are commonly justified on the grounds that they help the local economy. Do any readers know of any studies assessing to what degree, if any, film industry subsidies actually do benefit the economy of the subsidy-giver? If you […]

By 4-3, Maryland’s high court today rejected a claim for same-sex marriage under the state constitution. The opinion is more than 100 pages long and is studded with more citations to cases, law reviews and books (including, notably, William Eskridge’s Gaylaw), and sociological and scientific studies, than any case yet on the issue. The Maryland […]

While the Group of 88 led a faculty rush to judgment against the lacrosse team, the most striking aspect of the Duke faculty’s reaction to the lacrosse case came in the professors’ utter closed-mindedness as Mike Nifong’s case collapsed in late 2006. For instance: –History professor Peter Wood claimed, in an interview with the New […]

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has a blistering column attacking conservatives for opposing Judge Michael Mukasey’s nomination as attorney general. There’s one big problem with her argument: it ignores the fact that the overwhelming majority of conservatives are supporting the nomination, not opposing it. Lithwick herself cites the endorsements of Mukasey by Bill Kristol (the most prominent […]

Well-known fantasy writer Robert Jordan passed away on Sunday. Despite my own longstanding interest in this genre, I haven’t read much of Jordan’s work, and so am not in a position to say much about it here. However, he was widely regarded as one of the most prominent and successful post-Tolkien writers in the field. […]

You probably don’t read the VC for amateurish and uninformed speculation, but in case you do I have just that about the nomination of Michael Mukasey. Specifically, I wonder if the White House has intentionally tried to create the impression of some conservative opposition to the Michael Mukasey nomination to help speed him through and […]

One of the legal tests for causation turns on whether an intervening act was “abnormal.” In my criminal law class last week, I pointed out that if the act was abnormal, the result would be X, but if the act was not abnormal, then it would be Y. I also flagged for students that “not […]

Professors like to think of themselves as aggressive defenders of due process. In theory, the academy exists for the pursuit of truth. And faculty members are, in an ideal world, more inclined to embrace the dispassionate evaluation of evidence than the passions of the mob. The behavior of activist members of the Duke arts and […]

My post yesterday on how the brain remembers facts seems to have created tremendous uncertainty over whether VC readers owe me a beer. Just to be clear, you do not owe me a beer. My apologies for the confusion.