Author Archive | David Post

I’ve always admired John McCain (though I have to say, in the interests of full disclosure, that I’m not voting for him this Fall); he was, by far, my favorite among the Republicans seeking the nomination, and I was delighted that he prevailed. I have to say, though, that his choice of Sarah Palin as […]

A moment, please, to commemorate the passing of one of the real giants in American (and world) culture last Friday. A very nice tribute in last Saturday’s New York Times gives most of the details, if you’re not one of the cognoscenti — you may not have known much about him, but you couldn’t have […]

It is, I am informed on the warning label, a violation of federal law to use my new bottle of Fantastik™ brand heavy-duty kitchen cleaner “in a manner inconsistent with these directions.” Really?! So if I don’t shake well before use, or I use on porous materials, I’m violating federal law? I’ve started noticing this […]

Over at Edublawg, Luigi Russi, head of a group called the “Italian Legal Scholarship Unbound” in Milan, has issued a Call for Papers (and a preliminary Call for Ideas about Topics) for a symposium on Globalization and the Law — worth a look.

One of the books I’ve been spending some time with, the past week or so (on a recommendation from my daughter – thanks, Sarah!), is Brian Greene’s truly magnificent “The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality.” It’s a kind of summary snapshot of the state of modern physics, very much […]

This was just too good not to pass along.

On a friend’s recommendation, I watched Peter Bogdanovich’s wonderful documentary on the early years of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers (called ‘Runnin’ Down the Dream’) which just aired on the Sundance cable channel. [I’m a huge Petty fan, as it happens – a good deal of his stuff ranks up there with the truly great […]

Enjoy, and stay safe.

Odd factoid that I didn’t know until today — Alan Gura, the winning lawyer in the Heller v. D.C. Second Amendment case, was born in Israel.

I was just looking over the Heller opinion, and came across the debate between Justices Scalia and Stevens about U.S. v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876). Here’s what Justice Stevens’s dissent argues, accurately quoting both Cruikshank and the majority (citations omitted): In United States v. Cruikshank, the Court sustained a challenge to respondents’ convictions under […]

Yet another study — which I learned about because it was cited to me by a fellow academic — that shows a correlation between home gun ownership and homicide and suicide risk to occupants without controlling for some obvious confounding factors. Consider, for instance, criminal record (both its presence and its magnitude). Criminality is highly […]

“It’s just completely befuddling that our Supreme Court would be in alliance with the [criminals],” a government official said about the Court’s Confrontation Clause case, in which the Justices held that the Confrontation Clause required the reversal of a murder conviction. A pretty poor argument, it seems to me: The point of the Confrontation Clause […]

The Chicago Tribune runs a story under the headline, “Roberts’ record on high court defies ’05 pledges of centrism”: Despite pledges during his 2005 confirmation hearing to hew to judicial centrism, Roberts has shown himself to be a reliable member of the Supreme Court’s right flank—rarely, if ever, disagreeing with its positions on civil rights, […]

It’s not the sexiest issue around, I realize, but the new proposal that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) has approved, for opening up the space of top-level domains, is an important little moment in Internet history, and should be recorded as such so that the historians of the future don’t think […]

From the New York Times News Service.