This morning, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced his approval of the proposed Cape Wind offshore wind energy project in the Nantucket Sound. This is an important decision, as the Cape Wind project will be the nation’s first offshore wind farm. Offshore wind power has a significant foothold in Europe, but not in the United States. […]
Archive | April, 2010
Mojave Cross Decision (Salazar v. Buono) Handed Down
The opinions are here; I might have more to say after I read them. UPDATE: The opinions (six of them) are heavily influenced by the peculiar procedural posture of this case; there’s a lot of talk about standing and about interpretation of an earlier injunction in the case, and the validity of that earlier injunction […]
Con Law Exam Kills Law Student
Okay, it was 110 years ago. But still.
Mayor Daley and other Mayors: Seek “redress against the gun industry” in the World Court
April 27 was the tenth annual “Richard J. Daley Global Cities Forum,” held in Chicago. Over a hundred mayors and other local government leaders assembled to discuss global issues. As reported in the Chicago Sun-Times, “Daley convinced more than a dozen of his counterparts from around the world to approve a resolution urging ‘redress against […]
An Unwelcome Endorsement
According to The Hill, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein endorsed the financial regulation reform legislation during his Senate testimony today. “I’m generally supportive,” Blankfein told the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Wall Street will benefit from the bill because it will make the market safer, Blankfein said. “The biggest beneficiary of reform is Wall Street […]
Typos, and Especially Unclosed Tags
Folks: If you find a typo, and especially an unclosed tag, please e-mail it to us (you can find our e-mail addresses by clicking on contact under the Volokh Conspiracy banner, and then clicking on the blogger’s name) rather than just posting something in the comments. First, we sometimes don’t read the comments, at least […]
The Right to Carry Concealed Guns Debate: Pretty Similar in 1872 and in 2010
An excerpt from Debates of the [1872] Convention to Amend the Constitution of Pennsylvania (some paragraph breaks added). MacVeagh, incidentally, would nine years later briefly serve as U.S. Attorney General; Dallas would later serve as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit: Mr. Struthers. I move that the Convention go […]
Reading The Tea Leaves for the Supreme Court’s November and December 2009 Sittings
With the Supreme Court’s two opinions today in Merck & Co. v. Reynolds and Stolt-Nielsen S.A. v. AnimalFeeds International Corp., there are now only four cases outstanding from the Court’s December sitting, and all of them are potentially blockbusters: Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB (involving the constitutionality of the Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board, created by […]
Is the Arizona Immigration Law Preempted?
There’s no shortage of opinions on the legality of Arizona’s strict new immigration law. Over on the NYT‘s “Room for Debate” blog, Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies argues the law “is designed to mirror federal immigration law” and thereby avoids any preemption problem. The ACLU’s Vivek Malhotra, on the other hand, argues […]
After Stolt-Nielsen v. AnimalFeeds Int’l Corp.: Deciding When Class Arbitration Is Permissible
There may not be much interest among the general readership in today’s opinion in Stolt-Nielsen SA v. AnimalFeeds International Corp., but it’s an important decision for businesses. The Court held by a 5-3 vote (with Justice Sotomayor recusing herself), along the familiar ideological lines, that the Federal Arbitration Act does not permit imposition of class […]
Gov. Pawlenty’s Next Court Pick
Within the next month, President Barack Obama will nominate the next associate justice of the Supreme Court. For many, the selection of federal judges is one of the most important things a President can do, and President Obama’s nomination will set off a debate over not just his nominee, but the role of the Supreme […]
Birnbaum on Human Rights Watch and Israel
Benjamin Birnbaum’s investigative piece for The New Republic on Human Rights Watch and Israel is now up. The piece mentions, but does not dwell on, the various scandals that engulfed HRW last year—the fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia in which HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson invoked the organization’s hostility to Israel and the […]
Is It a Crime to Receive an Item That You Know Belongs to a Third Party?
The Gizmodo controversy involves, among other things, this question: Say that someone (Finder) offers you an item, and you know it belongs to a third party, who may have lost it or had it stolen from him. Is it a crime for you to receive it? Here are the relevant statutes: Cal. Penal Code § […]
Thoughts on the Legality of the Gizmodo Warrant
To no one’s surprise, California state law enforcement officials obtained a warrant and executed it at the home of Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor who filed the story analyzing the next-generation iPhone that Gizmodo paid $5000 for after it was apparently lost in a bar. Gawker, which owns Gizmodo, has claimed that the search was […]
My Ancestry–Fughetaboutit!
I signed up with the 23andme DNA service, just for fun, and discovered that my paternal DNA Haplogroup is G2c. Here’s what Wikipedia tells me: The most plausible scenario for the spread of G2c within Europe is an origin among Jews in Sicily, and a spread northward to Germany and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the […]