Author Archive | Jonathan H. Adler

Today’s WSJ editorial page reports that Senator Arlen Specter is sufficiently upset with the slow pace of judicial confirmations that he plans to shut down the Senate if Democrats do not schedule more confirmation votes on President Bush’s appellate nominees. A look at the numbers explains why the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee […]

With the infamous “torture memos” back in the news, it seems worth noting that my former colleague, Amos Guiora, has a brand new book, Constitutional Limits on coercive Interrogation. I have yet to read it, but have every reason to expect it will be interesting and provocative like much of his other work. There are […]

Does Tennessee’s Serious and Violent Sex Offender Monitoring Pilot Project Act, which requires convicted sex offenders to wear a GPS device (including those previously convicted), violate the Constitution’s ex post facto clause? Six judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit thought so, and dissented from the denial of en banc review […]

Naked economic protectionism is alive and well in interior design, according to Clark Neily. Imagine you were a state legislator and some folks asked you to pass a law making it a crime to give advice about paint colors and throw pillows without a license. And imagine they told you that the only people qualified […]

The Washington Post reports on continuing efforts to reintroduce the Mexican gray wolf in the southwestern U.S. It’s been brought back from the brink of extinction, but now the real difficulty begins. At first glance, there is no reason that Mexican wolves should not make the same sort of robust recovery that gray wolves have […]

Yesterday I presented my draft paper, “Reforming Our Wasteful Hazardous Waste Policy,” at the NYU/NYLS conference, “Breaking the Logjam: An Environmental Law for the 21st Century.” There’s a brief comment on the BTL blog about my panel here. The task I was given for my paper was to evaluate the nation’s primary federal laws governing […]

Will operating the world’s largest particle accelerator create a black hole that swallows up the Earth? Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho think it might, so they have sued the Department of Energy and the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in federal court seeking to halt completion of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. […]

Today and tomorrow is the NYU/NYLS conference on Breaking the Logjam: An Environmental Law for the 21st Century. The conference organizers have also launched a blog to further the discussion of environmental reform started at the conference. For my own part, I will be presenting my paper on reforming America’s hazardous waste laws tomorrow morning.

The United States has a rather unique approach to punitive damages — one that courts in other countries find alien, if not unconscionable. As the New York Times reports, foreign systems tend to disfavor punitives, and foreign courts can be reluctant to enforce American court judgments that include large punitive awards. Most of the rest […]

Reason editor Matt Welch takes to the NYT op-ed page to make the libertarian case against John McCain. According to Welch, the common theme to McCain’s political outlook is a hostility to individualism, making him a most un-libertarian presidential candidate. The presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party has seduced the press and the public […]

The Supreme Court handed down its decision in Medellin v. Texas today. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, which held that neither a judgment of the International court of Justice nor the President’s executive order directing state courts to follow the ICJ’s judgment constituted federal law that pre-empts a state’s pre-existing bar on the […]

Glenn Reynolds has an uncharacteristically long post with additional perspective on the vaccination “controversy.”

This Friday and Saturday, the New York University School of Law is hosting a symposium, “Breaking the Logjam: Environmental Law for the 21st Century.” Co-sponsored with New York Law School and the NYU Environmental Law Journal, the symposium seeks to “diagnose the roots of current failures and present specific changes in US law” to address […]

Charles Lane, author of The Day Freedom Died: The Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of Reconstruction, writes in today’s Washington Post about the import of Reconstruction for understanding the extent to which the Constitution protects gun ownership. During oral arguments on Tuesday, the justices debated what the framers of the Second Amendment […]

P.Z. Myers wasn’t allowed in, but his guests were. More here and here.