Archive | 2010
“South Park” Creators Warned (Threatened) Over Mohammed
CNN reports: The radical Islamic Web site Revolutionmuslim.com is going after the creators of the TV cartoon series “South Park” after an episode last week included an image of the Prophet Mohammed in disguise. . . . On Sunday, Revolutionmuslim.com posted an entry that included a warning to South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt […]
Big First Amendment win in United States v. Stevens
At issue: a federal statute bans commercials depictions of “animal cruelty,” namely a depiction “in which a living animal is intentionally maimed, mutilated, tortured, wounded, or killed,” if killing or other action violates the law where the “the creation, sale, or possession takes place.” The statute would therefore outlaw the sale in the United States […]
The FDA to Target Salt
From today’s Washington Post: The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to […]
The Fourth Amendment, New Technologies, and the Case for Caution
The difficulty some of the Justices had with pager technology in City of Ontario v. Quon yesterday reminds me of a passage in an article of mine on why judges should be cautious about applying the Fourth Amendment to new technologies. In the passage, I argue that judges are particularly likely to make errors in […]
Wise Words About Prosecutorial Discretion and Speech Restrictions
After a long discussion of the breadth of the speech restriction involved in the case, Chief Justice Roberts’ majority in United States v. Stevens goes on: Not to worry, the Government says: The Executive Branch construes §48 to reach only “extreme” cruelty, and it “neither has brought nor will bring a prosecution for anything less,” […]
Definiendum
A new word to me, from U.S. v. Stevens. According to Black’s Law Dictionary, it’s “a word or phrase given a specific meaning for purposes of the document in which it appears.”
Waco
With President Clinton wagging his finger at the Tea Party movement and claiming that the movement is inciting violence, it is worthwhile to remember the role the Clinton administration in perpetrating and covering up numerous violent and other crimes at Waco. The subject is treated at length in my book, co-authored with Paul Blackman, No […]
“Our Tech-Savvy Supreme Court”
Ashby Jones has this funny post at the WSJ Law Blog about today’s Quon argument.
The influence of French words in English legal terminology
Much more extensive and complex than you might think, even if you recognize “acquit” as derived from the Normans. Great podcast on the subject from Lingua Franca, a weekly Australian radio program on linguistics.
Waco
Bill Clinton’s invocation of Timothy McVeigh in connection with the Tea Party movement caused me to recall my review of a book on the Waco massacre that was a motivation for McVeigh. The book under review was Reavis, The Ashes of Waco, and it appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995. Re-reading it for […]
Does the Supposedly Superior Expertise of Regulators Justify Libertarian Paternalism?
By Ilya Somin on April 19, 2010 9:56 pm in Libertarian Paternalism, Paternalism, Political Ignorance, Public Choice, Uncategorized
Some of the commenters on my last two posts criticizing libertarian paternalism accuse me of ignoring the possibility that such paternalism is justified by the supposedly superior expertise of government regulators. Actually, I have addressed this point in several previous posts, such as here and here. However, readers can’t be blamed for not taking the […]
Was the Stored Communications Act Actually Violated in City of Ontario v. Quon?
At today’s oral argument in City of Ontario v. Quon, several Justices took the view that whether Fourth Amendment “reasonable expectation of privacy” existed in the case depended in part on whether the disclosure violated the Stored Communications Act (SCA), an electronic privacy statute. That raises a surprisingly tricky question: Was the Stored Communications Act […]
Richard Thaler Responds to Critics of Libertarian Paternalism
Economist Richard Thaler, a leading advocate of libertarian paternalism, has briefly responded to some of the points I made in my most recent post on that subject. In that post, I argue that advocates of libertarian paternalism implicitly rely on the assumption that regulators and voters are rational, while consumers and other private sector actors […]
Ahmad Doe
From Division of Youth and Family Services v. M.M.K (N.J. Super. Ct. April 19, 2010): In these consolidated appeals [of a termination of parental rights], defendant M.M.K. is the biological father and defendant D.L. is the biological mother of A.R.K. (fictitiously, Ahmad), who is almost six years old. I take it that Ahmad was the […]