C-Span has been running video of a few of the panels from the Stanford Constitutional Law Center Conference that I attended a few weeks ago. You can also find video on C-Span’s web site from two of the panels: “Executive Power During a Financial Crisis” and “Federal Intervention in Auto Industry Bailout” (the panel on […]
Archive | 2010
Gates v. Ridley on Progress, the Plight of Africa, and Climate Change
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates reviews Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist in the Wall Street Journal. Gates is quite favorable. He endorses Ridley’s overall thesis, but thinks Ridley is too dismissive of some current problems, including underdevelopment in Africa and climate change. Having shown that many past fears were ultimately unjustified, Mr. Ridley finally turns his […]
Ending Honorific Resolutions
The Los Angeles Times reports that Republicans may eliminate honorific resolutions (e.g. resolutions endorsing National Potato Day and National Pi Day, or honoring the 75th anniversary of Radio Shack’s listing on the NYSE — all real examples) from Congressional business. This would be a nice symbolic gesture. Such resolutions seem trivial, but they cost time […]
David Skeel on Bankruptcy for States
UPenn law professor and corporate finance and bankruptcy specialist David Skeel has an important article in this week’s Weekly Standard talking about the possibility and utility of bankruptcy for states. The article argues first that a new chapter for states in the Federal bankruptcy statute would be constitutional, and then turns to argue, second, that […]
What Law Will Govern Space Tourism?
Over at Opinio Juris, a scholarly exchange on the question of space tourism and the law that would underlie it. Steven Freeland, commenting on his own article in the Melbourne Journal of International Law, Frans G. von der Dunk responding, and Freeland’s final comments. Meanwhile, I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving; we had family […]
With Defenders Like This, Who Needs Oppressors?
A commenter responded to my Why American Courts Should Sometimes Consider Islamic Court Rulings post with this: This shows a complete lack of understanding of how badly women are treated under Islamic law. We give effect to English or French or even Taiwanese domestic decrees because we can have some confidence that whatever the substantive […]
I’m Proud to Have Such a Courageous Colleague
From the L.A. Times: When UCLA neuroscientist J. David Jentsch was a grad student, he never expected his life as an academic would require around-the-clock armed guards, or a closed-circuit TV inside his bedroom so he could keep constant watch over his home. But the high-powered security proved necessary again this month when the researcher, […]
Health Reform Error Could Cost Children’s Hospitals
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously remarked that Congress had to pass health care reform legislation so that Americans could “find out what is in it.” The latest discovery of what’s inside the health care reform legislation is a drafting error that could increase drug costs at children’s hospitals by millions of dollars. The Boston Globe […]
Greenwald v. The Nation
Glenn Greenwald rightly takes The Nation to task for publishing a a shoddy, fact-free, and reckless hit piece by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine attacking John Tyner and other critics of the Transportation Security Administration’s new airport security protocols as nothing more than fringe libertarian, Koch-funded astroturf. Tyner is the fellow who became an internet […]
Tit-for-Tat, and Collateral Damage
On the Why American Courts Should Sometimes Consider Islamic Court Rulings thread, a commenter writes: I think one consideration should be if the foreign court would honor a American court’s findings. This shouldn’t be a one-way street. I suspect that most foreign countries are perfectly happy taking at face value American marriages and divorces between […]
Blasphemy Prosecution in England
From the Guardian (UK): A 15-year-old girl has been arrested in the West Midlands on suspicion of inciting religious hatred after allegedly burning an English-language version of the Qur’an — and then posting video footage of the act on Facebook…. The incident comes just two and a half months after six people were arrested after […]
Potentially Coerced Marriages and Statutory Rape Laws
There is one twist on the foreign coerced marriages question that I wanted to deal with separately. As I mentioned earlier, marriage provides the poorer partner (in the scenario my correspondent was describing, usually a young woman) with important rights. Refusing to recognize Islamic law marriages on the ground that some of them might be […]
Coerced Marriages
A commenter on the Why American Courts Should Sometimes Consider Islamic Court Rulings thread writes, The scenario we commenters have discussed here more than once is the possibility that an arranged and nonconsensual, or at least coerced, marriage takes place in another country, and then the couple moves here. We’ve disagreed as to whether that […]
The Recency Illusion
Three comments in recent threads reminded me of what Arnold Zwicky (Language Log) calls the recency illusion, “the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent. This is a selective attention effect. Your impressions are simply not to be trusted; you have to check the facts. Again and again — retro […]
Why American Courts Should Sometimes Consider Islamic Court Rulings (and Islamic Law)
Tuesday, I blogged about a Massachusetts court’s decision not to honor a Lebanese Islamic court’s child custody order; I thought the Massachusetts decision was a sound application of religion-neutral Massachusetts law, under which foreign child custody orders dealing with Massachusetts resident children are honored only when they are entered based on standards that are close […]