Author Archive | Ilya Somin

As this recent Gallup survey shows, atheists continue to be America’s most unpopular minority group. Gallup asked respondents the following question: Between now and the 2008 political conventions, there will be discussion about the qualifications of presidential candidates — their education, age, religion, race, and so on. If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person […]

Jonah Goldberg and one of his readers consider an interesting constitutional federalism issue on Battlestar Galactica. One of the notable aspects of the show is the way constitutional and political economy issues are dealt with in at least a moderately sophisticated way. Far better than on most other TV shows, science fiction and otherwise – […]

The U.S. government is apparently going after Japanese Boston Red Sox pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka for making a beer commercial in which he had the effrontery to take a sip of Demon Alcohol. The Alcohol Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau claims that Matsuzaka’s ad violated US law: According to Arthur Resnick, director of public and media […]

Many bloggers and commentators have recently trumpeted one important new book about the history of libertarianism: Brian Doherty’s fascinating Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. I want to focus here on another book on libertarian history that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle: Lanny Ebenstein’s new biography of […]

This post by Ampersand rounds up the recent blogosphere reaction to the scandal of widespread prison rape. As he notes, conservative, libertarian, and liberal bloggers all agree that more should be done to curb prison rape. Yet, he concludes, “this is a curious case where it appears that everyone agrees, yet nothing ever gets done.” […]

In his recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Justice Anthony Kennedy forcefully argued for a pay increase for judges and against allowing TV cameras in the Supreme Court. Perhaps needless to say, I disagree with Justice Kennedy on both issues. For my critique of arguments for a judicial pay increase, see here, here, and […]

I agree with most of the points Guest-Blogger Nicole Garnett makes in her two posts and in her excellent Michigan Law Review article on which they are based. However, I think her analysis of Chicago’s decision to avoid condemning Catholic churches in the 1950s does not prove that takers routinely avoid high subjective value properties […]

Like Orin Kerr, Marty Lederman, and Mike Rappaport, I believe that the answer to this question is “Yes.” This consensus now covers conservatives (Mike), moderates (Orin), liberals (Marty), and libertarians (me), so it has to be right! I have a slightly different rationale for my view than any of my esteemed colleagues. Article III, Section […]

Prominent left-wing radical scholar and pundit Gar Alperovitz has an interesting NY Times article arguing that the United States and other large nations are overly centralized and should devolve more political power to the state or regiona level (hat tip: Ethan Leib). Here’s a brief excerpt: The United States is almost certainly too big to […]

In the 1990s, North Korea’s communist economic system killed some 2 million people as a result of food shortages partly created and seriously exacerbated by the country’s system of collectivized agriculture. Serious food shortages and widespread privation persist even today, since North Korea remains the world’s only unreformed Stalinist economic system. But never fear, the […]

Today’s Baltimore Sun has a generally informative article about Mayor of Baltimore v. Valsamaki, the Maryland Court of Appeals decision limiting the power of local governments to engage in “quick take” condemnations. Unfortunately, the article also contains at least three serious errors. Sun reporter Jill Rosen writes that Valsamaki “runs counter to the [US] Supreme […]

The philosophy behind “quick take” condemnations, a particularly pernicious type of taking discussed in my last post, is well summarized in this classic dialogue from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Faith, an unscrupulous fellow slayer, tries to persuade Buffy to adopt her amoral philosophy of life: BUFFY: Okay, we got ten, maybe twelve bad guys and […]

In Mayor of Baltimore v. Valsamaki an important decision issued yesterday, the Maryland Court of Appeals (that state’s supreme court), ruled that cities can only condemn property through “quick take” procedures if they prove that there is an “immediate necessity” for doing so. As Tim Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation explains in his post […]

Over at Opinio Juris, prominent international law scholar Peter Spiro criticizes Eugene Volokh’s and (by implication) my claim that U.S. should try to block the overriding of domestic law by international law norms. He argues that such resistance is futile, and that we should instead work to improve the substantive content of international law norms […]

The ongoing effort to establish an international law norm against “defamation of religion” – discussed in Eugene’s excellent post – nicely exemplifies several of the shortcomings of international law discussed in my forthcoming Stanford Law Review article (coauthored with John McGinnis). In the article, John and I contend that what we call “raw international law” […]