A hearty congratulations to my old friend Brad Smith, who has just been named as a 2010 recipient of a Bradley Prize for “outstanding achievement awarded annually to prominent scholars and engaged citizens.” Other winners this year are Michael Barone, Paul Gigot, and John Taylor–all exceedingly appropriate winners.
Archive | 2010
New Washington Legal Foundation Blog, The Legal Pulse:
My friends at the Washington Legal Foundation have started a new blog, “The Legal Pulse.” The weekly “Finger on the Pulse” round-up of stories looks to be especially useful to the general reader.
Could Senator Dodd’s Consumer Protection Bureau Regulate Dentists?
A spat has broken out over an advertisement by the Chamber of Commerce that states that under Senator Chris Dodd’s financial reform legislation, the new Bureau of Consumer Protection would have the authority to regulate dentists. Senator Dodd and the Obama Administration say that is not true. The issue arises because dentists often permit patients […]
Faisal Shahzad Allegedly Admits to Attempted Times Square Bombing
Reuters has the report here: The Pakistani-American arrested on suspicion of driving a bomb-laden car into New York’s Times Square told U.S. authorities he acted alone, but sceptical investigators are looking into his recent trip to Pakistan, a law enforcement source said on Tuesday. Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan, was arrested […]
Travel Data Leads to Times Square Bomb Arrest
DHS officials pulled Faizal Shahzad off a NY to Dubai flight late last night and arrested him in connection with the Times Square bombing. Two sidelights on the arrest drawn from my forthcoming book, Skating on Stilts: First, while DHS continues to be described as a sprawling unmanageable department, its creation has unified US border […]
Draft Testimony on Reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act
On Wednesday afternoon, I will be testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties on Reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The hearing is a response to the four proposals of the Digital Due Process coalition, a group of tech companies, privacy groups, and individuals that have agreed […]
Comparing Left and Right Blogospheres
This new study looks interesting. The study is sort of hard to read, but its basic finding seems to be that prominent liberal blogs are more often based on a community group model while prominent conservative blogs are more often based on a single-blogger no-comments model. I suppose that’s true, although I wonder if there’s […]
“Do ‘Family Values’ Weaken Families?”
A very interesting column from Jonathan Rauch (National Journal); the subject is much more his field than mine, so I don’t have any independent basis for evaluating it, but I generally find his analyses to be quite reliable and worth reading. An excerpt: Can it be? One of the oddest paradoxes of modern cultural politics […]
Be Careful. Trust No-One. Shut Up.
That’s an oversimplification, of course, of the three arguments to which I was responding — with different degrees of disagreement — in my most recent posts (one, two, three) on the Harvard E-Mail Controversy. But is it really that much of an oversimplification? Some people have been a bit puzzled about why I’ve spent so […]
If You Don’t Have “Scientific Creds,” “STFU”
One refrain I saw in some of the comments on the Harvard e-mail matter (and heard in a personal conversation) is that we shouldn’t much worry about the reaction to the e-mail’s author, because she wasn’t really a scientist. If scientists, or others with real scientific knowledge, were deterred from expressing their views, the argument […]
May Oregon Law Ban Employers’ Firing Employees Because the Employees Use Medical Marijuana?
No, held Emerald Steel Fabricators, Inc. v. Bureau of Labor & Indus. (Ore. Sup. Ct. Apr. 14), concluding that Oregon medical marijuana law was in relevant part preempted by the federal Controlled Substances Act. An excerpt from the end of the court’s opinion: First, employer preserved its challenge that, as a result of the Controlled […]
Important Relist in First Amendment/Business Case
Although determining whether the Supreme Court has relisted a case is somewhat dicey before the Court actually updates its docket, it appears as though the Court has relisted one very important business case that was on for Friday’s conference: Cablevision Systems Corp v. FCC, 09-901, CA2 (Walker, Cabranes, Raggi), which presents the question whether the must-carry […]
State court standards of review for the right to arms
Forthcoming in a symposium issue of the Santa Clara Law Review, final version here. This 108-page article, which I wrote with Clayton Cramer, surveys the leading state constitution right to arms cases, from the Early Republic to the present. The article examines the various standards of review that state courts have used in examining gun […]
Stearns on Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings:
My friend and sometimes co-author Maxwell Stearns has a column in the Baltimore Sun today on the role of judicial philosophy and Supreme Court confirmation hearings, “It’s a Fact: Judges Make Law.”
Caution About Sending E-Mails — and About Trust
One recurring theme in the comments about the Harvard e-mail controversy is that one needs to be extra cautious about anything one writes in an e-mail. Some of the commenters (and some people I’ve talked to) go further, and suggest that the author of the controversial e-mail should get no sympathy but should instead be […]