Congratulations to Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain of the 9th Circuit, who has been named chair of the Judicial Conference Committee on International Judicial Relations by Chief Justice Roberts. It is a three-year term, and Judge O’Scannlain is a terrific choice to chair it. The 9th Circuit announcement notes that the Committee was formed in 1993 to […]
Archive | 2010
Previewing the Supreme Court Term
October Term 2010 begins today, the first Monday in October, so it’s time for Supreme Court previews. Here are previews from the NYT, Washington Post (here too), and National Law Journal. My own term preview is up on NRO here.
In 1980, “20/20” Reports on the State of the Music Industry
The first segment is here, and the second is here. Pretty amusing.
VC Photo Caption Contest
With the new Supreme Court Term about to start, Elena Kagan was publicly sworn in on Friday as the newest Supreme Court Justice. Which means it’s time for another VC Photo Caption Contest. Here’s the photo: UPDATE: The winner so far is Ian H. Spedding, who had this caption: “You don’t need to see my […]
Teaching English and Math Means “Imposing Western culture on Jewish culture”
Here’s an article that reads like a parody, but isn’t. A former education minister of Israel, Yitzhak Levy, objects to the imposition of a core curriculum on state-funded Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) schools. This core curriculum, apparently, consists of English and Mathematics, neither of which, to my knowledge, are in tension with any known version of Judaism. […]
“Ex Ante Regulation of Computer Search and Seizure” Available in Final Published Form
By Orin Kerr on October 3, 2010 6:41 pm in Comprehensive Drug Testing, Computer Crime Law, Fourth Amendment
The final version of my latest article, Ex Ante Regulation of Computer Search and Seizure, 96 Va. L. Rev. 1241 (2010), has now been posted on the Virginia Law Review‘s website.
Beyond PowerPoint
To my surprise, I’m kind of a PowerPoint fan. I know slides can be deadly, and I’ve heard all the jokes about how power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. Even so, I cling to the view that, when done right, slides and pictures add a lot to a speech. At least that’s my theory. Others […]
Drone Warfare as Force Protection, and Drones as Strategic Air Power
By Kenneth Anderson on October 2, 2010 6:08 pm in Robotics, Targeted Killing, Uncategorized, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
Adam Entous, Julan E. Barnes, and Siobhan Gorman have an outstanding piece of national security reporting on the front page of the weekend Wall Street Journal, “CIA Escalates Campaign in Pakistan: Pentagon Diverts Drones to Afghanistan to Bolster Campaign Next Door.” This is a fine piece of journalism that integrates reporting from AfPak and Washington […]
“Embiggen” Makes The Economist
See this article on Ascension Island: If a future turn of events in Africa was seen as requiring the island’s military role to be embiggened and its facilities rendered much more secure, it might be convenient if the islanders had no legal right to remain where they were. Seems to me that the term works […]
Choosing Blogging Topics
Co-blogger Eugene Volokh gives some sensible reasons for why he chooses not to blog about some topics. I gave my own criteria for making such decisions here: I try to limit blogging to issues where I have a comparative advantage: that is, questions on which I can say something useful or interesting that is unlikely […]
Strategic Ambiguity? How to Interpret This Sentence?
I have no idea how many people attended the DC rally today; could be 10 or 1,000,000 for all I know. I’m sitting outside my law school in the sunshine. I know that there is much commentary on comparisons to the Beck rally in terms of size. But I am unsure how to interpret the […]
More Interesting New Homicide/Suicide/Deadly Firearms Accident Data
The CDC WISQARS site, which I had long used for data on homicides and nonfatal injuries, has a cool new National Violent Death Reporting System page that lets you generate cause-of-death statistics in much more detail than I’d seen before (though unfortunately only for the 16 participating states). So, if for instance, you wanted to […]
John Smith and Smith John
I have in mind a very famous person whose name (or at least its modern English rendering) has the following property: If you switch the first name and the last name — there’s no middle name — you get the name of a different person, considerably less famous but still at least moderately significant. And […]
On Catch Shares and Jane Lubchenco
Ron Arnold attacked Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for seeking to impose industry-killing restrictions on fishing off the New England coast. Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute rose to Lubchenco and the Obama Administration’s defense, arguing out that the industry’s woes are a legacy of fishery mismanagement and […]
The Sorry Green Giant
This morning I had an essay on NRO discussing the state of the environmentalist movement in light of the failure to enact significant climate legislation. I’m currently in Emigrant, Montana, attending a conference co-sponsored by Liberty Fund and PERC on “Liberty and the Progress of the Human Condition,” so I may not be able to respond much […]