Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

The Wall Street Journal’s excellent series on jobless young people features an article today on why students study liberal arts in college over STEM subjects, and why so many would-be STEM majors shift to liberal arts, despite the apparent loss of career prospects.  Larry Ribstein follows up with commentary suggesting that law school becomes a […]

Was my kid serious when she put that into her college application essay?  I’m not sure; she’s been around Dad studying UAVs and military robotics for years, expressing distinct uninterest and rolled eyes at the dinner table, but probably absorbing something. But without ever having seen a robot, weirdly, because the kinds of robot things […]

Daniel Kahneman has spent his career studying how people behave both rationally and irrationally, for which he has won a Nobel in economics and largely founded the field of behavioral economics.  As development economist William Easterly notes in his Financial Times review, there “have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only […]

Congratulations today to my Beloved Wife, Jean-Marie Simon, for a front page photograph illustrating an article in the Wall Street Journal today on Guatemala’s presidential election.  The photograph dates back to 1982, when Jean-Marie was a photographer and freelance journalist covering the civil war in Guatemala.  She worked there for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty […]

Instapundit points us to an article by Diane Auer Jones in the Chronicle of Higher Education, asking whether the US might do better in financing higher education to shift from the current student loan system to the Australian system: [W]e might look to the Australian system of student aid for guidance on how to develop […]

Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman, and Julian Barnes of the Wall Street Journal’s national security reporting team have a front page article today detailing the inside debates and, as the article says, policy changes around drone strikes in Pakistan over the several months.  It is a must-read for everyone who follows drone and targeted killing policy […]

I would be interested if anyone could point me in the direction of the documentation for a student loan securitization, online so that I can work with it on a blog or posted for classroom use.  It’s strange – I study and teach securitization, but though I routinely work and have my students work through […]

I am sure that many readers have seen this floating around the internet.  I am not great at math; I’m not intuitive at it and hate trick questions most of all, because they are … tricky.  On the other hand, ever since realizing when I started law school that in my life I couldn’t avoid […]

Glenn Reynolds is correct in his weekend post to point to the social theory of the New Class as key to understanding the convulsions in the middle and upper middle class; I’ve written about it myself here at VC and in a 1990s law journal book review essay.  The angst is partly income, of course […]

With euphoria over last week’s eurozone deal rapidly fading away, here are four sober takes on what it means – and what it doesn’t.  First, The Economist’s widely cited leader this week (and here is a link to the Economist’s collected articles on the crisis): YOU can understand the self-congratulation. In the early hours of […]

Adam Segal and Matthew Waxman, both fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations, write at CNN.com on why the global cybersecurity threat leads many to believe that the only way to address this transnational issue is through a treaty – and why such a treaty is a pipedream. The hacker – a government, a lone […]

Further to Orin’s brief post on Richard Fallon’s splendid essay about amicus briefs by law professors with a longer comment about the special role they play in international law cases in US courts, such as the upcoming Alien Tort Statute case in the Supreme Court. I’ve drafted some amicus briefs in international law cases in […]

Although I haven’t come to any policy views of my own at this point on the question of student loan debt, I wanted to flag a couple of links to discussions of the issue. The New York Times has a good FAQs-style summary by Ron Lieber in today’s Business section.  Highly recommended for coming up […]

Bryant Walker Smith (h/t Ryan Calo) of Stanford Law School’s Center on Internet and Society notes in a blog post that the state of Nevada has issued draft regulations for autonomous driving – automated, human-driverless, cars on Nevada roads.  The final regulations could be out by March 2012 (and the post has links to the […]

Duke University Law School’s Steven L. Schwarcz is a leading and prolific commentator on financial regulation and, I’m pleased to say, my c0-author on a book on financial regulatory reform (which, I’m less pleased to say, I have taken my own sweet time finishing; talk about a moving target!).   Steve is ahead of the […]