Author Archive | Todd Zywicki

Sean Sirrine has a long post critiquing the arguments in the law professors’ letter opposing the confirmation of Roberts. I don’t agree with all of his critique, but he raises a number of sound questions.

Not to belabor the point, but my point, and I believe Orin’s point too, is that there appears to be a leadership vacuum in New Orleans right now. For the past few days it has seemed like no one is in charge, making tough decisions, setting priorities, ensuring accountability, etc. They seem to be simply […]

It now seems evident that state and local officials in New Orleans are not up to the task of dealing with the myriad of problems associated with hurricane relief and response (relief priorities and logistics, crime control, evacuation, etc.). And judging from the various Senators and other empty suits from the federal government who crossed […]

From The McCormick Tribune Foundation Hurricane Katrina Relief Campaign: The McCormick Tribune Foundation Hurricane Katrina Relief Campaign has been established as an effort between McCormick Tribune Foundation and many of its Communities Program Partners to raise money for victims of Hurricane Katrina. The McCormick Tribune Foundation will match the first $2,000,000 contributed to the campaign […]

The human toll of the hurricane is almost too much for me to even contemplate. But just think about one small bit of it–the effect on New Orleans lawyers and the legal system. Consider this email today from a New Orleans lawyer. I hope that it won’t turn out to be this bad, but it […]

Over the weekend I read through the paper that prompted KC Johnson’s column in Inside Higher Ed (discussed by Jim last week). Leaving aside the data issues that the authors raise there, I want to explore the “alternative hypothesis” that the authors there raise as the nondiscriminatory explanation for the observed data. I will follow […]

Frank Cross reports some preliminary results on his empirical study of Chief Justices on case results: I have completed a preliminary analysis of the 2004 term. There appears to be some result from Rehnquist’s absence on outcomes. For example, in the cases over which Rehnquist presided, he had a 10% dissent rate. In the cases […]

Perhaps I was the last to know, but last week Jurist ran an op-ed column that I wrote earlier this summer on the Bankruptcy Reform legislation. I knew that it had been delayed for a while, but I didn’t realize that they had finally posted it. It is available here.

The media seems to be covering the pro and anti war protests in Crawfor (Cindy Sheehan and all that) as some sort of showdown between the pro and anti war families of soldiers (this article from the Washington Times of pro-War parents protesting the political use of their kids’ names by anti-War protestors was an […]

E.J. Dionne writes in the Washington Post today, “First Step? Admit There’s a Problem.” He writes: History repeats itself in strange ways. Consider two statements. “A slogan like ‘stay the course’ is unacceptable.” And: “Stay the course is not a policy.” The first quotation goes back to October 1982, when a Republican candidate for governor […]

This summer the Payment Cards Center of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve organized an excellent program on “Federal Consumer Protection Regulation: Disclosures and Beyond.” A summary of the program by Mark Furletti is available here. Yours truly was the keynote speaker for the panel on “Alternatives to Disclosure.” Tom Durkin of the Federal Reserve Board headlined […]

I am delighted to announce the latest addition to the Conspiracy, my new daughter, born Thursday evening. Mom and baby are both doing great. I expect to soon learn the meaning of the term “napocracy” myself. In the meantime, I am getting her while she is still impressionable with this and this.

A couple of weeks ago I suggested a research project on using Rehnquist’s periodic absences from the bench this year as an opportunity to test the influence of the Chief Justice by comparing results in cases over which Rehnquist presided versus those over which Stevens presided as acting Chief to see whether there is any […]

I just learned of these graduate students who submitted a fake paper to an academic conference and then were invited to present it (before the organizers learned it was a hoax). They used a random paper generator. The web site also allows anyone to generate a random paper. They then created their own session at […]

Tom Blumer at Bizzyblog has a look at the “backlash” against the “Kelo backlash” and decides that it doesn’t hold water, discussing a column by one Michael Kennedy in the New London Day newspaper justifying Kelo: Regardless, here’s one guy [the columnist, Michael Kennedy] who thinks Kelo was a good ruling. I don’t agree. If […]