Matt Welch, editor in chief of Reason, takes up an issue that I have written about on numerous occasions: the inexcusable gargantuan public subsidies for the New York Yankees’ new stadium: This year the Yankees moved into a new stadium. According to baseball economist Neil deMause of the excellent Field of Schemes website, the facility […]
Archive | October, 2009
Divided Sixth Circuit Dismisses No Child Left Behind Suit
In January 2008, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed a district court’s dismissal of a school district challenge to portions of the No Child Left Behind Act in School District of the City of Pontiac v. Spellings. Today, an equally divided en banc court affirmed the judgment […]
Government as Proprietor, and the Second Amendment
United States v. Dorosan (unpublished), decided Wednesday by the Fifth Circuit, upholds a ban on bringing handguns onto U.S. Postal Service property. Here’s the key legal discussion: First, the Postal Service owned the parking lot where Dorosan’s handgun was found, and its restrictions on guns stemmed from its constitutional authority as the property owner. See […]
“Cyberspace and the Law: Privacy, Property, and Crime in the Virtual Frontier”
Tomorrow I’ll spend the day at the Minnesota Law Review annual symposium, titled Cyberspace and the Law: Privacy, Property, and Crime in the Virtual Frontier. You can watch the symposium yourself here on the web. Participants include Pam Samuelson, Terry Fisher, and Dan Burk, among others. Our key note speaker is Judge Alex Kozinski.
Was Heller comparable to Roe v. Wade?
So argued the eminent Fourth Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, in Of Guns, Abortions, and the Unraveling Rule of Law, recently published in the Virginia Law Review. In Unraveling Judicial Restraint: Guns, Abortion, and the Faux Conservatism of J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, Nelson Lund and I disagree, arguing that none of Judge Wilkinson’s comparisons to […]
Are Books the New Magazines?
According to Tina Brown, they are – in an interview in today’s Financial Times about her website, The Daily Beast. This is an elliptical addition to Eugene’s posts about e-books and new legal book technologies. I’m sure many legal academics, myself included, have wondered how, along the way in the last couple of years, things […]
Treasury Inc. cont’d: Does Citi make cheaper loans in Battleground States?
We have been discussing my new paper, Treasury Inc.: How the Bailout Reshapes Corporate Theory and Practice, which you can download here. In my last post I made the case that the government is a control shareholder in many of the banks and automotive companies that accepted TARP bailout cash. So why does that matter? […]
Louisiana Justice of the Peace Refuses to Issue Marriage License for Interracial Couple:
I saw an AP story about this, but tracked down what seems to be a more complete local story (perhaps one on which the AP story was based). A snippet: [Justice of the Peace Keith] Bardwell said he came to the conclusion that most black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and […]
More Civility from the DNC
I just received another urgent message from the Democratic National Committee, which continues its civil discourse on the merits of health care reform. It seems that someone else is a lying liar who is telling lies but the DNC does not identify what exactly is being misrepresented. Neither does the video to which it links. […]
Repeating the Mistakes of the Mortgage Crisis
The Federal Housing Administration seems intent on repeating one of the key policy errors that played a major role in causing last year’s financial crisis. One of the main causes of the mortgage crisis that led to the broader financial crisis of 2008 was government subsidization of risky mortgages for people who were unlikely to […]
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospitalized
MSNBC is reporting that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized after she fell out of her seat in an airplane before takeoff. “Extreme drowsiness” from a combination of a prescription sleeping pill and an OTC cold medicine was blamed. UPDATE: Reports say that Ginsburg was kept overnight and released this morning. 2D UPDATE: The statement […]
Speculating on the Future of the Alien Tort Statute in a Multipolar World
Harvard Law School is hosting in a couple of weeks what is certain to be a very interesting small conference on the Alien Tort Statute. I was lucky enough to be one of the invitees, addressing the issue of corporate liability under the ATS. I address the issue of corporate liability under the ATS, but […]
Merit-Based Pay Cuts for Academics?
George Mason economist Bryan Caplan has an interesting post advocating merit-based pay cuts for academics: Many universities now have pay freezes or even nominal pay cuts. Under the circumstances, several professors have told me that there’s little point in doing faculty evaluations. If there’s zero – or negative – money for raises, why bother saying […]
Looking Back at Frank v. Maryland (1959)
I recently came across a fascinating Fourth Amendment decision, Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360 (1959), that allowed warrantless health and safety inspections of homes. I had never read Frank before, as the case is only of historical interest: It was overruled just 8 years later by Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U.S. 523 (1967). […]
Hayek on the Use of Superior Expert Knowledge as a Justification for Paternalism
In my most recent post on paternalism, I criticized claims that paternalistic policies can be justified on the grounds that government-appointed experts have greater knowledge than consumers and are less likely to be influenced to cognitive error. Among other points, I emphasized that government experts have no way of determining how much benefit consumers get […]