As Orin notes below, a new study of law school faculty “impact” has been released. Just for fun, I ran the numbers for the Volokh Conspiracy “faculty” who blog at least somewhat regularly. I used the same criterion as the study, limiting things to tenured professors. The result is a weighted score of 1566, below […]
Archive | July, 2012
Top Law Faculties for Scholarly Impact, 2007-2011
Greg Sisk and his co-authors ran the numbers based on citations in legal journals, updating part of an earlier study by Brian Leiter. The results are available here (and in more depth here). Several VC bloggers are mentioned for being in the “top 10” of scholars at schools that ranked in the Top 25 for […]
People Should Listen More to Hilaire Belloc (or, “More Beasts for Federal Judges”)
I mean, of course, that The Llama of the Pampasses you never should confound (In spite of a deceptive similarity of sound) With the Lama who is Lord of Turkestan. From United States v. Cassidy (D. Md. 2011) (confirmed in the print version), thus providing yet another odd Hilaire Belloc / First Amendment link (in […]
The Spending Clause: Comparing the Chief’s Opinion and the Joint Dissent
Some conservatives are not big fans of the Chief Justice right now, since they view his opinion upholding the individual mandate “as a valid exercise of Congress’s taxing power [a]s a sell-out of constitutional principle of the first magnitude.” But if you set aside section III-C of his opinion—and I realize that’s a little like, […]
Capretta & Levin: Finding the Insurance “Requirement” Unconstitutional May Undermine Obamacare
To uphold the Affordable Care Act, Chief Justice Roberts adopted a “saving construction” in which he deleted the “requirement” that all non-exempt Americans buy health insurance, leaving only the “penalty,” which he then recharacterized as a tax. The next day, in my Washington Examiner essay, Roberts decision didn’t open floodgates for ‘compulsion through taxation’, I contended […]
Debit, Credit and Cell: Making Canada a Leader in the Way We Pay
My new white paper with Philippe Bergevin of the C.D. Howe Institute in Canada is now available, “Debit, Credit and Cell: Making Canada a Leader in the Way We Pay.” Here’s the Abstract: Canadians are avid users of debit and credit cards and other electronic payment options. Compared to consumers in other countries, they are […]
Mauro and Coyle on Collegiality Among the Justices after NFIB v. Sebelius
Tony Mauro and Marcia Coyle have have an interesting story that includes comments from unnamed Justices about how the Justices might get along after NFIB v. Sebelius. The basic picture: “Members of the U.S. Supreme Court predict that any rifts among justices in the wake of the landmark health care decision are likely to heal […]
Rosen on Roberts as Statesman
Jeff Rosen not surprisingly praises Chief Justice Roberts’s statesmanship in upholding the Affordable Care Act and protecting the Supreme Court’s reputations and legitimacy from accusations of partisan decisionmaking. Here’s what Rosen says about Roberts: All of these instincts converged in the health care case, in which Roberts set aside his ideological preference to protect the […]
My Reason Interview
Since its founding in the 1970s, Reason Magazine has featured “The Reason Interview” with all the major libertarian figures, from Hayek to Nozick to Rothbard. (Reason should make all these interviews available online, but only a fraction of its archives are accessible.) Since I started reading the magazine way back in college, I have been hoping […]
Two-Year Blasphemy Sentence in Indonesia
Agence France Press (via the Jakarta Globe) reports: Tajul Muluk [a Shiite cleric] was arrested in April by police on the island of Madura off eastern Java amid anti-Shiite attacks that rights groups say were led by Sunni Muslims. “Based on witness accounts and evidence presented, the defendant has been proven legally and convincingly guilty […]
Washington Post Article on Obama’s Israel-Palestinian Policy
An interesting piece. Key line: “According to former administration officials and outside advisers briefed on some White House meetings, Emanuel, in particular, thought Netanyahu could be pressured to make concessions, just as he had in the 1990s.” The article suggests that this wasn’t true because Netanyahu had learned in 1999 that if he made concessions […]
Does China have “pervasive access” to 80% of global communications through Huawei and ZTE?
Maybe so, but the stories and podcasts repeating this claim by former Pentagon analyst F. Michael Maloof don’t provide much new supporting evidence. Maloof’s own report is interesting and extensive, and it does indeed make the claim I’ve headlined: The Chinese government has “pervasive access” to some 80 percent of the world’s communications, giving it the […]
Outrage over Citizens United?
The Citizens United case spurred much outrage on the political left, including claims that the Roberts Court was sacrificing its legitimacy to aid Republicans by allowing corporate money to flow freely into political campaigns. Recently, many commentators have defended Chief Justice Roberts from speculation that he capitulated to political pressure in NFIB v. Sebelius by […]
Stanford Constitutional Law Center Academic Fellowship
If you’re interested in becoming a law professor, you should consider applying for a two-year Stanford Constitutional Law Center Academic Fellowship; two fellowships are being filled this year, for July 2013 to June 2015. The Stanford Constitutional Law Center is directed by Professor (and former Circuit Judge) Michael McConnell, who is one of the top […]
Legitimacy, Popularity, and the Individual Mandate Decision
By Ilya Somin on July 13, 2012 5:59 pm in Federalism, Health Care, Individual Mandate, Public Opinion
In response to my post arguing that Chief Justice Roberts’ vote in the individual mandate decision failed to enhance the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, co-blogger Orin Kerr argues that Roberts may have been motivated by a different definition of legitimacy, one seemingly unrelated to popularity: If Roberts is thought to have been influenced by public pressure, […]