My father, Yefim Somin, recently participated in a panel on memoirs of immigration at Cary Memorial Libary in Lexington, MA. The video is available here. As my father mentioned in the talk, his account of his immigration experience is available in this recent book of Russian Jewish immigrant memoirs published by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid […]
Archive | March, 2013
Today’s Interesting Supreme Court Line-Up
Among the opinions the Supreme Court handed down this morning was Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, concerning the application of the first-sale doctrine to copyrighted works sold abroad. I’ll leave the substance of the opinion to others. What interests me is the line-up: Justice Breyer delivered the opinion of the Court joined by the […]
Immigration and the Constitution
The Open Borders blog – one of the best websites covering immigration issues – asked me to do a guest post on the implications of the Constitution to debates over immigration. The post is available here. Here is the intro: The US Constitution does not in itself tell us what kind of immigration policy is […]
The Surprising Second Life of Hadley v. Baxendale
IMDB has the story, apparently known to many contracts law professors, but just told to me today.
Math Puzzle
Consider the product 1! x 2! x 3! x … x 99! x 100! — a very big number, but that doesn’t faze us mathematicians (since you won’t need to multiply out in any event). The puzzle: Can you, by omitting exactly one of the factorials from the product, produce a perfect square? (For instance, […]
IJ Summer Boot Camp for Freedom Fighting Law Students
Here is a new video promoting the Institute for Justice summer “boot camp” for freedom fighting law students:
Philadelphia Mayor Suggests Magazine Article on Race Relations Isn’t Protected by the First Amendment
Philadelphia magazine published an article called Being White in Philly, with the subtitle, “Whites, race, class, and the things that never get said.” Apparently the Mayor of Philadelphia, Michael Nutter, thinks there’s not even a constitutional right to say those things; in a letter to the Philadelphia Human Relations Commission, the mayor argues, While I […]
Yiddish, Esperanto, and the Doctor’s Wife
I just finished reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which I loved. It turns out that both this and the last English novel I read, David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, both have Esperanto components to the plot, which was unexpected but not totally out of left field, since both books have to do, broadly […]
Judge Douglas Ginsburg Joins the George Mason Law School Faculty
The official announcement from the law school: Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg will join the George Mason law faculty as professor of law beginning in July of 2013. Judge Ginsburg, who is currently a professor of law at New York University School of Law, will continue also to serve as senior circuit judge of the United […]
Testimony on the Need to Reform the Electronic Communications Privacy Act
Tomorrow morning I will testify before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations, which is hosting a hearing on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, “ECPA Part 1: Lawful Access to Stored Content.” You can read my written testimony here. Readers may recall that I testified before the same subcommittee last […]
Defining “High Seas Felonies” in Another Country
By Eugene Kontorovich on March 18, 2013 9:00 am in Constitutional Law, Criminal Law, Foreign and Religious Law in American Courts, Global Governance/World Government, International Law, National Security, Uncategorized, War on Drugs
A district court recently ruled that Congress’s power to “Define and Punish… Felonies on the High Seas” extends beyond the high seas, to conduct entirely within a foreign country (on dry land), with no U.S. nexus. The case is U.S. v. Carvajal, 2013 WL 619890 (Feb. 20, 2013). The Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act (MDLEA) […]
Economics’ Egalitarian Core
Tyler Cowen had an interesting “economic view” column in yesterday’s NYT about the “egalitarian and civil libertarian core” of economics. Here’s a taste: Economic analysis is itself value-free, but in practice it encourages a cosmopolitan interest in natural equality. Many economic models, of course, assume that all individuals are motivated by rational self-interest or some variant […]
Catholic Cardinal Says Pedophiles Who Had Been Molested as Children Shouldn’t be Criminally Prosecuted for Their Adult Pedophilia
BBC News reports: The Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fox Napier, has described paedophilia as a psychological “illness, not a criminal condition”. The South African cardinal told the BBC that people who were themselves abused as children and then abused others needed to be examined by doctors…. Cardinal Napier referred to paedophilia as “a psychological […]
No Right to Anonymously Visit Government Meetings
An interesting decision in Paridon v. Trumbull County Childrens Servs. Bd. (Ohio Ct. App. Mar. 11, 2013) (some paragraph breaks added): At issue is whether appellee, Trumbull County Children Services Board …, may require attendees of its public meetings to sign in before being admitted to such meetings…. [Appellants allege] they attended a public meeting […]
A “Conservative Vision” for the Future of Environmental Policy
Last fall, I participated in a conference at Duke Law School on “Conservative Visions of Our Environmental Future,” sponsored by the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum, Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, Nicholas School for the Environment, Duke Federalist Society, Duke College Republicans and the Energy & Enterprise Initiative. I blogged the event, summarizing […]