CNN has some coverage here. The debate over health care legislation reminds me of the debate over the USA Patriot Act back in 2001 (albeit with the politics more or less flipped). In both cases, the legislation was very technical and difficult for a non-expert to understand. In both cases, you had a lot of […]
Archive | August, 2009
The Nightmare of Every Rookie Prosecutor:
Ouch. From Kozinski’s majority opinion: The government concedes the impropriety of many of these statements, but points out that the prosecutors were Special Assistant United States Attorneys on loan from the military. That’s no excuse at all; when the United States Attorney endows lawyers with the powers of federal prosecutors, he has a responsibility to […]
My Comments Policy:
I’ve been experimenting with my Comments policy for the last few months. Comments are a blessing and a burden. The burden is that we have moderated comments on this blog, moderation takes time and effort, and there is no way with our current setup to effectively ban any given abusive commenter, so one is left […]
7th Circuit Says Gun Registration is OK. Guns at Obama protests:
Last week, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals decided a case involving the Cicero, Illinois, gun registration ordinance. Full coverage of the decision is available in an article for CBS News, by Declan McCullagh. (And be sure to check out Declan’s new Taking Liberties weblog.) The decision is written by Supreme Court short-list Judge Diane […]
Holmes’s Overratedness:
There is no doubt that Justice Holmes was a powerful rhetorician: “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics“; “It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account”; “Three generations of imbeciles […]
Justice Holmes Rocks:
As this seems to be WDYTOJOWH week at the Volokh Conspiracy — “What Do You Think of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes?” — I thought I would risk annoying Ilya and David B by saying that I’m a big fan of Holmes. He was a marvelous legal thinker for his day, a true intellectual, and a […]
Why Oliver Wendell Holmes is Grossly Overrated:
In my view, Oliver Wendell Holmes is one of the most overrated justices ever to sit on the Supreme Court, and H.L. Mencken’s contemporary critique of Holmes, linked by co-blogger David Bernstein, is a good explanation of why. As Mencken put it, Holmes was no “advocate of the rights of man,” but rather “an advocate […]
When Are Discussions of Anti-Semitism Important?:
There are several prominent left-leaning blogs by Jewish authors that write a lot about anti-Semitism, or, more precisely, are very quick to denounce what their authors see as exaggerated or false claims of anti-Semitism made against critics of Israel. So I find it interesting to notice how these blogs have covered, or more precisely, not […]
A Period Piece
[Note to my lively, thoughtful readers: Your remarks deserve longer responses than I have room for. Very briefly, I agree with the comment: “Since the political makeup tends to correlate at least somewhat with the racial makeup, it is frequently difficult to distinguish these two things,” and I do talk about the issue in my […]
Legal Educator Blog Census:
Schools starting with A-M and schools starting with N-Z.
Klein v. Amtrak Opinions, Which Were Removed from Lexis and Westlaw Pursuant to a Settlement:
The Legal Intelligencer (Law.com) reports: The confidential settlement in Klein v. Amtrak — a case in which two trespassing teenagers climbed atop a parked train car and suffered serious burns when they got too close to a 12,000-volt catenary wire — included an unusual provision that called for the trial judge to vacate all of […]
Lash on the Original Understanding of the Privileges or Immunities Clause:
A very interesting paper, via Legal Theory Blog.
Christopher Caldwell’s New Book:
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. While I have been trying hard not to keyboard very much this summer, I have been doing some reading. This new book by Christopher Caldwell is hands down the most interesting and important I have read, all year – and given my interests in […]
Ted Olson, Law vs. Policy, and the Role of Courts vs. Counsel:
Like my co-blogger Dale, I was very interested in today’s New York Times article on Olson’s decision to argue in favor of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The Times mostly covers the story as “prominent conservative takes liberal view and thereby annoys conservatives.” That’s a significant part of the story. At the same time, […]
Mencken on Holmes:
My colleague David Schleicher referred to this amazing takedown of Holmes, and the bizarre affection “liberals” had for him, by H.L. Mencken. A taste: “If what he said in some of those opinions were accepted literally, there would be scarcely any brake at all upon lawmaking, and the Bill of Rights would have no more […]