Author Archive | Jim Lindgren

Randy Barnett raises the issue of term limits, which I blogged about a few weeks ago. There are at least three major questions to be answered in deciding whether to endorse the Carrington/Cramton proposal, or any specific proposal on term limits for the Supreme Court: 1. Do you favor 18-year term limits for Supreme Court […]

The Wall Street Journal has a story today on a pathbreaking new study just completed by two of my brilliant young Northwestern colleagues, Rob Sitkoff and Max Schanzenbach. Unfortunately, the Journal’s article is available only to subscribers, but the Journal’s story is already up on Westlaw (2005 WL-WSJ 59841238) for academics who have that subscription. […]

Professor Bainbridge has an interesting discussion of faculty diversity at UCLA. He cites to a Yale Daily News article covering a talk I gave at Yale in 1996. I well remember the talk, since it was the first time I presented at Yale and the first time I talked publicly about my work on viewpoint […]

Ann Althouse takes on the Nation, which is becoming a gross parody of its former greatness. She rightly criticizes the seemingly intentional misrepresentations of Brooke Allen about the framers’ views of religion. (Tip to Instapundit.) In the course of effectively fisking Allen, Althouse several times says that James Madison in the 1780s favored Separation of […]

The Chicago Tribune (p. 5.9) today censored a “Prickly City” cartoon. The Tribune ran a “Bizarro” strip instead along with this explanation: “Today’s Prickly City does not meet the Chicago Tribune’s standards of fairness. Please enjoy this substitute.” This is today’s strip, which the Tribune censored: [Click on the strip itself to enlarge] ©Universal Press […]

My original post on the Hoppe case was already my longest ever, so I am updating it here. VC reader Gabriel Rossman points me to this article by University of Rochester economist, Steven Landsburg, in Slate, which discusses an NPR story that pointed out that gays in California were 70% more likely to smoke: I’ve […]

INTRODUCTION: I read about the problems of Professor Hoppe, an economist at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas (tip to Instapundit): Hoppe, 55, a world-renowned economist, author and speaker, said he was giving a lecture to his money and banking class in March when the incident occurred. The subject of the lecture was economic planning for […]

One statement of the meaning of academic freedom is set out in the 1967 Kalven Report, a statement of policy by the University of Chicago explaining why a university should not take political positions on matters of public policy. Here is part of the Kalven Report: The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, […]

I frankly admit that I have no expertise in military strategy, yet I have been feeling particularly dense lately. When I read the calls for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, I can’t for the life of me figure out what the heck they are talking about. The time to talk about a timetable for […]

Incredibly, the European Union has come out against human rights activists in Cuba and in favor of Fidel Castro. Taking the lead from the Socialist government in Spain, the EU has publicly asked its members not to invite dissidents and human rights activists as guests to its embassies in Havana. This reminds me of the […]

Linda Greenhouse has an article in the Sunday NY Times, Week in Review (p. 5), describing the growing movement for term limits on the US Supreme Court. My colleague, Steve Calabresi, has been discussing this for years, though he wasn’t the first to suggest it. And a few years ago, I discussed our proposal for […]

My last post on Alexandra Samuel’s proposal for excommunicating political scientists like Condoleeza Rice received this response from Jonah Goldberg saying that he was writing a book about the subject and wanted examples. So I thought that I would add another. In the 1960s, just AFTER Ronald Coase had done his Nobel Prize winning work […]

Eugene comments on these snarky assertions of a newly minted Harvard Ph.D. at AlexandraSamuel.com: shouldn’t political science have its equivalent to disbarment or excommunication? After all, if we want the term “political scientist” to mean something, then a doctorate shouldn’t be a one-way ticket. When political scientists promulgate ideas or institute policies that violate even […]

At GlennReynolds.com, Glenn comments on recent stories on objectivity and the media: Elsewhere on this site today, Howard Fineman announces the death of the mainstream media as a political entity. He calls it “The American Mainstream Media Party,” and says it began when Walter Cronkite spoke out against the Vietnam War, and ended in 2004, […]

The CBS Panel “does not believe that political motivations drove the September 8 Segment.” Further, after mentioning political agendas and bias, the Report says: “the Panel will not level allegations for which it cannot offer adequate proof.” Given those sentiments, the Panel is pretty quick to charge those who exposed CBS’s fraudulent documents as having […]