Noah Sachs, over at PrafsBlawg, is kind enough to respond to my post on the Copenhagen meetings and collective action problems. It is worth reading the whole thing, but here is a chunk of it. (If you comment, please remember that Professor Sachs is my guest here, so be courteous. And my thanks to him […]
Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson
How Are the Copenhagen Talks Supposed to Overcome Collective Action Problems?
By Kenneth Anderson on November 29, 2009 7:42 pm in Climate Change, Collective Action Problems, Environment, International Law
Let me leave aside for the moment all the leaked memos and stuff. I would describe myself as a non-expert on climate issues who has been gradually persuaded to the following positions: Agnostic on the question of warming and human impact on it; Getting less agnostic as I read the emails and leaked materials; Unpersuaded […]
How Your FICO Score Is Calculated
I am not an expert in consumer debt, so if this is incomplete or incorrect, I welcome comments on this. However, here is an article from Yahoo Finance on how FICO scores are calculated, and specifically walking through the hits to your score taken for various credit events, ranging from maxing out a card to […]
Landmines and the Obama Administration
By Kenneth Anderson on November 28, 2009 11:24 am in International Human Rights Law, International Law, War and Armed Conflict
Where is the Obama administration currently on the Ottawa Landmines Ban Convention? The question is on the public table with the opening in a few days of the Cartagena Review Conference, the second diplomatic conference to review the treaty. The Ottawa Convention banning landmines was opened for signature in 1997 and entered into force in […]
Happy Thanksgiving
… to all our readers, commenters, and fellow conspirators. And please be careful on the roads today and over the weekend. It is a foggy morning here in DC. Thanksgiving is the greatest American holiday – uniting a very loose sense of Providence and Bounty and Plenty, family and commonweal, the sharing of food and […]
Private Sector Experience of Cabinet Secretaries (Updated and Purged)
(Update and big deletion and purge, December 2, 3009.) After discussions with the person who created the chart, I’ve decided to take it down and the rest of my commentary as well. He tells me that he has had a chance to re-think the whole thing, and thinks it was a big mistake to try […]
Dear Smith College Seniors Spamming Sites Looking for Survey Participants …
If you look in my previous two posts, you’ll see what I assume are automatically generated surveymonkey.com requests for participants on a study on the media by Smith College students. Let me express to the Smith College students who thought this a good idea, and whatever faculty supervisor approved it, that this is Not a […]
Robots, Law and Society
I mentioned earlier a panel discussion I participated in on robots, law and society at Stanford Law School a couple of weeks ago. Adam Gorlick at Physorg.com has a good article summing up the discussion. Ryan Calo, of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, raises some of the fundamental liability issues and the […]
Conflicts of Interest for Diplomats, Former Diplomats, and the UN: Ruth Wedgwood on Peter Galbraith
Ruth Wedgwood’s new column at Forbes.com takes up the uncomfortable question of Peter Galbraith and his financial dealings with regard to Kurdish autonomy, oilfields, and Galbraith’s consulting deal with a Norwegian company that could conceivably pay him somewhere up to $100 million. That discussion is very important and fraught with issues – Galbraith has not been […]
Reading Kindle Books on the Ipod Touch
I got tired of hauling so many books around on plane flights, and decided to try downloading some Kindle books to my Ipod Touch. I don’t yet have a Kindle, although apparently if I am very, very good … I know that Glenn Reynolds prefers the Ipod to read Kindle over the Kindle, but then […]
Goldman Sachs and Its Small Business Fund Ploy
I am a fan of Goldman Sachs. It is one of the few individual stocks I own, running against all my standard corporate finance professor ‘buy index funds!!’ instincts. Although we have had a surfeit of bankers and a surfeit of talent in financial engineering rather than, say, robotics, it is very scary to see […]
The Robotic Kindness of Strangers
One small nugget I took away from the (absolutely terrific) Stanford Law School robotics panel last week was a much better appreciation of how robotics will interact with advanced societies aging – elder-care, health care for the old and infirm, and so on. Japan leads the way. Paul Saffo (Stanford professor, futurist, and technology journalist, […]
Robert Tsai on ‘Eloquence and Reason’
By Kenneth Anderson on November 15, 2009 2:20 pm in Academia, Constitutional History, Constitutional Theory, Freedom of Speech, Supreme Court
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a new book on constitutional interpretation and language by my colleague, Washington College of Law professor Robert Tsai – Eloquence and Reason: Creating a First Amendment Culture. Constitutional rhetoric and interpretation are not my areas, but I started reading the book and have found it to be a […]
Reading While Traveling, Hard Copy and No Internet
By Kenneth Anderson on November 14, 2009 4:29 pm in Academia, Counter-Terrorism Policy, Economy, Finance, Financial Crisis, Freedom of Speech, International Human Rights Law, International Law, Legal Professor, Legal Scholarship, Robotics, Targeted Killing, Terrorism
I’ve been traveling recently, and so have been away from posting. One of the enforced virtues of traveling – one of the few virtues of traveling for me these days – is the plane flight with no internet. And if the big guy in front of me reclines his seat, as he always does, I […]
I Wasn’t Paying Attention When the Wall Came Down
I’m sorry I wasn’t and I don’t quite know what happened. I don’t say this to be flippant in the least. I knew that big things were happening, but unlike many others’ experiences, it all seemed very gradual to me and finally anti-climactic. It seemed like something that was gradually sliding into place that had […]