Archive | August, 2009

I’m going to be in San Juan, Puerto Rico, over the next few days giving CLE lectures on Fourth Amendment law hosted by the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico for members of the federal court bar. If any VC readers are planning to attend, please say hello. And if anyone […]

A couple days ago, I went out to dinner with a group of Japanese law professors here in Tokyo. One of the Japanese academics, who today is generally libertarian, told me that he had previously been a Marxist. I asked him what led him to change his mind. To my surprise, he said that it […]

Here’s the poster: According to The Washington Post, “the White House asked the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine to take down the ads, which feature Jasmine Messiah, a vegetarian who attends a Miami-Dade County public school that, she says, offers no vegetarian or vegan lunch options.” According to the president of the Physicians Committee, the […]

For the answer, see this comment. I just thought the quote would work perfectly as a post title, of course ripped savagely out of context.

D.J.T. v. L.S., 2001 WL 492492 (Del. Fam. Ct.): This Court also has concern regarding Father’s decision-making in allowing [son] to watch certain R-rated movies. While Gladiator may not be such a poor decision, clearly a movie that has sexual content would be. Mother testified that [son] was allowed to see the movie American Pie […]

The first two questioners and questions at President Obama’s Townhall today in New Hampshire: Peter Schmidt (one of the most liberal members NH State House): After praising Obama for bipartisanship, Schmidt asks: “If the Republicans actively refuse to participate in a reasonable way with reasonable proposals, isn’t time to just say, we’re going to pass […]

With thanks to the Administrative Office of the North Carolina courts, and to Stephanie Plotin of the UCLA Law Library, I can report some data on alienation of affections lawsuits in North Carolina: In fiscal years 2000-2007, there were an average of 230 such filings per year — a bit over 0.5% of the number […]

Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal has the scoop.   I wonder how (if at all) the picture changes if you focus on who wrote the briefs rather than who stood at the podium for oral argument. The media invariably focuses on who gave the argument, but most of the important work is done at […]

In today’s New York Times, John Schwartz has an interesting article on Charlie Nesson’s performance in the Tenenbaum trial.   Reading over the trial reports, I’m struck by how similar Nesson’s approach was to how he taught “Introduction to Lawyering” (ITL) in the fall of 1994, in my 1L year at Harvard. The ITL class was […]

AutoBlog reports that Motors Liquidation Co., the entity that assumed GM’s liabilities and unwanted assets in the automaker’s bankruptcy proceedings, assumed GM’s polluted sites, but does not have the money to pay for cleanup. Before bankruptcy, GM estimated it had $1.9 billion in environmental issues and litigation liabilites. Motors Liquidation Co., though, has only about […]

General Motors claims its new Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid will get a whopping 230 miles per gallon in city driving, over four times more than the current leader, the Toyota Prius. GM readily admits that the Volt will not perform as well in highway driving, when the vehicle will rely more on its engine on […]

I thought I’d blog one more excerpt form my Torts syllabus; parts of it are focused on torts specifically, but I suspect that much the same can be said about policy arguments in most legal fields. As always, I’d love to hear suggestions for improvement, but recall that the goal of this passage is to […]

from someone who has some experience with immigration law: I want to assure you that immigration judges are well aware of the potential for abusing asylum by making sham conversions. However, it is not the IJ’s job to marshal evidence of a true religious conviction. As in the Article III courts, the IJs are there […]

Ambiguity About Ambiguity: An Empirical Inquiry into Legal Interpretation, by Ward Farnsworth, Dustin F. Guzior, and Anup Malani. The abstract:   Most scholarship on statutory interpretation discusses what courts should do with ambiguous statutes. This paper investigates the crucial and analytically prior question of what ambiguity in law is. Does a claim that a text is […]

And one of them is antibiotic resistance. Along with my regular co-author, Bill Sage, I’ve just sent off a new article to the law reviews, titled Combating Antimicrobial Resistance: Regulatory Strategies and Institutional Capacity. Antibiotic resistance is a major public health problem. Every year, two million Americans acquire bacterial infections in the hospital, and 70% […]