Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

in helping to find our way through the economic crisis? The economists are evident, even if in some kind of professional and ideological disarray and angst. But where are the law professors? And what expertise do they – should we – bring to the table of policy, law, action, and reform? As Judge Posner says, […]

A quick post script to my previous post on David Wessel’s economics column in today’s WSJ concerning the stimulus. Wessel quotes Barney Frank in passing: Not for the first time, as an elected official, I envy economists. Economists have available to them, in an analytical approach, the counterfactual. Economists can explain that a given decision […]

Economics editor of the WSJ, David Wessel, has a fine column today on p.2 talking about why the stimulus has been growing in unpopularity. I raised the policy issue of the stimulus earlier in the summer in a post asking whether we should simply cancel the rest of it – a discussion, it seems, that […]

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. While I have been trying hard not to keyboard very much this summer, I have been doing some reading. This new book by Christopher Caldwell is hands down the most interesting and important I have read, all year – and given my interests in […]

Althouse criticizes what she calls the Orwellian use of “conversation” in current national debates: Man, “conversation” has become one of those Orwellian words. There it is in Obama’s NYT interview, where he’s saying something that invites the relabeling that Sarah Palin so effectively slapped on it — “death panels” … “I think that there is […]

Gravity and Levity. Check out this recent post that gives a layperson’s introduction to path integrals, and a plug for the beauty of calculus, in a few nicely written paragraphs. But I was particularly taken with this post (and the ones that link to it) on the idea that as a psychological matter, people tend […]

I am breaking radio silence midweek, in the midst of writing a chapter in my little book, Returning to Earth: Abiding Principles of US-UN Relations: The Obama Administration and Beyond … the chapter, as it happens, is titled: “The UN-of-Values: From Human Rights to Multiculturalism in the General Assembly and Among the NGOs.” This chapter […]

What follows was posted up as a final addendum to the FOIA-ACLU post below; I’ve been urged to put it up as a separate post. I’ve hesitated to do so, partly because I think it will leave numbers of people thinking, perhaps correctly, that its political heat is excessive – and also because, due to […]

With apologies to the Senior Conspirator, I am going to be taking a week off, starting this afternoon at 4:00 pm. It’s not just that I won’t be posting for a week – I won’t be reading this blog or any other blog for a week. In fact, with the exception of absolutely necessary email, […]

I am clueless about FOIA and related law, but would be interested in knowledgeable responses to the following question. Is there a mechanism by which an individual can find out, or require the government to disclose, whether he or she has been named (or some web posting, statement, or other form of speech of the […]

That’s the question I put to a someone close to the admissions process at a reasonably selective school recently. His/her reply, which he/she would be the first to admit was deliberately highly exaggerated for maximum epigraphical effect is below (I’ve edited and cleaned up a disjointed conversation, so this is not a literal transcription). You […]

Columnist Charles Lane – full disclosure, an old friend and a journalist who I have admired going all the way back to his Central America days in the 1980s – has a striking piece in today’s Washington Post, “Undue Influence: the House Bill Skews End-of-Life Counsel.” About a third of American adults have some form […]

Law schools typically used to require a basic one semester class – often pass-fail – on accounting for lawyers. I took it, then concluded I needed something more advanced outside of the law school curriculum. But at a minimum, the accounting for lawyers class, while not requiring much in the way of actual accounting, introduced […]

My wife and I are pretty conservative financially – our second car is a 1992 Honda Civic, bought used from a neighbor with 30,000 miles on it in 1998, and it now has 60,000 miles on it, because – again, part of our pretty financially conservative life style – we live walking distance to my […]

Andrew Hall, superstar energy trader, has made Citicorp hefty amounts of money through the proprietary trading his group (Phibro) undertakes in the energy markets. More power to him. The terms of his contract, so far as one can tell from news reports, obligate Citicorp to pay him something on the order of $100 million, essentially […]