Dynamic concentration holds the key to having less crime and less punishment.
Archive | October, 2009
A Response to Delahunty’s “The Fourth Amendment Goes to War”
In a forthcoming essay, The Fourth Amendment Goes to War, Professor Robert J. Delahunty defends the October 2001 OLC opinion he and John Yoo wrote while at the Office of Legal Counsel on how the Fourth Amendment applies in the war on terror. The opinion concluded that the Fourth Amendment does not apply “to the […]
Market Discipline? What Market Discipline?
By Kenneth Anderson on October 26, 2009 3:57 pm in Economy, Finance, Financial Crisis, Proposed Legislation, Regulation
The New York Times reports that Congress and the administration might soon reach some kind of view on legislation for addressing “too big to fail” institutions. Off the table is Paul Volker’s proposal to re-establish some line between commercial banking and proprietary trading – some updated Glass-Steagall demarcation. On the table is the Treasury’s proposal […]
Rifqa Bary — the 17-Year-Old Convert from Islam to Christianity — Ordered Back to Ohio, But to a Foster Family:
13 Central Florida News reports: Bary will be turned over to a foster family that’s already set up for her in Ohio. However, her transfer home will remain a secret…. Bary’s time in Florida may be short lived, but her parents still have a long way to go to get to their daughter back home. […]
Bloggingheads, cont’d.
Henry Farrell continues our conversation about my book. One thing he says is that international law should not be regarded as a single entity, which is either “good” or “bad,” but is a label attached to a multitude of cooperative arrangements undertaken by states, which should be evaluated on their own terms. Security Council resolutions […]
They Judged the Cartoons, but Did Not Read the Book
By Jonathan H. Adler on October 26, 2009 11:24 am in Academia, Freedom of Speech at Colleges and Universities
This morning NPR ran a story on Yale University’s decision to force the Yale University Press to remove all depictions of the prophet Muhammed, including several controversial Danish cartoons, from Jytte Klausen’s book The Cartoons that Shook the World. As had already been reported, the University’s decision was based, in part, on various outside experts […]
How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment
We could have half as much crime, and half as many prisoners, a decade from now as we have today.
Should Israel Attack Iran?
That was the topic of a conference last Friday at the American Enterprise Institute. The three panelists who addressed this question agreed that an Iranian nuclear arsenal would be worrisome indeed, not because Iran would immediately incinerate Tel Aviv, but because it would almost certainly use its conventional forces and its terrorist infrastructure more aggressively […]
The Wall Street Journal on Alvarez v. Smith
By Ilya Somin on October 25, 2009 7:33 pm in Criminal Law, Due Process Clause Property Rights, Property Rights, War on Drugs
The Wall Street Journal has an editorial urging the Supreme Court to rule in favor of the property owners in Alvarez v. Smith, an important property rights case that I have been trying to draw attention to for a long time (see my recent Findlaw column on it and previous posts on the subject here […]
Help me pick an constitutional law textbook
This spring I will be adjunct teaching at Denver University, Sturm College of Law. The course is “Advanced Topics in Constitutional Law: Fourteenth and Second Amendments.” The course will be mainly 14th Amendment, plus some Second Amendment (which is happens to be a good topic with which to study 14th Amendment original intent/meaning and incorporation), […]
Arguing for Corporate Liability Under the Alien Tort Statute, a Bullet Point List
If I were to sit down and sketch out in a single sentence or two each the current approaches (”theories” is way too strong for what I mean here) arguing for corporate liability in the Alien Tort Statute, what would they be? I give it a shot as bullet points below; I welcome any additions, […]
Prosecutors Investigate Student Investigators
It appears that some Cook County prosecutors don’t like journalism students looking into whether innocent people may have been wrongly convicted, so they’ve decided to investigate the students. The NYT reports: For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The […]
The Harms of a Health Insurance Mandate
Tyler Cowen discusses the effects of an individual insurance mandate in today’s NYT. A taste: Americans seem to like the idea of broadening health insurance coverage, but they may not want to be forced to buy it. With health care costs high and rising, such government mandates would make many people worse off. . . […]
Sunday Song Lyric
“Weird Al” Yankovic turned 50 on Friday. (Can you believe he’s been around that long? And that he has a new album?) Yankovic’s exceedingly goofy, and quite clever. He also has a song off of his 2006 album, Straight Outta Lynnwood, that seems somewhat appropriate for the VC: “I’ll Sue Ya.” It begins: I sued […]
Books I Would Recommend to those Who Disagree With Me
Megan McArdle and Tony Woodlief give their answers to an interesting question: What three books would you recommend to a thoughtful person who disagrees with you politically, in the hopes that reading them will change their mind? My recommendations would depend a lot on whether the person in question disagrees with me from the right […]