Author Archive | Jonathan H. Adler

NYLS law professor David Schoenbrod began his legal career with the Natural Resources Defense Council, fighting to remove lead from gasoline. This effort was largely successful — today gasoline is unleaded and lead levels are down dramatically. Nonetheless, Schoebrod argues that the bulk of America’s federal environmental regulatory system is a failure. In Saving Our […]

Rejecting the due process and equal protection arguments for heightened scrutiny, the New York Court of Appeals in its important decision last week applied rational basis review to the exclusion of gay couples from marriage. This should have been an easy route to denying the plaintiffs’ claims. As ordinarily applied, rational basis is a very […]

Amber (Prettier than Napoleon) asks the question, and it’s a very interesting one. Is the cause possible differences in innate intelligence at the tail ends of the bell curve (what I’d heard called the idiot-genius syndrome, which leads men to be overrepresented both among the very low-IQ and the very high-IQ)? Sex discrimination in law […]

A commenter writes: [H]omosexuality is not natural in that it clearly functions against the survival of the species. I’ve heard versions of this article before, so I thought I’d pass along a few reactions. 1. To begin with, I take it that the commenter isn’t asserting that tolerating homosexuality (or recognizing same-sex marriage) actually jeopardizes […]

from Pajama Guy: Match the phrase with the writer who created or popularized it…. A. Namby-pamby B. End in itself C. Purple prose D. The dismal science E. Sweetness and light F. Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast G. Objective correlative H. Willing suspension of disbelief I. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of […]

I was just rereading the Supreme Court’s most recent campaign finance / free speech case, and was again struck by these paragraphs at the end of Justice Stevens’ opinion. Vermont law (among other things) limited the campaigns of candidates for state representative to spending $2000 for the primary and general election campaigns combined. The law […]

claims to have abandoned anti-Semitism, brags about his Jewishness. No, really. (The bragging part is in the second-to-last paragraph here.) Thanks to Mark in Mexico for the pointer.

Rick Hasen, a leading election law scholar and author of the Election Law blog, has interesting thoughts here and here. Rick is more open than I am to the constitutionality of campaign speech restrictions, but I’ve always found his analysis to be thoughtful, fairminded, and interesting.

A few months ago I read an article by Prof. Andy Leipold called Why are Federal Judges so Acquittal Prone?, and found it very interesting, so I invited Andy to join us for a week to post about his findings. Andy is an accomplished criminal law scholar, and Professor and Co-Director of the Program in […]

OK, then, head over heels. Discuss.

I’ve found my invaluable Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989) — if you love discussing English usage questions, you must get this — and found this lovely excerpt: As for ice-cream, there is no such thing, as ice-cream would be the product of frozen cream, i.e., cream made from ice by melting. What is called […]

Here’s today’s Bushism of the Day, “the president’s accidental wit and wisdom,” from Slate: “So we’ll bring our ideas, they’ll bring theirs, let’s clarify the differences, let’s don’t say bad things about our opponents.” Whoops, sorry, wrong President — that’s actually from President Clinton. The Bushism of the Day today is really this: “Let’s don’t […]

On occasion of Slate‘s 10th anniversary celebrations, its editors very graciously invited several of the magazine’s “most persistent critics” to offer their criticisms in Slate‘s pages. Here are my criticisms, which I hope are constructive.

Didn’t know of this Latin abbreviation until I ran across it in Justice Scalia’s Youngblood v. West Virginia dissent today. It’s apparently short for verbum sapienti, which means “a word to the wise [is enough].” Learn something new every day; I can’t say I’m likely to use it in my own prose, but at least […]

A Christian Science Monitor op-ed argues that this is advisable, and constitutional. I don’t think so, because the Twenty-Second Amendment’s bar on a President serving more than two terms also applies to the Vice-President (for reasons I touch on below). But, as I suggested here and here, the matter is more complex than it first […]