Archive | August, 2009

This book, reviewed in the New York Times on Sunday, and written by an eminent historian presidential biographer, is a history and critique of the Supreme Court. I’ve read it. The only thing I learned is that there is still at least one historian who is stuck in a 1930s time warp, in which the […]

Is there really something wrong with that? JammieWaringFool (thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer), thinks there is: White House Blog Seeking Snitches The Obama administration is starting to look more like Castro’s Cuba by the day. Here they claim they’re not concerned about protests against ObamaCare, but still, just in case, feel free to snitch […]

My friend Haym Hirsh, a computer science professor at Rutgers, e-mails: It turns out that you can reverse engineer a pacemaker with sufficient accuracy that you can broadcast radio signals to it to induce various undesirable actions, such as broadcasting the pacemakers existence (including model and serial number), broadcasting personal information such as the patient’s […]

So reports Ars Technica, and points to the complaint. The complaint is based on breach of contract, a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trespass to chattels, conversion, and a violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act. As I noted earlier, Amazon’s actions were indeed not authorized under the terms of use, which […]

(Update: In other news out of Washington DC today, my sixteen year old daughter got her driver’s license this morning, in a road test that she herself described as “weirdly easy” and which Dad will rephrase as “alarmingly” so.) “Overhaul Stumbles” is how the headline the Wall Street Journal put things this morning in its […]

The raging controversy over Human Rights Watch’s anti-Israel bias, which was sparked with a blog post here at the VC that was republished by the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal.com, just won’t die. Readers will recall that the piece focused on a talk Sarah Leah Whitson gave in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in which she tried to […]

The Lakeland (Florida) Ledger reports: [Antavio Johnson, 20, was charged with two counts of corruption by threat of a public servant after a Polk County gang detective found the song on a MySpace page belonging to Hood Certified Entertainment in February. In his song, “Kill Me a Cop,” Johnson mentions two Lakeland police officers by […]

Some readers were confused about my comment below that the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act is having a negative impact on used booksellers. In short, the CPSIA bars the sale of children’s books printed before 1985 due to concern that the ink might contain lead. As the Washington Post reported: Legislation passed by Congress last […]

The Ninth Justice blog reports that, according to the Segal-Cover ranking system, Sonia Sotomayor is the most liberal nominee to the Supreme Court in forty years — the most liberal since Thurgood Marshall in 1967 How could that be? Segal-Cover rankings evaluate the perceived ideology of judicial nominees by examining how newspaper editorials evaluate their […]

Here’s a case I ran across in preparing for my Torts class this Fall; I hadn’t heard about it before, so I thought I’d note it here. The case is Touchette v. Ganal, 922 P.2d 347 (Haw. 1996), and it stems from horrific multiple murders perpetrated by Orlando Ganal. Orlando’s wife had an affair with […]

“Cash for Clunkers” is an amazingly successful stimulus program, right? How else to explain its immense popularity? Not so fast. Congress budgeted $1 billion to to provide car-buyers of rebates up to $4,500 when trading in a qualifying older vehicle for a new, more fuel-efficient one. The money was supposed to last into November, but […]

Few paid much attention when Congress passed, and President Bush signed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act in 2008. Indeed, it’s almost certain that few who supported the law had much understanding of its likely consequences. One person who’s paid substantial attention to the CPSIA, and the havoc it’s created for many industries is Overlawyered‘s […]

I’m with co-blogger Randy Barnett on this: Sean Wilentz’ recently-published essay on Lincoln, historiography, politics (and many other things) is a magnificent piece of argumentative scholarship, well worth reading by anyone interested in Lincoln, US history, slavery, Thomas Jefferson, the Civil War, . . . One issue – tangential, admittedly, to the main debates, but […]

I am not trying to be snarky here. This is a genuine question. Suppose, by assumption (as some reports have it) that a recovery is now getting underway – this might be true or false, take it as true by assumption. Unemployment, let us also take by assumption, will continue to rise as a lagging […]

Professor John Culhane is doing a series of posts this week on the nature, extent, and potential resolution of conflicts between religious liberty and the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. The first post, a useful and interesting taxonomy of the issues, is up this morning. I recommend it to those who follow the subject.