Hooray for the Volokhs! I hesitate to move from the sublime to the ridiculous, but heck … here’s my question. Do the bad guys on TV or in the movies ever use Apple? Macs? Over the last month, watching movies on my new FIOS connection, I realized that I have yet to see the bad […]
Archive | 2010
35 Years Ago Today,
my parents, my brother Sasha, and I left the USSR.
Debating the Advantages of US Professional Sports Over International Soccer
In a recent post, I wrote that US pro sports have an important unappreciated advantage over international soccer. Unlike the latter, they are not organized in ways that fuel ethnic violence and provide prestige for oppressive regimes. Co-blogger David Post seems to concede my central point, but defends soccer anyway: I think Ilya’s on to […]
Louis Brandeis — Wuss or Snob?
A few people on the Volokh Conspiracy have complained that some of my posts seem to be deriding privacy advocates. I think that’s close, but not quite right. We all believe in privacy, certainly I do. But as I see it, today’s privacy advocates, often in alliance with industry (what I called the “privacy-industrial complex”), […]
World Cup, Round 1:
First, a word about co-blogger Ilya Somin’s interesting post “An Underappreciated Advantage of American Professional Sports Over International Soccer”“. Ilya describes an “important advantage of US pro sports over international soccer: soccer often promotes nationalist and ethnic violence and provides propaganda fodder for repressive or corrupt governments, while US pro sports (with extremely rare exceptions) […]
Sunday Song Lyric
It seems like a good day to dip back into the great American songbook, so how about Irving Berlin’s “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” Said ABC Radio in 1945: “If the Ziegfield Follies glorified the American girl, it was Irving Berlin who painted her picture in music. Here’s a song that reflects all […]
Proposed Emergency Powers for a Computer Network Attack
When Senators Lieberman, Collins, and Carper proposed legislation last week to deal with the risk of a large-scale attack on our computer infrastructure, the libertarian-privacy attack was not long in coming. Declan McCullagh, a committed libertarian journalist for Cnet, posted a long story full of angst about the bill. It would, he said, “”grant the president far-reaching […]
Habermas on the Euro Crisis and the Necessity of Doubling Down on the Europe Project
The Nation runs an article from the great German philosopher Jurgen Habermas on the Euro crisis. (I didn’t see a credit for an original German publication; if it’s special to the Nation, congratulations on an intellectual coup. But reads as though it had appeared somewhere earlier.) Habermas, consistent with his long held positions, comes out […]
Some Background on Religious Exemption Law
The discussion of Elena Kagan’s memo about a RFRA case suggested to me that it would be good to explain some basic principles of American religious exemption law. What follows is my attempt at an objective explanation of the law; I don’t think any of this should be controversial as a statement of what the […]
Sotomayor a “Reliable Liberal Vote” on the Court
The LA Times reports: The early returns are in, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor is proving herself to be a reliable liberal vote on the Supreme Court. Cases this year on campaign speech, religion, juvenile crime, federal power and Miranda warnings resulted in an ideological split among the justices, and on every occasion, Sotomayor joined the […]
Kagan Sought to Lead OLC
This Washington Post story on the newly released batch of memos from Elena Kagan’s tenure in the Clinton Administration includes an interesting tidbit: Kagan sought, unsuccessfully, to get nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel.
Kagan Memo on Religious Freedom
The New York Times reports that, [Kagan, as a White House lawyer during the Clinton Administration,] recommended that the federal government intervene in a case to support religious freedom. The California Supreme Court ruled that a landlord violated a state law prohibiting housing discrimination by refusing to rent an apartment to an unwed couple because […]
The Future of Privacy: Facial Recognition, Public Facts, and 300 Million Little Brothers
It’s been a pleasure to blog this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation and I’d love to continue it. If you’re interested in reading more, check out our book, Wild West 2.0. It is the most-discussed Internet policy book of 2010 (Jimmy Wales called it “an invaluable guide” to the “brave new world of […]
Ghostwriter Kagan
N.Y. Times: In the Whitewater case, she worked to deflect a Senate subpoena for notes of meetings between the White House and private lawyers. She solicited supportive statements or op-ed articles from former officials and law professors, even ghostwriting or editing some of them. I don’t this reflects badly on Kagan; her job was to […]
Gay Marriage in Iceland
The vote in the parliament was 49-0. The bill must be approved by the president. Of interest: the legislature simultaneously ended domestic partnerships, which had been available only to same-sex couples as a substitute for marriage.