Author Archive | David Post

My annual revision of my “Writing Guidelines” – mostly for law students (mine and others’), but (so I’ve been told) helpful for more experience writers as well.   [And, notwithstanding my tireless efforts, every year a typo or two seems to creep into the text unbidden and undiscovered (by me) – a particularly embarrassing development […]

. . . because of the Department of Homeland Security’s fearless quest to rid the Internet of copyright infringement.  I’ve noted DHS’ penchant for seizing domain names at the border before — see here and here.  But now it seems they’re going into the Youtube notice-and takedown business.  See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CV8Xt2VWvc [See Techdirt’s comments on this […]

So here is a curious provision of Pennsylvania law, buried in the recently-enacted Act 13, a comprehensive revision of Pennsylvania’s oil and gas law (enacted to deal with the rush to exploit the gas reserves in the Marcellus Shale):  58 Pa. C.S. §3222.1(b)(10) and (b)(11), titled “Hydraulic fracturing chemical disclosure requirements,” regarding hydraulic fracturing of […]

Quite possibly the most polite and reasonable cease-and-desist letter of all time.  I hope it gets results – a good precedent.  See http://brokenpianoforpresident.com/2012/07/19/jack-daniels-lawsuit-the-full-scoop/   Thanks to Hugh Greentree and AJ Fluehr for the pointer

So the NCAA has now imposed sanctions on the Penn State athletic program for its many failures, including a $60 million fine and various other restrctions on their athletic program (designed, as the NCAA itself proudly notes, to be “punitive”).  From the NCAA announcement: “The NCAA imposes a $60 million fine, equivalent to the approximate […]

There’s nothing like winning an award to get the blood flowing in the veins … So I’m pleased to report that my “Moose” book has garnered another obscure award — the “Nyan Cat”** award, for given for outstanding achievement in disinformation, web myths and general web based idiocy.  I’m in good company, sharing the award […]

In my course this summer in Rome (“The Roman Republic and the US Constitution”), we spent the first two weeks surveying the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and the last two weeks reading The Federalist from start to finish, and looking for connections between the two (of which there are a fair number). […]

[In response to some comments, I’ve made a few edits [marked with strikeouts] to make what I was trying to say a little clearer – DGP] So it turns out that this little brouhaha about whether the Court has issued a “holding” in regard to the question of whether the commerce clause authorizes Congress to […]

Ilya proposes “a fairly simple solution” to what he calls the “holding vs. dictum mess” that I blogged about earlier: “Just look at what the Court itself said the holding was.” That cannot be the right answer. A court’s holding defines the scope of its power; holdings must be obeyed, by citizens and by other […]

Fellow-blogger Randy Barnett writes, in today’s Washington Post Outlook Section, that the healthcare decision shows that the Court is prepared to enforce limits on Congress’ powers: Lawmakers argued that this mandate was justified by the Constitution’s commerce and “necessary and proper” clauses. Had we not contested this power grab, Congress’s regulatory powers would have been […]

OK, nobody actually was speaking of soccer. . . . But I’ve been away from home (and the VC) for a while (six weeks in Italy), and after a 20-hour transatlantic ordeal I come home in the midst of this firestorm about the healthcare decision (about which I have, at the moment, nothing intelligent to say).  […]

As co-blogger Jonathan Adler noted here, Fred Shapiro and Margaret Pearce have published the results of their (pretty exhaustive) study of the “Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time.”   There’s some interesting stuff in there (at least, for those of you who are interested in the structure of the legal academy and its institutions). To […]

The Supreme Court has granted cert in Kirtsaeng v John Wiley, another of the series of rather baffling cases involving interpretation of the scope of copyright’s “importation right.”  It’s a rather wonderful example of how baroque the structure of copyright law has become, as well as the ways in which interpretation of some very arcane […]

The line in the Ohio prison pork case, Pork is not one of the necessities of life. reminded me of a post from several years ago connecting The Simpsons (minus Homer’s sarcasm) and Pliny: Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79), Natural History 8:209: Pig There is no animal who furnishes more variety to the tongue: its […]

Here is what, to me, is the most extraordinary thing about the recent flap over publication of Gunter Grass’ poem “What Must Be Said,” in which he excoriates the Israelis and depicting their undeclared nuclear program (and not Iran’s) as a threat to world peace.  Grass is of course entitled to have, and to publish, […]