Author Archive | David Post

Today is Mendelssohn’s 200th birthday (Feb. 3, 1809) — which completes the trifecta of geniuses born within a 10 day period between Feb 3 and Feb 12, 1809 (with Darwin and Lincoln, of course, on Feb 12). [If any of you know of a comparable 10-day period, I’d love to hear what it was and […]

Jackie Robinson would have been 90 today, had he lived, and that’s an event worth pausing for and celebrating. There have been people who changed the country more than Robinson did — but not many of them. If symbols matter — and boy, do they matter! — the sight of Robinson going on those fields […]

I don’t have much to add to the many Updike obituaries out there, except to say that I’m sorry to see him pass. I was never a enormous Updike fan, personally — but his prose could achieve incandescence at times, and there can never be too many people about whom that can be said. To […]

I just happened across this extraordinary paragraph in recent law review article (entitled “Why Judy Norman Acted in Reasonable Self-Defense: An Abused Woman and a Sleeping Man,” 23 Buff. Women’s Law Journal 65 (2007)), and I thought I’d share it with you all: The prevailing belief is that individuals are independent, autonomous beings, and therefore, […]

[I warned you I could be shameless about promoting this book of mine . . .] Maybe everyone already knows this, but it was news to me: the price that Amazon charges for individual books fluctuates (rather widely) from day-to-day. For instance, (and I assume this is generally the case), I’ve noticed that my book, […]

A reminder to all our Washington DC-and-environs VCers: A week from this coming Wednesday (Feb. 4th) I’m going to be talking at a Cato Institute Book Forum about my book, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace.”It should be an interesting event: Cato has rounded up two outstanding commenters — Jeff […]

Just got home from watching the Inauguration down at the federal courthouse, and lemme tell you all — it was F**ing cold out there!! Putting aside the oath kerfuffle, I thought it was a pretty stirring event. Obama’s speech was terrific — perhaps not Lincoln’s Second, or Jefferson’s First, in terms of soaring oratory, but […]

Ben Sheffner, over on Copyright & Campaigns, has a nice piece on the efforts of record industry lawyers to overturn an order providing for live Internet coverage of a court hearing next Thursday in one of the RIAA’s lawsuits asserting copyright infringement against the operator/user of a peer-to-peer file-sharing system (RIAA v. Tenenbaum). The case […]

It will be interesting to see whether Obama yields at all to the demands of the weather in his inaugural address. It’s been brutally cold in Washington the last few days, and while it should warm up some by Tuesday, it’s going to be pretty crisp out there, and many people in the crowd will […]

I just got word that Amazon.com has started shipping copies of my book about Jefferson’s moose, the Internet, and how they’re connected. So now I join the ranks of published authordom, and I can start doing what every other published author of whom I’m aware does once his/her book hits the streets, namely obsessively tracking […]

I have a particular fondness for instances illustrating the incommensurability of different reactions to political events, examples of how different people, aligned at different points of the political spectrum, see things so differently that debate or discussion is not likely to effect any changes of mind. Here’s Paul Krugman in yesterday’s New York Times, complaining […]

Larry Lessig has an interesting column in Newsweek today calling for the dismantling of the FCC: The solution here is not tinkering. You can’t fix DNA. You have to bury it. President Obama should get Congress to shut down the FCC and similar vestigial regulators, which put stability and special interests above the public good. […]

Adam Liptak has an interesting piece in this morning’s New York Times about the precedential significance of Bush v Gore (issued 8 years ago this month). The opinion itself contained unusual (and arguably unique, for a Supreme Court opinion) limiting language:

One of the threads in the comments on the postings regarding a recent obscenity conviction (upheld by the 4th Circuit) for “receipt of obscene cartoons” involved my friend Mr. Jefferson, and his views on the First Amendment and “the freedom of speech.” One reader added a helpful link to Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions, in which he […]

Timothy Sandefur pointed me to a related post on his blog here, where he describes in some detail an even more appalling case involving criminal prosecution for purely textual descriptions of children engaged in obscene acts. [And note to commenter “Anonn”: sorry, but i really do not consider that my use of the word “damn,” […]