The Hill reports that the Senate’s failure to follow constitutionally prescribed procedures could doom the food safety bill. The bill includes fee provisions that constitute taxes and the Constitution requires that all tax bills originate in the House of Representatives, and it looks unlikely that House Dems will let the slip pass. Based on […]
Author Archive | Jonathan H. Adler
Practicing Lawyers vs. Legal Academics
Bridget Crawford wonders why practicing lawyers don’t much like legal academics. Professor Bainbridge offers an explanation. Rick Garnett responds with some qualifications. UPDATE: More at Legal Ethics Forum.
Did the TSA Back Down?
Here’s an interesting round-up of stories suggesting the Transportation Security Administration kept body-image scanners (and the associated aggressive pat downs) out of service over the holiday weekend. If so, it was a cynical effort to dampen growing concerns about the TSA’s new security measures — so the TSA could proclaim “Opt-Out” day had become “TSA […]
Saving Environmentalism from Itself
Margaret Wente writes: Mercifully, nobody will pay attention to the climate conference at Cancun next week, where a much-reduced group of delegates will go through the motions. The delusional dream of global action to combat climate change is dead. Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme is dead. Chicago’s carbon-trading market is dead. The European Union’s supposed reduction […]
Justice Stevens on Capital Punishment
Adam Liptak has an interesting article in today’s NYT previewing an essay by retired Justice John Paul Stevens in which he explains why he no longer believes the death penalty, as practiced, is constitutional. In a detailed, candid and critical essay to be published this week in The New York Review of Books, he wrote […]
Are the New TSA Airport Scans and Pat-Downs Unconstitutional?
By Jonathan H. Adler on November 28, 2010 10:26 am in Airport Security, Fourth Amendment, War on Terror
Orin’s colleague Jeffrey Rosen argues in today’s Washington Post there is a “strong argument” that the Transportation Security Administration’s use of full-body-image scanning devices and more thorough pat-downs are unreasonable searches and seizures prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. Although the Supreme Court hasn’t evaluated airport screening technology, lower courts have emphasized, as the U.S. Court […]
The Monopoly of Our Time?
Is Settlers of Catan the “board game of our time” as Monopoly was eighty years ago? the great board game of this era is The Settlers of Catan. That game, which came out in Germany in 1995, is not a household name like Monopoly, and given that electronic games have eclipsed board games, it may […]
Gates v. Ridley on Progress, the Plight of Africa, and Climate Change
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates reviews Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist in the Wall Street Journal. Gates is quite favorable. He endorses Ridley’s overall thesis, but thinks Ridley is too dismissive of some current problems, including underdevelopment in Africa and climate change. Having shown that many past fears were ultimately unjustified, Mr. Ridley finally turns his […]
Ending Honorific Resolutions
The Los Angeles Times reports that Republicans may eliminate honorific resolutions (e.g. resolutions endorsing National Potato Day and National Pi Day, or honoring the 75th anniversary of Radio Shack’s listing on the NYSE — all real examples) from Congressional business. This would be a nice symbolic gesture. Such resolutions seem trivial, but they cost time […]
Health Reform Error Could Cost Children’s Hospitals
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously remarked that Congress had to pass health care reform legislation so that Americans could “find out what is in it.” The latest discovery of what’s inside the health care reform legislation is a drafting error that could increase drug costs at children’s hospitals by millions of dollars. The Boston Globe […]
Greenwald v. The Nation
Glenn Greenwald rightly takes The Nation to task for publishing a a shoddy, fact-free, and reckless hit piece by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine attacking John Tyner and other critics of the Transportation Security Administration’s new airport security protocols as nothing more than fringe libertarian, Koch-funded astroturf. Tyner is the fellow who became an internet […]
The End of Ethanol?
Maybe it’s the new mood in Congress. Maybe the stars are aligned. Whatever the cause, opposition to ethanol subsidies is cropping up in some unusual places — and just in time, as ethanol tax credits are set to expire in a few weeks. Back in 2000, then-Vice President Al Gore touted ethanol subsidies as good […]
What Did James Madison Think about Blogs?
By Jonathan H. Adler on November 22, 2010 10:18 am in Blogosphere, Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Originalism
Are bloggers the 21st century equivalent of political pamphleteers? Would James Madison have had one? I don’t know. But I do know that several faculty members at the University of San Diego School of Law’s Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism have launched “The Originalism Blog.” This blog won’t endeavor to answer the question in this […]
“Gamesmanship Pays Better than Entrepreneurship”
If you wanted to get rich, would you invest your energies in starting a business to sell an innovative new product or service, or would you move to Washington, D.C. and become a lobbyist? Townflier CEO Morris Panner looks at trade association CEO salaries and notes that the smart bet is to go inside-the-beltway, and […]
Dear Airline Letters
Here is what happens when airline let the TSA come between them and their customers. UPDATE: Maybe airports that go their own way will save some of these relationships.