Author Archive | Eric Posner

Tomorrow the National Academy of Sciences will convene a workshop on geoengineering as a way to slow or reverse the effects of global climate change. Samuel Thernstrom thinks serious federal research on geoengineering is overdue. A geoengineering system would of course be controversial, but the policy question we face today is simple: Should the federal […]

Economist Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has a good piece in today’s NYT on medicare spending. It begins: Medicare expenditures threaten to crush the federal budget, yet the Obama administration is proposing that we start by spending more now so we can spend less later. This runs the risk of becoming the new voodoo economics. […]

The NYT‘s Nicholas Kristof joins the ranks of those urging an end to the drug war. The War on drugs, Kristof notes, has had three consequences: 1) “we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons”; 2) “we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad”; and 3) “we have squandered resources.” Writes […]

From the Washington Post: Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wants to repeal and replace the controversial, $4 billion domestic security initiative known as Real ID, which calls for placing more secure licenses in the hands of 245 million Americans by 2017. The new proposal, called Pass ID, would be cheaper, less rigorous and partly funded […]

Jeff Rosen may have quit blogging, but he’s still writing articles about Judge Sonia Sotomayor. His latest appears in Time magazine. Here’s a taste: An examination of Sotomayor’s career supports the idea that on the bench, she has been a racial moderate, not a radical. At the same time, her opinions and speeches suggest that […]

A federal judge has largely denied John Yoo’s motion to dismiss Jose Padilla’s suit against him. There’s a brief NYT report here, and more on the Constitutional Law Prof blog here. Prior posts on this litigation are here. UPDATE: More coverage from NYT and San Francisco Chronicle.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an interesting opinion today in Securities Exchange Commission v. Fair Labor Standards Authority, a case in which one agency sued another. In ruling for the government against the government, the opinion for the court by Judge Brown begins: This is the sort of dispute that […]

Senator John Cornyn has announced that he will pose a “daily question” raised by Judge Sotomayor’s record and opinions every business day from now until the start of the confirmation hearings on July 13. As the press release explains: “The goal of the Daily Question series is to encourage a civil discourse that focuses on […]

Stuart Taylor may “admire many things about Judge Sonia Sotomayor,” but his latest column raises concerns about the handling of Ricci v. DeStefano. The panel’s decision to adopt as its own U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton’s opinion in the case looks much less defensible up close than it does in most media accounts. One reason […]

Charlie Savage shrewdly asks whether President Obama might prefer a nominee who will defer to executive power

Reports out today indicate that Spain is reconsidering its universal jurisdiction statute and may repeal or restrict it. A universal jurisdiction statute gives courts jurisdiction over international crimes that do not meet ordinary jurisdictional requirements

Much has been written about Jeff Rosen’s New Republic piece, which cited anonymous sources who disparaged Judge Sotomayor’s judicial ability. It is never easy to evaluate judges, or to evaluate their evaluators, especially when those evaluators insist on anonymity. Fortunately, data on judicial performance exist, and although the data have problems as well, they provide […]

David Brooks praises what he calls the

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John Tierney argues that: 1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers