I suspect the debate over whether judges are like baseball umpires is as old as baseball itself, but here’s an early example I came across on Westlaw: A well-known English judge, watching village children drawing up rules for their cricket team for the year, said they were showing him how the common law of England […]
Archive | October, 2009
“My Goodness, What a Coincidence”
Acrostic mischief in a veto message from Gov. Schwarzenegger.
Challenge to the Ban on Compensation for Bone Marrow
The Institute for Justice — one of the top libertarian public interest law firms — is filing the challenge today. Here are the Complaint and a short video; and here is the IJ press release: Filed Monday, October 26, 2009, in federal court in Los Angeles, Flynn v. Holder challenges the federal ban on compensating […]
Tax Exemptions as Subsidies to Churches
Occasionally I hear people condemning the tax-exempt status of churches, on the grounds that the tax exemptions — both the exemptions from property and income taxes, and the tax deductions given to people who contribute to the church — are subsidies to the churches. This is especially common when a church says or does something […]
Rating Agencies Doing Fine, Thanks
The Lex column in the Financial Times reports that the rating agencies – Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s – are doing financially just fine and, well, even better than fine: McGraw Hill this week showed the ratings business is on the increase … Its Standard & Poor’s credit ratings agency, which accounts for the vast […]
Check that Checkbook:
My recent article “Check that Checkbook: A Guide to Smarter Alumni Giving” which was recently published in National Review is now available online on NR Digital. (At least I think it is–I’m always a bit unclear when NR Digital is generally available and when it isn’t.)
“Guns as Smut: Defending the Home-Bound Second Amendment”
That’s the title of a new article in the Columbia Law Review (the link is just to an abstract, since no PDF is available). The law review asked me whether I could write a commentary for its online supplement (the Sidebar), and I did, here, under the title The First and Second Amendments; the author’s […]
Pretend “Gun-Free” School Zones: A Deadly Legal Fiction
That’s the title of my forthcoming article in the Connecticut Law Review; a revised version is now available. The article suggests that, under Heller, bans on guns at schools are constitutional. However, as a policy matter, gun prohibition on campuses turns them into targets for criminals, particularly mass killers. The response of anti-gun groups is to warn about the dangers of 18-year-olds […]
Braised Boneless Short Ribs with Leeks and Mushrooms
Yum. Braised short ribs are one of my favorite beef dishes (I usually prefer lamb to beef); my friend formerchef posts a recipe, with photos of the cooking process. Yum. Did I say “yum” already?
Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc.
My Mayer Brown LLP colleagues and I just filed a certiorari petition in this patent case, and I thought some of our readers would find the issue very interesting (I know I did). As we argue in the petition, Prometheus’s claims … attempt to exclude the public from using the results of basic human metabolic […]
Why Didn’t the Federal Government Even Try to Argue the Commerce Clause in its Supreme Court Brief in United States v. Comstock?
I am currently in the process of drafting an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case of United States v. Comstock, on behalf of the Cato Institute and co-blogger Randy Barnett. As longtime VC readers can probably guess, we will be arguing that Article I of the Constitution does not give Congress power to retain […]
Can Obama accept the Nobel Prize without congressional consent?
Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, Rep. Cliff Stearns, and Rep. Ron Paul say “no,” and have sent a letter to the President asking him to request congressional consent, which they expect would be speedily given. They point to the example of President Theodore Roosevelt, who created a committee, including the Chief Justice, to hold Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace […]
Our Own Orin Kerr Cited Five Times by Tenth Circuit Decision
It’s the one that Orin discusses below, but he was too modest to note the court’s reliance on his own work.
Louis Brandeis and the Incorporation Doctrine
By David Bernstein on October 28, 2009 1:28 am in Constitutional History, Freedom of Speech, Supreme Court
I’ve read most of Mel Urofsky’s new biography of Louis Brandeis, and it’s an extremely good, and very informative, book. But I’m afraid that Mel vastly exaggerates Brandeis’s influence on the Supreme Court’s adoption of the “incorporation doctrine”, to wit: (1) p. 618: “Scholars now believe that the Fourteenth Amendment … was intended to extend […]
Benefits and costs: crime, crime avoidance, crime control
Most of the costs imposed by crime are the costs of crime avoidance.
Criminal justice efforts are cheap in budgetary terms, but expensive in terms of the loss of liberty and the suffering they impose.
Programs that control crime without inflicting punishment can justify large costs for modest crime reductions.