Brooklyn resident Levy Itzhak Rosenbaum recently became the first person convicted of brokering the sale of kidneys in the United States [HT: George Mason law student Michael Mortorano]. The real tragedy here is not what Rosenbaum did, but the fact that organ sales are illegal to begin with. Legalizing them would save thousands of lives […]
Archive | November, 2011
A Prize for Ocean Cleanup
Last month, the X-Prize Foundation announced the winners of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup Challenge. The challenge was created to spur the development of more effective oil spill cleanup methods. Specifically, the challenge offered $1.4 million in prizes for the development of removing oil from the ocean’s surface. The aim was to double the industry’s […]
Myths About Population
Global population is believed to top 7 billion. Is this a problem? Does 7 billion people constitute “overpopulation”? Nicholas Eberstadt doesn’t think so. In today’s Washington Post, Eberstadt punctures five “myths” about global population. The myths: The world is overpopulated. Rapid population growth keeps poor countries poor. For all its ethical problems, China’s one-child policy […]
William Easterly Reviews Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman has spent his career studying how people behave both rationally and irrationally, for which he has won a Nobel in economics and largely founded the field of behavioral economics. As development economist William Easterly notes in his Financial Times review, there “have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only […]
University of Arkansas Panel on the War on Drugs
This Monday at noon, I will be taking part in a Federalist Society panel on the War on Drugs at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Joining me will be University of Arkansas lawprofs Mark Killenbeck (constitutional law) and Laurent Sacharoff (criminal law). This is a very timely event because both public and elite […]
Privacy Victims by the Million: Federal Law Turns Parents and Children into Liars … and Criminals?
A recent report by Danah Boyd and others reveals that turning parents and children into liars is a principal effect of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. According to Consumer Reports, 7.5 million kids under 13 have joined Facebook. Since Facebook prohibits kids of that age from the service, that’s 7.5 million children […]
Guatemala’s Lost Photographs from the 1980s
Congratulations today to my Beloved Wife, Jean-Marie Simon, for a front page photograph illustrating an article in the Wall Street Journal today on Guatemala’s presidential election. The photograph dates back to 1982, when Jean-Marie was a photographer and freelance journalist covering the civil war in Guatemala. She worked there for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty […]
How Grade Inflation Hurts Math and Science Education
The New York Times has an interesting story on the declining number of math and science majors in universities. The article identifies many potential culprits, including grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences. It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no […]
Reforming Higher Education: The Australian Model for Financing Education
Instapundit points us to an article by Diane Auer Jones in the Chronicle of Higher Education, asking whether the US might do better in financing higher education to shift from the current student loan system to the Australian system: [W]e might look to the Australian system of student aid for guidance on how to develop […]
How About Occupy Hollywood?
One of the obvious dangers of the Internet Age is that we’ll be so distracted by everything going on around us – lots of it interesting, complicated, and even important (not to mention all the stuff that’s idiotic and unimportant and fundamentally uninteresting) — that we will fail to recognize the truly important stuff when […]
Florence and the Plaintiff’s Bar
Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article on the dispute among two plaintiff’s attorneys involved in Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of the County of Burlington, the pending Fourth Amendment strip-search case, about who would litigate that case and with what goals. The article is behind a paywall, so […]
Inside Executive Branch Policy-Making on Drone Strikes
Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman, and Julian Barnes of the Wall Street Journal’s national security reporting team have a front page article today detailing the inside debates and, as the article says, policy changes around drone strikes in Pakistan over the several months. It is a must-read for everyone who follows drone and targeted killing policy […]
More on Consent, Win-Win Transactions, and Voluntary Torture
Here is another example I have found interesting in its own right but also helpful in thinking about consent. It is an admittedly completely artificial case of triage. Al’s favorite hobby is the piano. One day he has a traffic accident. As he is pulled from the rubble he notices that the dexterity of one […]
Return of GMU Law and Econ Seminars for Law Profs and Economists
For many years a signature program of the GMU Law & Economics Center was its programs in Economics for Law Professors and Law for Economists. After a hiatus for several years, those programs are now back. Here’s the info for economics for law professors. Here’s the info for law for economists. The two programs actually […]
Time‘s Paris Bureau Chief: Charlie Hebdo Mohammed-Cover Issue “Outrageous, Unacceptable, [and] Condemnable”
The post is here; here’s the introduction and conclusion: Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that “they” aren’t going to tell “us” what can and can’t be done in free societies? Because not only […]