I was asked for advice by parents seeking a college for their daughter. I thought I’d crowd-source it. The girl has some unique needs: she is Jewish and she (a) keeps kosher, so she needs the availability of kosher food, but she is not Orthodox and Stern College would not be a good environment for […]
Archive | April, 2013
College Admissions and Affirmative Action for the Well-Off
Instapundit links to this Daily Beast piece: These days, a nearly-perfect GPA is the barest requisite for an elite institution. You’re also supposed to be a top notch athlete and/or musician, the master of multiple extracurriculars. Summers should preferably be spent doing charitable work, hopefully in a foreign country, or failing that, at least attending […]
When to Marry?
Megan McArdle — whose work I have long liked — argues for being open to marrying early: [P]eople should be looking to get married as early as possible. I say this as someone who married late, and since I wouldn’t want to have married anyone except my husband, I’m glad I waited. But as a […]
Orthodox Easter: What’s up with that? — Part 3
On Thursday, I posted about the difference between the Gregorian calendar (used by the Western churches) and the Julian calendar (used by most Eastern Orthodox churches). There’s a 13-day difference between them for the period between 1900 and 2100, so any given day shows up 13 days later on the Julian calendar than on the […]
Judiciary Committee Hearing Scheduled for DC Circuit Nominee Sri Srinivasan
News here. Srinivasan was previously awarded the John Roberts/Elena Kagan Award for the D.C. Circuit Hopeful Nominated in the Last Few Months of A Presidential Term With No Chance of Confirmation This Late (But A Very Promising Future Next Time). It looks like this may be the next time. If so, it will be excellent […]
United States v. Cote and the Trouble With Ex Ante Search Restrictions on Computer Warrants
As regular readers know, I have written at length about ex ante search restrictions on computer warrants. As I explained in a 2010 article in the Virginia Law Review, these restrictions are conditions of how a warrant is executed that some magistrate judges have begun to impose in cases involving searches of a computer. I […]
IQ2US Debate: Abolish The Minimum Wage
At my suggestion, Intelligence Squared is hosting a debate on the motion: Abolish The Minimum Wage. At a time when President Obama is proposing to increase it, I thought it might be useful to go back to first principles and explore whether the minimum wage is good policy in the first place. The debaters are […]
Western Christians, Orthodox Christians, and Jews: the coming convergence
Over the last few days, I’ve been blogging (here and here) about calendrical differences and how that affects the calculation of the date of Easter. The good news is that these problems are going to diminish substantially pretty soon. Recall the Orthodox calendar, which is 13 days off from the Western calendar. The Orthodox calendar […]
Supreme Court Solves the Real Standing Problem
Today the Supreme Court announced a new policy to solve the real “standing problem” confronting those who wish to watch oral arguments. Rick Hasen has the details here.
The “Marcott Mess”
A recent paper in Science reconstructing climate records for the Holocene received substantial media attention because it showed a gradual cooling for several thousand years followed by a dramatic uptick in temperature in the past 100 years. This uptick seemed to replicate the blade of Michael Mann’s “hockey stick,” and was highlighted in media reports on the […]
Watch Out U.S. News, Angie’s List to Rank Law Schools
Paul Caron has the details at Taxprof. In addition to the obvious potential effects on law school incentives to satisfy their customers, I wonder how giving all law students free Angie’s List memberships will skew local reviews of other businesses. Nascent lawyers are known to be, shall we say, more combative than the average twenty-something. […]
Suit Alleging Political Discrimination at DOJ May Proceed
Three unsuccessful applicants to the Department of Justice’s Honors Program sued the federal government alleging they were rejected on political grounds. The district court in D.C. rejected their claims. Last Friday, however, in Gerlich v. U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgment […]
DOMA and Definitions – A Final Comment
In his last post on the subject, Nick Rosenkranz concludes that “the mere fact of a federal definition, for purposes of federal law, does not violate principles of federalism.” On this we are entirely agreed. And if all Congress sought to do with Section 3 of DOMA was to define the semantic meaning of a […]