On Thursday, January 9, I will be doing a talk about my book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter at McGill University in Montreal. Th lecture is sponsored by McGill’s Research Group on Constitutional Studies, will run from about 4:30 to 6 PM (including time for questions), and will be held in […]
Archive | January, 2014
A First Look at Navarette v. California: Are Stops Governed by the Rules of Terry or By Case-by-Case Reasonableness?
On January 21st, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Navarette v. California, a Fourth Amendment case on whether an officer who receives an anonymous tip regarding drunk driving must corroborate the dangerous driving before stopping the car. Reading through the briefing in the case, I was struck by the surprising argument advanced by the […]
Brain dead is dead
The recent case of Jahi McMath, a 13-year-old declared dead after a routine operation went wrong, raises the issue whether family members can mandate care when their relative is brain dead. The simple answer is No. In the US, brain death is usually treated conclusively as death. Thus, a family member of a dead person […]
Do Pistol Grips Make Semi-Automatic Rifles More Dangerous, Because They “Aid Shooters when ‘Spray Firing’ from the Hip”?
Laws that ban so-called “assault weapons” often define them with reference to various features, such as a rifle’s having a bayonet mount or “a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon” (to quote the New York assault weapon ban upheld by N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Cuomo (W.D.N.Y. Dec. […]
George Will on Ilya’s New Book
I’m delighted to say that George Will’s column for today talks in some detail about Ilya’s Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter (Stanford Univ. Press). Quite a feather in Ilya’s hat!
Justice Sotomayor Enjoins Enforcement of Contraception Mandate
Last night, before heading to Times Square for the New Year’s festivities, Justice Sonia Sotomayor granted a request for a stay of enforcement of the “contraception mandate” against several Catholic organizations. Here’s the order and more from SCOTUSBlog and the AP. In other pending cases, injunctions pending appeal were granted by split panels of the […]
John McGinnis to Join Law and Liberty Blog
Richard Reinsch has announced that John McGinnis will be joining the Law and Liberty Blog, making it even more of a must-read blog than it is already.
The Sequester’s Impact on the Judiciary
In his 2013 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts comments on the negative effects of the sequester on the operation of the judicial branch. By its own initiative, the Judiciary had already achieved significant cost reductions when the sequester provisions of the Budget Control Act of 2011 went into effect on […]
Steven Harper Responds
Steven Harper sent me an interesting response to my post yesterday on his essay in The Chronicle Review. Here it is in full (I apologize for not having first noticed it in March–I just came across it the other day when a friend emailed it to me and I had assumed it had been more […]
Obama Administration Dominates 2014 Awards for Dubious Achievements in Privacy Law
As 2013 ended and 2014 began, privacy professionals took a moment to look back and choose the year’s most dubious achievements in privacy law. The dubious achievement awards, also known as the Privies, were dominated by officials of the Obama Administration. The awards are a light-hearted way of expressing skepticism about the effort to write […]
Double Check, Where the Moved Piece Is Not One of the Checking Pieces
An interesting thing happened yesterday in a game between my son and my father: a double check, in which the moved piece was not one of the checking pieces. (In a usual double check, a piece moves, placing the king in check but also discovering a check by another piece. To quote a formulation on […]