Author Archive | Orin Kerr

The law student group blog De Novo is seeking guest submissions for a blog symposium on the topic.

The Supreme Court will be hearing the Grokster case tomorrow, and it seems to be the hottest ticket of the Supreme Court Term. The hot ticket means that a number of people likely are planning to brave the cruddy weather and get in line early on Tuesday morning (or even camp out Monday night) to […]

While the U.S. News rankings shouldn’t matter as much as they do, it’s news worthy that the new law school rankings reportedly are out. I haven’t confirmed that the rankings posted on a law school discussion board are accurate, but the rankings purporting to be the new list can be found here.   As usual, not […]

Lawprof Amy Cohen spent a semester-long sabbatical from Western New England College School of Law working at a law firm practicing IP law, an area of law she has taught for many years. On her return she wrote an interesting article: The Dangers of the Ivory Tower: The Obligation of Law Professors to Engage in […]

Believe it or not, that’s a description of a forthcoming law review article. Yes, a law review article. Check out The Perfect Crime, by law prof Brian C. Kalt, forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal. It clocks in at 22 amusing double-spaced pages, and raises an interesting set of questions about a possible gap between […]

An interesting-seeming new scholarly paper.

For those who haven’t read enough about Terri Schiavo in the last few weeks, the transcript of my appearance on yesterday’s Hugh Hewitt Show (along with Andrew McCarthy) is available here.

According to Wikipedia, it is “an extreme sport in which people take an ironing board to a remote location and iron a few items of clothing.” “EI supposedly combines the excitement of an extreme sport with the satisfaction of freshly ironed clothes.” Most importantly for our intelligently skeptical readers, “Though it seems a parody or […]

Seems like they are; their life expectancy at birth is 2.4 years higher for men and 3.6 years higher for women. My intuitive assumption was that it should be a little less than for non-Hispanic whites, since Hispanics tend to be poorer than non-Hispanic whites. Yet obviously my intuitive assumption is wrong. I’m genuinely curious […]

It takes two incidents, right? (One anecdote is data, two are a trend, three is proof.) I pointed Monday to Howard Dean’s remarks about “brain-dead” Republicans, which either means he’s saying the voters are brain-dead, or the people for whom the voters voted are brain-dead (even though they beat Dean’s party handily at the federal […]

by the German magazine Stern. The magazine ran a photo display s comparing various parts of American life (Democrat vs. Republican, Left vs. Right, Cynical vs. Romantic); for Black vs. White, the white is a Florida retiree and the black is Charles Ezeb, a felon serving a life sentence. The display, as Medienkritik points out, […]

I’m going to be on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show later today discussing the Schiavo law and the court decisions interpreting it. Station information is available here.

Hugh Hewitt has responded to my questions about his reaction to the Schiavo court decisions. He writes:   [A]nyone trying to argue that Congress did not make its intent clear . . . are asking their readers to disbelieve what nearly every commentator has either praised or condemned over the past few days — that Congress […]

Their essay is available for download here; here’s the abstract (paragraph breaks added): Recent evidence suggests that capital punishment may have a significant deterrent effect, preventing as many as eighteen or more murders for each execution. This evidence greatly unsettles moral objections to the death penalty, because it suggests that a refusal to impose that […]

In case some conservatives think that the recent decisions in the Schiavo case provide a good reason to engage in attacks against the judiciary, I think it’s worth noting that one hundred percent of the Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 nominated judges who have reviewed the Schiavo case have voted against granting the relief […]