I am often on the prowl for metaphors to explain things in finance law to students, and I liked this discussion today (January 20, Comment) by the Financial Times’s John Kay on the distribution of returns described in Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan: Some people have described the process as picking up dimes […]
Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson
The Weekly Standard’s Parody of Ann Coulter
I’m not opening this for comments because this was intended as – and taken in the spirit of – parody. That’s all. I thought it was funny, that’s all, and I’ve been wondering all these years if I’d ever get a chance to link it. (A senior Weekly Standard editor at the time told me […]
New York Times to Adopt Paid-Online Model
New York Magazine is reporting (good piece by Gabriel Sherman) that the NYT has decided to move to a paid-online site model – a drastic shift away from its current free website. The article explains the debate between the two sides within the Times – those urging that it has to somehow get to a […]
Sanjay Gupta for 2010 Nobel Peace Prize
Why not – for a doctor who stayed through the night?
Saturdays with Stendhal 3
From The Red and the Black, Volume I, Chapter 34, The Hotel de la Mole (free translation), and yes, I will manage to get it back to Saturdays!: The abbe Pirard to Julien … “The Marquis does not like scribblers bloggers, I warn you; it is his one antipathy. Know Latin, Greek if you can, […]
A Question Re Legal Ethics
The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz has an op-ed today reminding readers of the inglorious role that Martha Coakley played in one of – certainly in my view – the greatest miscarriages of justice of the past twenty years in the United States, the persecution in Massachusetts of the Amirault family on prosecutor-contrived charges of […]
The Rise of the Uncorporation
Congratulations to Larry Ribstein on his new book from OUP, The Rise of the Uncorporation. I somehow got a comp copy in the mail, just finished reading it, and it is terrific. A gracefully written essay on business law!(!!) It manages to meld together law, history of business and legal forms in business, law and […]
Haiti and Evacuations
By Kenneth Anderson on January 15, 2010 9:19 am in Global Governance/World Government, International Human Rights Law
My Opinio Juris co-blogger Peter Spiro raises an important question about what the US obligations should be in a crisis like Haiti’s. Should the US government put its priority on evacuating its own citizens first? There are an estimated 45,000 US citizens in Haiti, and there’s an assumption that they should be first in line […]
Comstock and National Security Implications for Detention?
By Kenneth Anderson on January 12, 2010 6:59 pm in Civil Rights, Counter-Terrorism Policy, Executive Branch, Federalism, War on Terror
(Update: Thanks to Ilya for his post above, and Orin for his comment below to this post. Bottom line is that Comstock does not have national security implications.) Could I put a question to the VC staff who are following Comstock? For those of us in the national security area, the whole matter of continued […]
Kevin Jon Heller on Carl Schmitt and Nuremberg
Over at Opinio Juris, my co-blogger Kevin Jon Heller has a post on the German political theorist Carl Schmitt and the history behind his brush with a Nuremberg prosecution at the end of the Second World War. It is drawn from research for Kevin’s book on the Nuremberg trials; given the interest that law professors […]
Saturdays with Stendhal 2
Notional Saturday. Saturday in my heart. This, from On Love: I crave leave to slander France a little more. Actually, not. I am great lover of France. (Recall that the poet Blaise Cendrars, on the outbreak of the First World War, distributed a manifesto proclaiming that all true poets would fight for France. Cendrars joined […]
More Predator Drone Debate, in the Wall Street Journal, and What the Obama Administration Should Do as a Public Legal Position
By Kenneth Anderson on January 9, 2010 5:37 pm in Robotics, Targeted Killing, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
The Wall Street Journal has a weekend editorial on the same topic as my National Journal post below, Drone Wars, January 9, 2010. Interestingly, I find myself believing that the WSJ editorial gets it, if not precisely wrong, at least puts the emphasis exactly backwards. The WSJ editorial is primarily concerned to defend the “war” frame […]
National Journal on Targeted Killing and Predator Drone Strikes
By Kenneth Anderson on January 8, 2010 11:42 pm in Robotics, Targeted Killing, War and Armed Conflict, War on Terror
(Update: Thanks, Glenn, for the Instalanche! Please see the further post above, on what I think the US legal position ought to be – what the Obama administration should be stating as its view of the relevant international law, and how I think the WSJ’s op-ed today in defense of drone strikes is not actually […]
Bruce Bawer on the Muhammad Cartoon Attack
By Kenneth Anderson on January 6, 2010 10:30 am in "Hate Speech", Freedom of Speech, International Law, Mohammed Cartoons
Follow up to Eugene’s post on the Muhammad Cartoon attack … see Bruce Bawer’s article in City Journal, “While Europe Sneered.” And although I received a comp copy of the Voltaire Project printing of the cartoons, I have ordered a paid copy and have requested that my school’s library order the book. Please consider doing […]
My Response to David Brooks, Taken from an Old Article on Lawyers, Elites, and the New Class
(Update: Thank you Instapundit) David Brooks has a piece up today in the Times attracting much comment. I am no populist, except perhaps by David Frum’s unexacting standards, but let’s just say I think that Brooks somewhere along the way lost the marvelous tuning that made him the true heir of Veblen. I think it […]