A federal district court judge in Louisiana has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the six-month moratorium on deep water oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico imposed by the Interior Department. Judge Martin Feldman found that the plaintiffs were substantially likely to prevail on the merits in their legal challenge to the moratorium on the […]
Archive | 2010
Cardhub Penalty APR Study:
The folks at Cardhub have sifted through the credit offers of several leading issuers and provided their assessment as to which ones offer the clearest disclosures of their Penalty APR policies. They also conclude that the Federal Reserve’s sample disclosures aren’t very good.
Naval War College International Law Conference and Bleg for French Translation
I’m on radio silence, as I’m at the Naval War College conference on international law, which is where all the cool people are this week. I was last on radio silence finishing up my short policy manuscript on UN-US relations. I’m not sure I’d describe it as “done,” but the editors took it away from me, […]
Freedom of Speech and the Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress Tort
I have a near-final version of this article — forthcoming in a few weeks in the Cardozo Law Review de novo online supplement — available at SSRN. Here’s a short summary, from the SSRN abstract: Twenty years ago, Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell held that even outrageous, severely distressing speech is constitutionally protected, at least […]
First Amendment Clash Brewing Over Gay Pride Festival in Minneapolis
By Dale Carpenter on June 22, 2010 11:38 am in Constitutional Law, First Amendment, Freedom of Association, Freedom of Speech
Must an expressive association that paid for a permit in a public park to advance its message include someone using the event to convey an opposing message? Specifically, must an anti-gay preacher and others be allowed to condemn homosexuality in signs and literature by roaming the permit grounds of a gay-pride celebration? For more than 30 years, gay-rights organizers have annually paid for […]
Grassroots Lobbying and State Lobbying Regulations
Ross Perot famously characterized lobbyists as “these guys with alligator shoes”; indeed, few vocations are less esteemed than lobbyists, especially since cable television has romanticized bail-bondsman, tattoo artists, and pawn shop owners. In contrast to conventional lobbying, which involves paid actors communicating directly with public officials, grassroots lobbying is any effort to organize, coordinate or […]
Bainbridge v. Bebchuk
Harvard’s Lucian Bebchuk worries that House-Senate conferees will “gut” the proxy access provisions of the financial regulatory reform legislation and undermine efforts to enhance corporate democracy. UCLA’s Stephen Bainbridge responds, arguing that such changes would be a good thing.
Property Rights for Advocates of Thoughts We Hate
By Ilya Somin on June 22, 2010 12:35 am in Property Rights, Religion, Religion and the Law, Religious Freedom
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that freedom of speech requires “not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” The same point applies to property rights. A free society must protect the property rights of those who espouse unpopular views – even if their unpopularity is […]
Avoiding Bad Reactions by Foreign Nations as a Justification for Speech Restrictions?
Here’s a passage from Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project that would be very troubling if the restriction weren’t limited to speech coordinated with groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations — and may be very troubling even given that limitation. The Court is explaining why the restricted speech may jeopardize the government interest in “combating terrorism,” […]
Speech That Aids Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and Strict Scrutiny
The boys are behaving better, and I have a chance now to return to the Humanitarian Law Project decision. In this post, I thought I’d approach the opinion from a different perspective. Let’s look at the general problem: American speakers can do many things that help foreign terrorist organizations, both those that are directly fighting […]
Kenneth Minogue, “Morals & The Servile Mind”:
If you haven’t seen this interesting essay by Kenneth Minogue in The New Criterion, let me point you to it. I don’t agree with all of it, but I find the central thrust thought-provoking. Alert readers will recognize the implicit hat-tip to Ilaire Belloc. A snippet: My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins […]
Interchange Price Controls and the Central Planning Mentality:
A few final thoughts on the Durbin Amendment and interchange price controls. First, one of the peculiarities of the price control provisions of the Durbin Amendment is that it only applies to debit and prepaid cards. This seems peculiar because for years the primary concern of merchants has been credit cards, which have higher interchange […]
Tocqueville Meets the Speech Police
The two pillars of representative democracy are free and open elections and free and open debate. Every schoolchild is taught not only that the Bill of Rights enshrines citizens’ rights to speech, association and petition, but that America is great because citizens speak out on issues of public concern and bring their arguments directly to politicians. […]
Different Theories of Interchange Regulation:
Adam Levitin also has a letter in today’s Washington Times today, responding to the op-ed column that Josh Wright and I published on Friday on the antitrust economics of interchange regulation. I’ve followed Adam’s work on this for some time, and I confess that I literally do not understand his theory of the market here. […]
Humanitarian Law Project and Strict Scrutiny
[UPDATE: I have since added a post that takes a different — and, I think, more helpful, look — at the strict scrutiny test as it is affected by Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project; you can see it here.] The Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project majority acknowledges that the law was a content-based restriction on […]