If you’ve been planning to buy the book in the reasonably near future, now is probably a good time. Amazon has priced it anywhere from 28.58 to 36.50 (list is 45), and it’s just come down near the bottom of the range, 28.50 with free shipping. By the way, there should be some interesting news […]
Archive | August, 2011
NAACP Calls for an End to the War on Drugs
The NAACP recently adopted a resolution calling for the abolition of the War on Drugs, emphasizing the harm that it inflicts on minority communities. This is a sea change for the nation’s most prominent black civil rights organization. The NAACP resolution is far from the first indication that the War on Drugs inflicts great harm […]
Is It a Crime to Publish Parody Videos That Use “Lewd … Language” Meant to “Embarrass and Emotionally Torment” Police Officers?
Yes, the Renton (Wash.) city prosecutor’s office concludes, applying the Washington “cyberstalking” statute — an excellent example of the dangers of the broad “cyberbullying” and “harassment” statutes that I have often condemned. KIRO-TV reports: The Renton City Prosecutor wants to send a cartoonist to jail for mocking the police department in a series of animated […]
Debt Limits, Union Strike Threats, and Talk of “Extortion” and “Hostage-Taking”
Some have faulted conservatives who demanded various spending cuts as a condition of raising the debt limit for engaging in “extortion” or “hostage-taking.” One could likewise fault liberals who threatened to block a conservative-backed debt-limit-increase-plus-spending-cut bill: They too were threatening to cause a government default if their changes or replacement for the bill weren’t enacted. […]
Do Changes to a Blog Post’s URL and the Site’s Metatags Restart the Statute of Limitations?
An interesting decision, stemming from the Wolk v. Olson litigation. Here’s the legal background: A publisher is generally not be liable once the statute of limitations (generally a year or longer) has run since the original publication. At that point, under the “single publication rule” — which is generally accepted in most states, and has […]
Ninth Circuit Panel Holds that University Antidiscrimination Policy May Be Applied to Religious Groups, But Only If It’s Applied to Other Groups
The case is Alpha Delta Chi-Delta Chapter v. Reed (9th Cir. Aug. 2); the opinion basically agrees with Justice Stevens’s concurrence in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, which took the same view. The Christian Legal Society majority held only that a policy that recognized groups must take all comers — with some modest exceptions — […]
Chuck Lane in the Washington Post, and James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal‘s Best of the Web, on Civility
Very good posts, here (Lane) and here (Taranto).
Scotusblog essays on Obamacare’s constitutionality
By David Kopel on August 3, 2011 11:46 am in Constitutional Law, Federalism, Health Care, Taxing and Spending Clause, Tenth Amendment
This week Scotusblog is running a series of essays, “The Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.” Contributors so far are Dawn Johnson (Indiana U.), Bradley Joondeph (Santa Clara U., and manager of a very useful blog on the ACA litigation), Bob Levy (Cato), Charles Fried (Harvard), and me. There are many more essays still to […]
Cross-Ideological Dating at Match.Com
This interesting Slate article on Match.com notes that Match’s statistical data base finds that conservatives are more willing to date liberals on the site than vice versa: Indeed, says [Match.com’s Amarnath] Thombre, “the politics one is quite interesting. Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than […]
Israeli Protests
As you may have noticed from the news, Israel has been experiencing large civil protests/demonstrations, primarily over the price of housing, but generally over “cost of living issues.” Given that Israel currently has the best-performing economy in the OECD, with over 5% annual GDP growth and 6% unemployment, you may be wondering “what the heck […]
Further Proof that John McCain is No Gandalf
During the 2008 presidential campaign, I took issue with Victor Davis Hanson’s claim that John McCain is like Gandalf. Today, McCain is praising the Tea Party for their role in the budget debate. Nevertheless, the fact that he previously derided them as “Tea Party Hobbits” is telling. Gandalf would never think that “hobbit” is a […]
The Debt Deal and Divided Government
The debt deal passed today does not go as far in cutting spending as I would like. But it does nonetheless enact substantial cuts without any tax increases, with a significant likelihood of more cuts in the future. If the bipartisan commission created by the new legislation fails to come up with a spending cut […]
Comedy of Errors at Univ. of Colorado not very funny
Among the offerings at this summer’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival, at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is the Comedy of Errors. The show is clearly a crowd-pleaser, provoking many laughs from most of the audience. The people with whom I saw the show, who generally have pretty good taste in theater, thought it was hilarious. So […]
Montesquieu on Climate
From Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV: Cold air constringes the extremities of the external fibres of the body; this increases their elasticity, and favours the return of the blood from the extreme parts to the heart. It contracts those very fibres; consequently it increases also their force. On the contrary, warm air relaxes […]
Considering the Costs of Climate Adaptation
Yesterday afternoon I attended a lecture by Michael Greenstone, the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics and former chief economist of the Council of Economic Advisers during the first year of the Obama Administration, addressing the question, “Will Adaptation Save Us from Climate Change?” This lecture was the keynote address at a PERC workshop on “Human […]