Author Archive | Guest Blogger

I am not stating a conclusion about how this matter ought to be resolved, and there are competing concerns. I am saying that the concerns I have raised ought to be taken seriously. 18 U.S.C. 207 is a statute that can carry criminal penalties. Violations are serious, not “minor” as some comments here suggest. Bush […]

I spent years listening to criticisms

My second post in this discussion concerns the pre-appointment/pre-nomination vetting process for Executive Branch office holders nicknamed

A number of you have suggested going in the opposite direction than I propose and have all White House employees be privately paid operatives of the President’s political party, in essence to privatize the White House. Some would say we are already there, with the exception that the government pays the salaries, including salaries for […]

There is no intent in my proposal to remove politics from the White House or from the Executive Branch. Good policy decisions must be politically informed decisions, or the policy will go nowhere (e.g. 1993 Clinton health plan). The President needs good political advisors. The question I present is whether these advisors and other political […]

Here are my responses to some of the comments made thus far. If you believe I have not answered your question in the next 24 hours, please post it again or email me at rpainter@umn.edu. Richard Painter First Amendment concerns with my proposal would be relevant for career government employees and indeed Hatch Act rules […]

My first post concerns appropriate boundaries of political activity by the White House staff and by senior political appointees in the Administration. Political campaigning by Administration officials is ostensibly conducted in a

Several of you have asked me to say more about the method used to generate the sample of lawyers interviewed for my book, “Lawyers of the Right.” Jack Heinz, Anthony Paik, and I relied primarily on the

Both the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation attempt to appeal to all strands of the conservative alliance and to unify and mobilize lawyers for conservative and libertarian causes. Heritage pushes lawyers (and other advocates) to find ways to contribute to the mutual success of the organizations they serve. The Federalist Society does not directly […]

I devote two chapters of the book (3 & 4) to exploring differences among lawyers for the different constituencies. One chapter focuses on social background and values, and the other considers professional identity. It is difficult to summarize those chapters; they draw heavily from qualitative interview data to develop group portraits. But a few additional […]

I am grateful to Eugene Volokh for this opportunity to post some findings from my book, Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (University of Chicago Press 2008) and to seek your reactions. The book is an account of lawyers

In this last blog entry, we would like to respond to some commentators and discuss our new research on the consequences of social networks. Dasarge and Fischer both discuss leadership. We can find some evidence of the importance of leadership. Black soldiers with an abolitionist officer were less likely to desert. But this was less […]

Our last post sketched some of our key findings concerning the role of social networks and their effects on desertion and surviving POW camps during the U.S Civil War. In our new Princeton University Press book, Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War, we also use our unique longitudinal data to explore how the […]

In our new Princeton University Press book, Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War, we examine the war experience for Union Army soldiers. We weave a single narrative from the life histories of 41,000 Union Army soldiers, diaries and letters, and government documents. Our core questions are not those typically asked in a military […]

In our new Princeton University Press book, Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War, we examine the war experience for Union Army soldiers during the U.S Civil War. The meat of the book is based on a statistical analysis of a unique data base. In this post, we would like to provide some details […]