Justice Breyer is famously willing to look to foreign law for ideas on how to resolve legal questions, saying that there’s no reason not to look at how foreign judges have solved sticky problems when he is confronted with similar issues. So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Justice Breyer looks to foreign practice […]
Archive | May, 2010
Sixth Circuit Now 0-4 in Habeas Cases This Term
This morning the Supreme Court released its opinion in Renico v. Lett. By a vote of 6-3, the Court overturned a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granting habeas relief to Reginald Lett, who had been convicted of murder in Michigan. Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion begins with the following […]
Bankruptcy Reform Instead of Bailouts
Nobody likes bailouts, but what’s the alternative? Stanford economist John Taylor has an interesting op-ed in today’s WSJ suggesting that proper reforms of the bankruptcy code could reduce the need for the federal government to retain legal authority to bail out ailing financial firms. Here is the core of his proposal: During the past year […]
PhRMA Thanks Reid
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association is co-sponsoring ads in Nevada thanking Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for his efforts to create jobs in Nevada. As the Wall Street Journal editorializes, this is a fairly transparent effort to repay Reid for pushing through health care reform. PhRMA invested heavily in trying to pass health care […]
Starve the Beast:
When I was in college during the Reagan years the accepted wisdom on the limited government side of the aisle was that the only way to limit government spending was to first reduce government revenues. The logic was that the dynamics of interest-group politics were such that spending would rise indefinitely until it hit some […]
Street Preacher Arrested in England for Public Statements That Homosexuality is a Sin
From the Daily Mail: [Dale McAlpine] was charged with using abusive or insulting words or behaviour contrary to the Public Order Act 1986…. Mr Mcalpine[ and two others were preaching and leafletting in] the pedestrianised shopping precinct in the centre of Workington…. Mr Mcalpine said a woman came up to him [as he was leafletting] […]
I Shouldn’t Take Brian Leiter’s Bait, So
I won’t. I could prepare a lengthy post on how he intentionally distorted what I wrote about taboos in elite universities like Harvard, or take him to task for a cheap insult, and so forth, but I’ll instead quote what Leiter himself has written to show why it’s not worth responding to him, and why […]
Times Square bombing — where were the cameras?
Although it’s early still, this bombing doesn’t look especially well-organized, and I expect that we’ll catch the perp soon, given the massive amount of information to be gleaned from inside the car. That said, I can’t help wondering why New York City, the best-funded and most terror-focused police department in the country, doesn’t already have […]
Car Bomb Found in Times Square?
The New York Times reports.
“Pour encourager les autres”
Running around the track tonight, I found myself musing over the famous ironic expression by Voltaire in Candide: “pour encourager les autres.” The more I thought about it, the less convinced I was that I understood it, in the sense of being able to come up with cleverly parallel situations in which the irony of […]
A Follow-on Drone Hearing
By Kenneth Anderson on May 1, 2010 11:10 pm in International Human Rights Law, Robotics, Targeted Killing, Uncategorized, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
The House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Rep. John Tierney, held a second hearing (Wednesday, April 28, 2010), once again on the topic of drone warfare. The first, held back on March 23, was focused on the technology of UAVs; this follow-up hearing was specifically about targeted killing and drone warfare. […]
My Comment Policy
For a while I was leaving comments open on almost every post, but for the last week or so I’ve been mostly closing them. I thought it was therefore a good time to reiterate my comments policy: Comments are a blessing and a burden. The burden is that we have moderated comments on this blog, […]
Bernstein on Normblog
Back in January, Normblog featured a profile of me, consisting of my written responses to a series of questions on various topics. I never did get around to linking to it, so here it is, in case readers find it of interest.
Terrorfare: one more story and it’s officially a trend
I thought that providing government health care and welfare payments to al Qaeda’s favorite Canadians, the Khadr family, was just misplaced Canadian generosity: “Family members have spoken scornfully of Canadian society, as they receive medical care and welfare payments that keep them in a pleasant apartment in Toronto,” the Washington Post once noted. Turns out, […]
Approaching Arguments That Have A Racist Past
Like Eugene, I received an e-mail recently from a student who will be a 1L at Harvard Law School this fall. Like the student who e-mailed Eugene, this student is somewhat worried about the environment he’ll find when he enrolls. He writes: I’m an incoming student at Harvard Law next year. And even though I’m […]