Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

I’ve pointed in the past couple of weeks to ‘must-read’ discussions of the NDAA at the Lawfare blog, by Benjamin Wittes, Robert Chesney, and more recently Steve Vladeck.  Now, in a cross post at Lawfare and Opinio Juris, Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck weigh in with two substantial posts.  Their take-away is somewhat different from […]

To all of the readers and Co-Conspirators of the Volokh Conspiracy.  The Anderson family had a lovely Christmas, with our daughter home from her first semester at Rice University, which she loves despite spending the semester with mono and strep and returning home early for an urgent tonsillectomy.  Santa delivered Ipads to Beloved Wife and […]

The NYU Development Research Institute, led by Professor William Easterly, has published the first formal international aid agency evaluation of that international development program known as “Christmas.” It is a disturbing report, to say the least.  Some highlights: Lack of Efficient Modalities: The Christmas Gifts appeared to consist largely of in-kind aid.  This contradicts abundant […]

While I am thinking about drones – and, like Orin, stalling on my exam grading – let me add two drone and targeted killing links. The first is a Wall Street Journal news article by Adam Entous and Julian Barnes, on debates in Washington (and beyond) on whether (and if so what kinds and capabilities) […]

CJ Chivers and Eric Schmitt have a lengthy and important front-page story in this past Sunday’s New York Times detailing scores of instances of civilian collateral damage from NATO air operations in the Libya fighting.  Anyone dealing with laws of war, humanitarian intervention, targeting standards, and technology and war needs to read this article closely. […]

Over at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes and Robert Chesney have put up a FAQs on the NDAA – required reading for everyone dealing with the legislation.  (Lawfare has been the single most important resource to keep track of the NDAA and what it means. Of course, full disclosure, being the Reviews editor, I am not entirely […]

The great Christopher Hitchens has died.  Our families were friends; our deepest sympathies to his wife Carol and his children.  For my own part, this is how I remember Hitch, from Cyrano de Bergerac, Act V: Cyrano’s Gazette (comments are open): He attacks the false priests, the false nobles, the false landowners, the false artists: […]

The Santa Futures markets suggest that I am likely to receive Emanuel Derman’s Models.Behaving.Badly come Christmas morning.  I am looking forward to it, more so after reading the great Burton Malkiel’s review in today’s Wall Street Journal (perhaps behind a paywall, but maybe not).  Malkiel speaks highly of the cross-disciplinary erudition that runs through the […]

So how should the outcome of the Durban conference, the UN’s latest climate change confab, be interpreted?  Looking at it strategically, adopting by assumption the standpoint of wanting to see maximum binding international legal enforcement, how did things fare? I see three general interpretations on the table: optimists, pessimists, and mitigators.  And add a fourth, […]

Last week I commented on and linked to posts at Lawfare by University of Texas’ Robert Chesney analyzing the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act and its detention provisions, including US citizen detention.  This is very much a moving target, with the House and Senate versions of the bill having moved to conference […]

This link from the BBC has been making the rounds via Twitter and FB, but I thought I’d link it for readers.  The focus is on sovereign debt and the eurozone, and it is a fascinating collection of graphs from a mixture of economists looking at 2011 through graphs of various economic and market indicators.

Charles Lane being the New Republic editor at the time of Glass’s principal “fabulisms.”  Jack Shafer has done an excellent job going through documents in the matter of Stephen Glass seeking a license to practice law in California; once it was taken up by the California Supreme Court, the documents related to the bar matter […]

I’ve been asked the question as to whether the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) permits indefinite detention of US citizens, and whether, if it does, it adds anything to existing law on US citizen detention.  The quick one line answer is that, at least in the Senate version of the bill, it permits military detention […]

Tempted though I am to crowd-source my Business Organizations exam and invite the Conspiracy commentariat to write it for me, I instead refer you briefly to this end-of-year list from Time Magazine, naming Occupy Wall Street as the most important news story of 2011.  (I suppose it is not completely clear whether being number one […]

Over at the New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin offers a short, breezy look at litigation likely to get a lot of public attention and debate next year.  His “coming year’s top five legal stories” are Health care reform cases Same sex marriage in California Affirmative action Football Celebrity arrest I don’t have an opinion; the legal […]