For those following financial regulatory reform debates, Paul Volcker’s NYT op-ed today is must-reading (NYT Op Ed, Paul Volcker, How to reform our financial system, January 31, 2010) (Thanks to Paul for pointing out misspelling.) The specific points at issue are ownership or sponsorship of hedge funds and private equity funds, and proprietary trading — […]
Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson
Cities in Flight
Instead of a Stendhal post this week – I missed Saturday lost in the DC snow – and further to my Foundation post below, which has garnered some very interesting comments … do we have any fans of James Blish’s Cities in Flight novels? As an exercise in future history social theory, I actually think […]
“The New Foundation”
By Kenneth Anderson on January 29, 2010 11:48 pm in Literature, Popular Culture, Psychology, Science Fiction/Fantasy
Peggy Noonan notes in her weekend column that President Obama’s SOTU address worked in a name for the new program – in the tradition of the “New Deal” or Kennedy’s “New Frontier. For the Obama administration, it is the New Foundation. She is skeptical: They’ve chosen a phrase for the president’s program. They call it […]
Spirit: A Sad Robot Story from XKCD
XKCD adds: “On January 26, 2010, 2274 Mars days into the mission, NASA declared ‘Spirit’ a ‘stationary research station” expected to stay operational for several more months until the dust buildup on its solar panels forces a final shutdown.” Spirit = A Robot Laika. Ave Atque Vale.
Contracting Around the Security Council, and the International Criminal Court Review Conference
By Kenneth Anderson on January 29, 2010 2:02 pm in Global Governance/World Government, International Law
The United States did not join the International Criminal Court, despite Bill Clinton’s 11th hour signature (followed by the Bush administration’s controversial 1st hour “de-signing”). The ICC now reaches the moment, as is usual in treaties of this kind, to convene a ten year review conference, with an eye to making changes and seeing how […]
Targeted Killing Aimed at a US Citizen Abroad
By Kenneth Anderson on January 27, 2010 5:37 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, Targeted Killing, War on Terror
This won’t be as exciting or informative as the title suggests, apologies [although it turns out I have said rather more than I was going to; you can read an even longer version of my views at SSRN here]. The front page of the Washington Post carries a story from Dana Priest on US military […]
Historical Note on the Noriega Trials
I read with interest Justice Thomas’ dissent in Noriega v. Pastrana – Co-Conspirators Elwood and Adler have discussed it earlier here. My interest is different from the current controversy, as I was involved in the Noriega saga on the front end, first monitoring the increasing civil disturbances in Panama during the last couple of Noriega’s […]
Public Service Announcement
Always back up. Even when you think you are automatically backing up, manually back up. Manually save documents. Not a computer crash and really not the end of the world, but Word for Mac seems to be a particularly unstable program (for me at least), often when I am working on long, involved documents for […]
Saturdays with Stendhal 4
The Red and the Black, Volume 1, Chapter 26, “The World, Or What the Rich Lack.” After several months of application kept up at every moment, Julien still had the air of a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and opening his lips did not reveal an implicit faith ready to believe everything and […]
The Emerging Law of Detentions: The Guantanamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking
By Kenneth Anderson on January 22, 2010 9:22 pm in Counter-Terrorism Policy, International Human Rights Law, Supreme Court, Terrorism, Uncategorized, War on Terror
Anyone doing serious work on detention, Guantanamo, war on terror, any of these areas, will want to read an extraordinary new study just out from the Brookings Institution by Benjamin Wittes, Robert Chesney, and Rabea Benhalim, The Emerging Law of Detention: The Guantanamo Habeas Cases as Lawmaking. (I’ve given the SSRN free download link; here […]
Administration’s Guantanamo Panel Backs Indefinite Detention
The Justice Department’s task force on what to do about Guantanamo and detention has said that nearly fifty of the 196 detainees at Guantanamo should be held indefinitely without trial, under the laws of war, on the grounds that they are too dangerous to release but unprosecutable. Stories are in the Washington Post and the […]
President Obama’s Banking Proposal
(Update: I did not want to add my own reaction until I had a chance to read through the President’s speech. In quick terms, I think it is conceptually the right approach, for the reasons laid out by Manzi, McArdle, today’s WSJ editorial, but above all by Paul Volker. It is important to understand that […]
Event: Human Rights and the Law of Armed Conflict
If you are in the DC area on Monday, January 25, you might want to check out this event at ASIL Tillar House, 2:30-5:00 pm. This looks to be a terrific discussion with great people on the program, on a topic much under debate currently. The question of how far human rights law enters, if […]
Returns on Investment in Law School Education
The New York Times ran a much emailed piece talking about the declining value of a top-tier law degree, and now law professor Sarah Waldeck has followed up at Concurring Opinions with a blog post urging potential law students to be very tough-minded in deciding whether to go to law school: Forty-five thousand dollars per […]
My School’s Great Logo Debate
I am not very good with graphic design, illustration, and anything that requires good visual instincts. So I don’t really regard myself as fit to have an opinion about this. However, a current debate at my school is between Old Logo: And New Logo: Opinions at the school seem to be divided; naturally, a Facebook […]