Author Archive | Jonathan H. Adler

Tomorrow the White House will announce new federal fuel efficiency standards for motor vehicles that will require a 35 mpg fleet average by 2016. This standard will also serve as a de facto national greenhouse gas emission standard equivalent to the standard adopted by California, prompting California to “stand down” from pursuing its own separate […]

NYU law professor Rick Pildes has a lengthy post on Balkinization previewing Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB, “the most important challenge in two decades in the ongoing debate between those who believe in the

This morning the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a constitutional challenge to portions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Appointments Clause cases don’t come along all that often, and this one’s a doozy — “Humphrey’s Executor squared” according to Judge Kavanaugh’s dissent on the D.C. Circuit. Our prior […]

The NYT has an interesting article this morning on how cap-and-trade became the greenhouse gas emission-control strategy of choice. How did cap and trade, hatched as an academic theory in obscure economic journals half a century ago, become the policy of choice in the debate over how to slow the heating of the planet? And […]

The National Law Journal‘s Marcia Coyle asked a bunch of law professors and legal experts who they would pick to replace Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court. My response was perhaps a bit pedestrian — I explained why I think Judge Diane Wood is the “obvious” choice — but some of the responses she […]

Biofuels are the answer. Politicians will alter the scientific inquiry accordingly.

Love them or hate them, the Sunday Song Lyric is going on a summer hiatus. Barring some profound inspiration — or something really topical — I don’t expect to post more SSLs until some time in August. Below the jump, however, is an index of all the SSL posts since January 2007. The listing of […]

Two YouTube videos help put proposed budget cuts and our growing debt into perspective. Bush’s fiscal irresponsibility was quite bad — and conservatives were too complacent about the growth in federal spending on Bush’s watch — but things are getting much, much worse.

Across a range of issues, the Obama Administration is discovering that setting national security policy and balancing the relevant trade-offs is more difficult than it appeared when President Bush was in charge and then-Senator Obama and his advisors could take policy positions without any responsibility for implementing them. The latest is the announcement that the […]

More comments by Judge Sonia Sotomayor have surfaced that are sure to complicate her confirmation should President Obama nominate her to the Supreme Court. The New York Times reports: In 2001, Sonia Sotomayor, an appeals court judge, gave a speech declaring that the ethnicity and sex of a judge

Remember Marc Dann? He resigned as Ohio’s Attorney General under a cloud of scandal (see my prior posts here). Now his pal, former roommate and former aide, Anthony Gutierrez — the aide accused of sexually harassing a female state employee in Dann’s apartment — has been indicted on ten felony counts, including theft and misuse […]

From the WSJ, more encouraging news about the Obama Administration’s approach to illegal drugs. The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use. In […]

Conservative House members Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Bob Inglis (R-SC), along with Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-IL), have introduced an alternative to the cap-and-trade proposal developed by House Democrats: HR 2380, the “Raise Wages, Cut Carbon” Act of 2009. Their proposal is for a carbon tax that will gradually increase over time, offset by a reduction […]

Fish may not get much attention, but fishery depletion is one of the more serious environmental problems facing the world today. A shocking percentage of the world’s fisheries are overfished. Protecting fishery resources requires keeping fish catches to sustainable levels. The most effective way to do this is through so-called “catch-share” policies, a property-based conservation […]

Paul House spent over 20 years on death row for the murder of Carolyn Muncey. Then the U.S. Supreme Court, in House v. Bell, granted House’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus because the availability of new evidence cast doubt on his conviction. A new trial was scheduled to begin June 1, but the […]