Author Archive | Randy Barnett

A video about obeying the law from some students at Georgia State. (Another version available on Google Video)

This column by Dan Henninger in today’s Wall Street Journal has much within it with which I disagree. Not the least is that it purports to be about blogs and blogging, but is actually about the Internet writ large, including chat rooms and IM. Even with respect to blogging, it seems to rely more on […]

This balanced story from The New York Times contains within it several appropriate critical responses to this announcement by the FDA. Here is the lede: WASHINGTON, April 20 — The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that “no sound scientific studies” supported the medical use of marijuana, contradicting a 1999 review by a panel of […]

Here (via Glenn) is a nice account of why blogging is great: I stopped worrying about deadlines, audience, editors, letters to the editor, all the stuff that had smothered me before. I was writing so fast that I didn’t have time to double-think my sentence structure or my opinions. What came out was sloppier but […]

This is from a press release by the Marijuana Policy Project: The Marijuana Policy Project invites you to attend a screening of Waiting to Inhale, a feature-length documentary that provides a compelling and detailed look at medical marijuana. Waiting to Inhale will be screened in Boston on Saturday, April 22, at 12:00 p.m. at the […]

Cato has announced the location and topic of this year’s summer seminar. Although I am not lecturing at this one, I have often done so in the past and can report it is a wonderful event, in part because the “students” are of all ages, professions, and walks of life. In addition, there is always […]

From Cato.org: The Cato Institute today announced that the recipient of the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty is Mart Laar, the former prime minister of Estonia and main architect of his country’s remarkable economic transformation into one of the world’s freest and most dynamic economies. The prize and its accompanying $500,000 cash award […]

From Laissez-Faire Books: Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre’s Spychips Named Best 2005 Book on Liberty Laissez Faire Books is pleased to award the third annual Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty to Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre for the best book on liberty for 2005. The award is for their book, Spychips: […]

The Cato Institute announces here that tomorrow, Thursday, April 20, it will announce the recipient of the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Here is a description of the prize: Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty The Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty carries a cash award of $500,000 and is presented every other […]

Like many other nonexperts, I have been wrestling with what to think about U.S. policy towards Iran. Mark Steyn has a lengthy, but very interesting piece in the City Journal entitled, Facing Down Iran: Our lives depend on it. What makes it particularly interesting is its attempt at a “big picture” analysis of the past […]

Via the Independent Institute, which is unfortunately promoting this dreck, I’ve come across a thoroughly dishonest article by Edward Peck on the controversy over the Mearsheimer and Walt “Israel Lobby” paper. How dishonest? Peck: “The expected tsunami of rabid responses condemned the report, vilified its authors, and denied there is such a lobby“ “Shrill insistence […]

Yeah, I know the election is way over, but I never got around to blogging this heartwarming picture of Israeli democracy in action. (The photo was captioned someting like “Israeli soldier casts his vote.”) UPDATE: My Israeli wife asked, “What’s the big deal about this picture?” I responded to the effect that the fact that […]

The Australian: Andrew Fraser will defy the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission by not apologising to the Sudanese community for his study linking African refugees to high crime rates. In a landmark ruling that raises fresh questions about the limits to which academics can engage in public debate, HREOC chairman John von Doussa has […]

For most of the last century, Holmes’s greatest defenders and promoters have been left-wing “Progressives.” But Holmes’s views on a range of issues are now repugnant to the left. Beyond a general solicitude for (some types of) freedom of expression, Holmes had no regard for civil rights or civil liberties. See, e.g., his majority opinion […]

To answer Orin’s query below, there aren’t many scholars who have argued that Lochner was correctly decided, but there are some, including not just Siegan, but the VC’s own Randy Barnett, Richard Epstein, Ellen Frankel Paul, Roger Pilon, among others. There are a number of other scholars who are generally sympathetic with Lochnerian cases, but […]