Author Archive | Stuart Benjamin

Orin mentions the response by scholars and government officials to the DOJ “White Paper” on the wiretapping program. Two additional points bear mentioning. First, this same group issued a letter on January 9, 2006 that laid out their views; the DOJ white paper responded to that, and their February 2 letter responds to the DOJ […]

The Supreme Court today issued a 5-4 opinion with O’Connor in the majority (the first this Term, I think). The opinion holds that state sovereign immunity does not prevent a bankruptcy trustee’s suit against a state agency. This may sound dry (and it is), but state sovereign immunity has been a hugely contentious issue in […]

While we wait to hear whether Patrick Fitzgerald indicts anyone in the Bush Administration, I think back to a conversation I had shortly before the 2002 elections with a friend who was in the White House Counsel’s office. The friend said that having a Republican majority in the House and Senate mattered a great deal […]

The Duke Law Journal will be holding a symposium on administrative law issues raised by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and it occurred to them (and me) that some readers of this blog might be interested in submitting. From the Call for Papers: “[The hurricanes] have also brought a number of important administrative law issues into […]

Putting together the points about Miers being close to Bush and the complaints about her lack of a public record on the subjects with which the Supreme Court deals, what is striking here is the gap between what Bush knows about her and what the public knows about her. We are beyond reading tea leaves […]

I just noticed a new Cato study entitled “The Grand Old Spending Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders.” Here’s the guts of the Executive Summary: President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the […]

Spectrum policy is a major research area for me (see here and here, for example), and I’ve been a bit disappointed that few journalists have shown an interest in writing on the subject with any depth. I’ve just run across, though, a very good article in the National Journal by Drew Clark called “Spectrum Wars” […]

I’m going to be teaching Cohen v. California tomorrow (the case reversing a conviction for wearing a jacket that said “Fuck the Draft”), and I decided to see if Cohen was the earliest iteration of “fuck” in a Supreme Court opinion. (It was.) I then looked up “shit” to see if it appeared earlier in […]

Back in 1997, John Lott wrote an article in the Journal of Legal Studies putting forward data that seemed to show that right-to-carry (gun) laws reduced violent crimes. That article, and the subsequent book “More Guns Less Crime” influenced me and many others — including state legislatures that passed right-to-carry laws based in significant part […]

The Economist magazine, which endorsed Bush in 2000, has endorsed Kerry in 2004. This strikes me as more significant than most endorsements, both because they endorsed Bush in 2000 (and endorsed Dole in 1996) and because they are very smart small-government types. And it is particularly striking because they supported the decision to invade Iraq. […]

The Wall Street Journal notes a remarkable shift in an article today on page A4 (subscription required). In 2000, those with a high-school diploma or less preferred Gore to Bush by 7 percentage points, and those who graduated college preferred Bush to Gore by 5 percentage points. That is in keeping with what had been […]

The story of the 380 tons of explosives missing from a known base in Iraq is obviously big (and depressing), but that shouldn’t entirely obscure another important story. A few months ago, co-conspirator Jacob Levy noted the lack of response to an NBC Nightly News report asserting that the Pentagon had located Zarqawi’s camp in […]

I just ran across a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland (a group that calls itself nonpartisan, that apparently is regarded as nonpartisan, and whose board contains both Republicans and Democrats). I find its results stunning. Rather than summarize them, I’ll just quote from their press […]

I haven’t posted for a while, because I have become increasingly disenchanted with the current administration and have not wanted to start writing angry or petulant posts about how President Bush has betrayed the principles of limited government, but at the same time the election has been at the forefront of my thoughts and is […]

There is a remarkable op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s called “Kerry Up, Markets Down.” (You can view it at http://www.aei.org/news/filter.,newsID.21046/news_detail.asp. For some reason, powerblogs is not letting me insert links.) In it, the author notes that there has been an inverse relationship between the S&P 500 and the value of a “Kerry […]