The Cato Institute Center for the Promotion of Human Rights is now The Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace and Prosperity. Its mission statement says the Initiative seeks to increase the understanding of ideas and policies based on the inalienable human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It offers a human-rights-based […]
Author Archive | Randy Barnett
Comments Off:
Some may have noticed that, since the beginning of the year, I have been blogging more, but without comments. These two developments are related. Over time I found monitoring comments, which I believe I have an obligation to do, to be such a drag, as well as time consuming, that it undermined my desire to […]
A New Meme:
Instapundit reader Dale Britton emails:
Chicago Speeches This Week:
Every year I like to celebrate my birthday in my home town of Chicago where I can eat my favorite comfort food: Teibels Family Restaurant for lake perch (boned and buttered), Carson’s, The Place for Ribs for baby back ribs, and Walker Brothers, The Original Pancake House for apple pancakes. This year, I am also […]
Was Lochner Right?
On Friday, I will be giving a talk on “Was Lochner Right? Natural Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment” at a conference on Natural Rights and the Constitution sponsored by the The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy. I will share a panel at 11:15am with Princeton Professor Robert George. The conference is being […]
In the Mail: A New Collection of Writings by Bruno Leoni:
Bruno Leoni (1913-1967) was an Italian libertarian philosopher and lawyer whose book, Freedom and the Law, was required reading in the 1970s for libertarians interested in law. Leoni’s blend of law and economics insights with his view of the common law as a spontaneous order influenced–and was in turn influenced by–the work of Friedrich Hayek. […]
Farewell to Larry Sanders Remembered:
The Extreme Mortman is saying goodbye to blogging and, in his final post, links to a number of memorable goodbyes, including Jim Carrey’s goodbye to the fictional Larry Sanders on his last show. It was so amazing, I thought I would link here to the longer clip that shows the beginning and ending of Carrey’s […]
In the Mail: Hamburger’s “Law & Judicial Duty”:
Philip Hamburger’s new book, Law and Judicial Duty, arrived. It is a “big” book both in ambition and sheer length (621 pp.). Here is the publisher’s description (which is typically written by the author). Almost every day, a judge in the United States holds a statute unconstitutional. This power of the judges is known as
Whelan Responds to Pinker:
Ed Whelan responds to Steven Pinker’s split-verb theory of Chief Justice Roberts’ mistaken recitation of the presidential oath here: . . . In a New York Times op-ed today, Pinker speculates that Chief Justice Roberts
Two Pictures of Lysander Spooner:
I long thought there was but a single photograph of Lysander Spooner. Recently I noticed that there are actually two different photos in circulation, both of which obviously having been taken at the same session. Here they are: If anyone happens to have a higher resolution version of either photo, but especially the one on […]
Both the Chief Justice and the President Flubbed the Oath:
Little Green Footballs says that “it was Justice Roberts who messed it up, not Obama.” But it appears to me that the President had the presence of mind to pause after catching the Chief Justices’s error and then repeated the error himself. First, here is what the Constitution says: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) […]
Replacing the Exclusionary Rule With Something Better:
Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds have gotten into an interesting debate on the merits of the exclusionary rule. Jonah argues against setting the criminal free because the constable blunders and Glenn contends that the exclusionary rule is all we have so long as the police retain their immunity from civil liability. (Their exchange is Glenn, […]
Happy Birthday, Lysander.
Peter Eyre of Bureaucrash reminds us that today is the birthday of Lysander Spooner, abolitionist, lawyer, entrepreneur, and radical libertarian theorist. On this day 201 years ago Lysander Spooner was born on in central Massachusetts. Like de Molinari a century before, Spooner
More on Hoover as Proto-New Dealer:
Herbert Hoover–the “Forgotten Progressive”–also nominated three Justices to the Supreme Court: Charles Evans Hughes (February 24, 1930
The so-called “Lochner Court” and the Thirteenth Amendment:
In his post yesterday on the new Thirteenth Amendment case Matter of Vinluan v. Doyle, Eugene noted that the decision rested on on “several Supreme Court cases from the first half of the 1900s, such as Pollock v. Williams (1944).” More significant for me is that it cited and quoted from Bailey v. Alabama (1911), […]