A British panel composed of leading members of Parliament and former public officials has concluded that the War on Drugs is a failure and should be abandoned. The panel includes former heads of MI5 (the British domestic intelligence agency) and the Crown Prosecution Service, as well as leading Conservatives, including prominent former members of Margaret […]
Archive | Conservatism
What if Libertarians and Conservatives Agreed on Empirical Issues?
Following up my post on what might happen if liberals and libertarians agreed on empirical issues, this post addresses the question of what might happen if libertarians came to agree on empirical issues with conservatives. Unfortunately, answering this question is a lot tougher than the previous one about liberals. Libertarianism and liberalism are fairly coherent […]
New York Times on the Secular Right Blog
The New York Times recently ran an interesting article on the Secular Right blog, which I commented on here back when it was first established: As a child, Razib Khan spent several weeks studying in a Bangladeshi madrasa. Heather Mac Donald once studied literary deconstructionism and clerked for a left-wing judge. In neither case did […]
Political Attitudes of Russian Jewish Immigrants
By Ilya Somin on January 3, 2011 2:19 pm in Communism, Conservatism, Immigration, Libertarianism, Russia
In a comment on my last post on Russian Jewish immigration, University of North Carolina law professor and blogger Eric Muller writes: Again and again I find myself wondering to what extent it’s true that Jewish refugees/emigres from Soviet totalitarianism (and their offspring) tend to have a libertarian and/or conservative political orientation. Does anyone know […]
How Progressives Misunderstand Much Conservative Skepticism of Climate Policy
By Jonathan H. Adler on November 8, 2010 6:51 pm in Climate Change, Conservatism, Environment, Uncategorized
In yesterday’s Washington Post, Bracken Hendricks of the Center for American Progress laments widespread conservative opposition to “government action on climate change.” Responding to the threat posed by global warming should be a conservative cause, Hendricks argues, because a warmer world will breed bigger government. Many conservatives say they oppose clean-energy policies because they want […]
The Defeat of Proposition 19
To me, the most disappointing of the many electoral results this Tuesday was the relatively narrow (54-46) defeat of California Proposition 19, the marijuana legalization initiative that I and and many other VCers endorsed. I’m not disappointed because this proves that law professors have little electoral clout. We knew that already. Rather, the disappointment is […]
“You Can’t ‘Fact-Check’ a Fever Dream of Paranoia and Irrationality”
Forbes has “fact-checked” its infamous and inflammatory cover story by Dinesh D’Souza, “How Obama Thinks.” Heather MacDonald is not impressed. Such a “fact-checking” feint is irrelevant to this travesty of an article; you can’t “fact-check” a fever dream of paranoia and irrationality. Sickeningly, while “How Obama Thinks” is useless as a guide to the Obama presidency, […]
Lithwick on Conservatives’ View of the Law
In a scathing review of the new NBC drama, Outlaw, about an ethically challenged, conservative Supreme Court justice who resigns from the bench to seek social justice, Dahlia Lithwick describes “the Supreme Court conservatives’ view of the legal system” as “the law is an airless, mechanistic set of fixed rules that privilege those who write the […]
Are Right and Left Changing Where They Stand on Standing?
By Ilya Somin on August 18, 2010 10:00 pm in Conservatism, Constitutional Law, Constitutional Theory, Gay Marriage, Health Care, Standing
Traditionally, conservative scholars and judges have advocated narrow views of constitutional “standing”: the level of “interest” litigants must have at stake in the outcome of a case in order to give them a legal right to sue. For their part, liberals have usually promoted the opposite view: constitutional rights should not be denied based on […]
Why It’s Embarrassing to Be a “Conservative”
Professor Bainbridge lists “ten things that make this conservative embarrassed by the modern conservative movement.” I’m not as enamored with David Klinghoffer’s lament (see also here), nor would I equate Hugh Hewitt with Michael Savage, but I largely agree. UPDATE: Of course it ain’t so hot to be a liberal either. SECOND UPDATE: Patterico counters […]
From “Liberaltarianism” to Libertarian Centrism?
Reason has an interesting debate on the question of libertarian political strategy. Should libertarians seek to forge an alliance with conservatives or liberals or neither? Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg and Tea Party leader Matt Kibbe argue for reconsituting the libertarian-conservative coalition that was badly frayed if not completely severed during the Bush years. Cato Institute […]
Conservatism, Libertarianism, Civil Rights, and “Circumstances”
In a National Review post discussing the civil rights laws of the 1960s, Roger Clegg writes that “Conservatism is superior to libertarianism because it is less ideological and more readily acknowledges that circumstances matter.” Whatever the general validity of this claim, Clegg picked a very poor example to illustrate it. As co-blogger David Bernstein has […]
Affirmative Action and Racial Profiling Revisited
By Ilya Somin on May 8, 2010 12:39 am in Affirmative Action, Conservatism, Immigration, Racial Profiling
Back in 2006, I pointed out that most liberals and conservatives take internally contradictory stances on affirmative action and racial profiling: I have long been fascinated by the fact that most conservatives support racial and ethnic profiling for national security and law enforcement purposes, yet are categorically opposed to the use of racial or ethnic […]
Was the Individual Mandate a “Republican Idea”?
Many commentators have noted that the individual mandate is an idea that some Republican politicians and right-of-center thinkers used to support. Over the weekend the Associated Press reported that many on the right once championed an individual mandate as part of a broader health care overhaul. Not only does the Massachusetts health care reform championed […]
The Harvard Law School Guide to Conservative/Libertarian Public Interest Law
In response to my recent post on conservative and libertarian public interest law, various law students and others have e-mailed me to ask whether there is a single comprehensive list of right of center public interest firms. The closest thing I know if the Harvard Law School Guide to Conservative/Libertarian Public Interest Law, available here. […]