George Will has written a Washington Post column on the abuse of “blight” condemnations in New York: On Aug. 27, 1776, British forces routed George Washington’s novice army in the Battle of Brooklyn, which was fought in fields and woods where today the battle of Prospect Heights is being fought. Americans’ liberty is again under […]
Archive | 2010
Straussians:
Mike Rappaport has a nifty little post (taking off an earlier post by Tom Smith) on Leo Strauss and the Straussians. I’ve never fully understood the intramural battle among the Straussians, but this seems like a useful roadmap. I’ll confess that I wasn’t even aware that there was a Midwestern Straussian school. I know little […]
No Full-Face Veils in Egyptian University Exams
From Reuters: A Cairo court ruled on Sunday in favour of the Egyptian government’s decision to ban female students wearing the niqab, or full face veil, in university examinations…. The government said it brought in the ban in part because students, male and female, were sitting exams disguised as other candidates by wearing a face […]
Walter Russell Meade on Obama and – Hamilton, Wilson, Jefferson, and Jackson
Provocative, interesting essay by Walter Russell Meade in the latest Foreign Policy, The Carter Syndrome. It argues that Obama is a Jeffersonian in his foreign policy trying to come to grips with his Wilsonianism (“Barack Obama might yet revolutionize America’s foreign policy. But if he can’t reconcile his inner Thomas Jefferson with his inner Woodrow Wilson, […]
Can the Police Now Use Thermal Imaging Devices Without a Warrant? A Reexamination of Kyllo in Light of the Widespread Use of Infrared Temperature Sensors
In Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), the Supreme Court held that it violated the Fourth Amendment to direct an infrared thermal imaging device at a home without a warrant to determine the home’s temperature. This post asks whether that result is still good law. I realize that probably sounds a bit nutty […]
Cost-Benefit Analysis and Airline Security – A Query about Method
In the various discussions about airport and airline security here at VC, a common response in the comments is something like this one (some version of this pops up from many commenters, and I’m just pulling up the most convenient example): With the current procedures, flying is one of the safest things we do. Even […]
Getting Serious about Airline Security
The Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole argues that if we are serious about airline security, we need to alter our focus. He argues we spend too much time and effort “keeping bad things—as opposed to bad people—off of airplanes.” A risk-based approach would invert these priorities and concentrate efforts on identifying higher risk passengers for greater […]
Recovery or “Reform”?
University of Chicago economists Gary S. Becker, Steven J. Davis, and Kevin M. Murphy argue that continuing legal and regulatory uncertainty have inhibited efforts to get the economy back on track. Among other things, uncertainty about the rules of the game discourages investment and economic risk-taking. After surveying some evidence to support their argument, they […]
Blogs – New and Improved
Some developments in blogosphere. The Business Law Prof Blog has re-opened for business, and it’s something of an Ohio enterprise. The four contributors are Stefan J. Padfield (Akron), Eric Chaffee (Dayton), Michael Borden (Cleveland-Marshall), and J. Scott Colesanti (Hofstra). The University of Pennsylvania Program on Regulation has launched a new regulatory blog called, appropriately enough, […]
Typical Human Rights Watch Dishonesty
HRW’s website has published this piece on the Geneva Conventions and Israel by director Ken Roth. There are many things wrong with it, but I’ll focus on one piece of blatant dishonesty. Here’s Roth: Instead, there is strong evidence that Israel wanted Gazan civilians to pay the price for Hamas’s abuses, and that the decision […]
Congratulations David Post!
The Green Bag has announced its “Exemplary Legal Writing 2009” honorees. Among those selected is our own David Post for his book, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace. An excerpt from David’s book will be reprinted in the Green Bag Almanac & Reader 2010, along with excerpts from the other […]
The First Amendment and Knowingly False Statements of Fact
Is there an exception to First Amendment protection for knowingly (and recklessly) false statements of fact, or are there several narrower exceptions for libel, fraud, and the like? I’ve blogged before about this question (I’m inclined to think the answer is that there’s a general reckless/knowing false statements of fact exception, subject to the limits […]
Seeking Updates on United States v. Payton
Back in August, I wrote a long post about the Ninth Circuit’s very dubious computer search and seizure decision in United States v. Payton, 573 F.3d 859 (9th Cir. 2009). I speculated about the possibility the opinion might be revised or overturned en banc, but I wrote that post a week before the en banc […]
Sunday Song Lyric
What was the best album of 2009? The best song? Spin gives top honors to “Zero” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and ranks their album It’s Blitz! second (behind Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion). NME also ranks “Zero” as the best track of 2009 and ranks It’s Blitz! third. (By comparison, Rolling Stone puts “Zero” […]
NSA.Gov
For fun, go to the NSA site, and observe the password prompts. Sounds to me like a design glitch — you can reach much of the material by just canceling the password prompts, so why not just make the material available without making people go through the hassle? But maybe it’s just some deep humor.