With an eye to Ben Bernanke’s upcoming testimony to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission during the two days of hearings on “too big to fail” – in other words, systemic risk – the WSJ has an editorial in today’s paper raising various questions about the basis on which the Fed, the FDIC, and other agencies […]
Archive | 2010
Comment of the Week
From “Blue,” commenting on Jane Mayer’s New Yorker hit piece on the Koch brothers: From Mayer: “The Kochs continued to disperse their money, creating slippery organizations with generic-sounding names, and this made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington.“ So let’s check out some of the organizations she cites: “Charles Lewis, […]
What Ever Happened to Rehberg v. Paulk?
I’ve had a few posts recently on new Fourth Amendment decisions that I think are wrongly decided, and I wanted to flag an update on one case that I blogged about back in March: Rehberg v. Paulk, the case holding that there is no Fourth Amendment protection in the contents of e-mails. I wrote a […]
Do We Need to Change Legal Education?
Paul Horwitz summarizes some recent proposals for changing legal education. Like Paul, I’m not convinced changes are needed. As I see it, the basic structure of legal education in the United States works quite well. Every student gets the basic tools of legal reasoning and the common law building block courses in the first year. […]
From Law Professor to University President?
A surprisingly common path: It looks like you just need to make a pit stop as a law school Dean for a few years. (Hat Tip: Dan Filler)
On Charles and David Koch
Like David, I read the New Yorker piece. It seemed like tendentious conspiracy-mongering to me (ironic in light of Mayer’s interest in Fred Koch’s link to the John Birch Society). Short on important facts and long on characterization and innuendo. Others have dissected in some detail, that’s not my object here. I’ve met Charles and […]
“Red Cow”
Not a Red Bull, not a red heifer, but a red cow: What does it refer to, as a legal term?
113 Pages Deciding Nothing?
This morning the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the petition for rehearing en banc in Al-Bihani v. Obama — only it did so with a two-page order and 111 additional pages of “statements” respecting the denial. The vote was unanimous, but there appears to be a fair amount of disagreement within […]
A Farewell to Firefox?
I’ve been a devoted Firefox user for many years, but it may be a time for a change. I had always found Firefox to provide a relatively stable and bug-free browser. No longer. With the latest updates (v3.6.8), my Firefox crashes and freezes-up all the time. This may have something to do with the way […]
Time to Reform the IPCC
By Jonathan H. Adler on August 31, 2010 10:40 am in Climate Change, Environment, Politicizing Science
Yesterday the Inter-Academy Council, a consortium of the world’s leading national academies of science, issued a report highly critical of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (Full report here.) The report does not challenge the IPCC’s central findings about the science of climate change, but strongly criticizes the IPCC’s procedures and management structure, […]
A Lomborg About-Face on Warming?
The Guardian reports on an “apparent U-turn” by Bjorn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist,” on the issue of global climate change. (See also here.) The stories report that Lomborg has a new book, due out this fall, in which he calls global warming “one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and urges adoption of […]
Fourth Amendment Stunner: Judge Rules That Cell-Site Data Protected By Fourth Amendment Warrant Requirement
A few federal court opinions have been making a big public splash recently by taking surprising positions on how the Fourth Amendment applies to location surveillance. The latest opinion in the line is Magistrate Judge James Orenstein‘s decision in In The Matter Of An Application Of The United States Of America And Order For […]
Three Issues in the Debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque”
By Ilya Somin on August 31, 2010 1:41 am in Property Rights, Religion, Religion and the Law, Religious Freedom, War on Terror
The ongoing debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque” has generated lots of commentary. But I fear that much of it conflates three separate issues: whether the government should use its power to block the construction of the mosque, whether the construction of any Islamic facility near Ground Zero is objectionable, and whether this particular organization […]
Modern Jazz Quartet With Laurindo Almeida Play “One Note Samba”
It’s been ages since I blogged a link to a jazz video on YouTube. I did it for a while, but I stopped when it began to feel more like work than just a fun thing to share. In any event, here’s a video I’ve enjoyed enough that I thought it was worth sharing: The […]
“Debating the Invasion of Iraq — Three Questions for the Pro-War Blogosphere” — Six Years Later
Back in September 2004, about 18 months into the war in Iraq, I posed three questions for the pro-war blogosphere: First, assuming that you were in favor of the invasion of Iraq at the time of the invasion, do you believe today that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea? Why/why not? Second, what […]