Author Archive | Randy Barnett

At Balkinization, Brian Tamanaha offers some “straight talk on tenure” in law schools.

In 1981, Phillip Workman robbed a Wendy’s restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee. While attempting to escape from police, he shot and killed Lieutenant Ronald Oliver. In 1982, a jury sentenced Workman to death. His case has been in court ever since, and generated two divided decisions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit […]

The Washington Post reports on a proposal to build a wind farm off the coast of Delaware. Two hundred towering windmills, each so tall that its blades would loom over the U.S. Capitol Dome, could be built in the Atlantic Ocean near one of Washingtonians’ favorite beach retreats, under a plan being considered in Delaware. […]

If you’re planning on visiting a National Park this summer, you may have to pay higher entrance fees. The National Park Service is planning to increase user fees at approximately one-third of National Parks over the next three years, according to this story. The NPS has not done much to publicize the move, likely due […]

Monday afternoon I will be participating in a panel at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., “Has the Supreme Court Seen Green? The Ramifications of Mass. v. EPA.” Other participants will include Lisa Heinzerling (Georgetown), David Schoenbrod (New York Law School), Joel Schwartz (AEI), Mark Moller (Cato), and former Deputy AAG for Natural Resource […]

Jonathan links to Adam Liptak’s story today in the New York Times on the Second Amendment and the role playing by “liberal” academics in attaining acceptance for the individual rights reading. He also links to Jack Balkin’s comments diminishing the role of academics and crediting the popular constitutionalism of the gun rights political movement. There’s […]

Nature Reports Climate Change has launched a new climate blog, Climate Feedback, with an interesting roster of contributors.

Howard Bashman launched How Appealing five years ago today.

Yesterday’s Washington Post reported on a survey of U.S. Army troops that found a significant percentage of American soldiers support the use of torture or tolerate abuse of civilians. “Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect,” according to the report. Interpretations of the results differ. […]

Adam Liptak has an interesting article in today’s NYT on how the “individual rights” interpretation of the Second Amendment became the dominant view. There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — […]

There are some musical artists that you like without knowing it. You’ve heard their songs, but did not know it was them. So it was for me and Elvis Costello. I didn’t own any of his stuff in the early 1980s, but I certainly should have given the other bands I was listening to at […]

The NSA domestic surveillace program has been out of the news ever since it was announced in January that the Bush Administration had agreed to seek FISA warrants for such surveillance rather that try to conduct it outside of FISA. In a hearing earlier this week on amending FISA, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell […]

Please tell me that this story is some sort of joke.

Congress has sent the President its war spending bill, and as expected, President Bush has vetoed it. I think it’s an interesting moment to revisit a post I put up almost three years ago, “Debating the Invasion of Iraq — Three Questions for the Pro-War Blogosphere.” Here’s the post, dated September 27, 2004:   A year […]

The New York Times has a fascinating obituary of Robert Rosenthal, a highly decorated WWII bomber pilot and a member of Justice Jackson’s legal team at Nuremberg. Rosenthal was 89. Thanks to Peter Lattman for the link.