Archive | Uncategorized

Reader Mostafa Sabet points out a possible partial explanation for the data about black men marrying white women more often than black women marry white men, and Asian women marrying white men more often than Asian men marry white women: Women tend to prefer men who are taller than they are; blacks are on average […]

The San Francisco Chronicle reports: The woman who has accused Kobe Bryant of sexual assault should be referred to in court by her name or as “the complaining witness,” because calling her “the victim” implies the NBA star is guilty, his lawyers said in a court filing released Tuesday. Judge Terry Ruckriegle gave prosecutors five […]

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports: More than 100 petitioners are seeking the removal of the incoming editor of UNLV’s student newspaper, alleging he posted anti-Semitic comments on a Web diary last year. . . . [The editor, Justin Chomintra] apologized to anyone he offended, but he maintained the statements published on his Web log, a […]

“Armed and Fabulous”: More about the Pink Pistols (who draw their name from a column by my friend Jonathan Rauch), “the first national gun club for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community.”

Michael Williams has them, quoting a UPI story from last year: African-American men had white wives 2.65 times more often than black women had white husbands. In other words, in 73 percent of black-white couples, the husband was black. For every 1,000 black women who were married, there were 1,059 black married men. Asian women […]

I had yet another Blogger glitch yesterday, and had to recover my template; unfortunately, some people were unintentionally lost from the blogroll. We’ll probably be switching to new blogging software within a week or so, and the blogroll will be fixed then.

A few doctrinal items about Schwarzenegger and bobble-heads: Contrary to what some have said, Schwarzenegger’s claim isn’t a federal copyright claim; it’s a state law “right of publicity” claim. Copyright law protects people’s creative expression, such as their writings, recordings, and the like. Right of publicity law protects their names and likenesses, at least against […]

The disclosures about 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick’s role in policy decisions to maintain, if not erect, the “wall” between domestic law enforcement and anti-terror efforts continue. As reported last week in the Washington Times and noted yesterday by the WSJ editorial page, newly released memos suggest Gorelick played a key role in maintaining limitations on […]

NYT Errors in the Air: Today’s New York Times provides more evidence that newspapers should be careful assigning writers to cover subjects about which they know very little. The article, under the misleading headline “Court Rulings on Emissions Sharply Split Two Groups” (emphasis added), contains a mistaken central premise and a major omission. As a […]

Someone forwarded to me this e-mail, which was sent to all students by the administration at Boalt Hall, the UC Berkeley law school: Folks: This semester we had an incident in which a guest lecturer made racist remarks during a class. The incident caused a great deal of hurt and anger in the students who […]

Several readers complained that they couldn’t access the Conspiracy over the last week or two. It turns out that there was a problem with SBC and its subsidiaries — which, I’m told, include yahoo, pacbell, and norlight; for some reason, they weren’t allowing access to at least certain UCLA servers. SBC has apparently fixed the […]

A reader suggested that my “thou” / “you” distinction was backwards, and “‘thee’, ‘thou’, ‘thy’ are the formal uses, while ‘you’ is the informal.”      Nope: Thou, thee, and thy (the grammatical equivalents of I, me, and my, though used for the second-person informal singular) were the informal versions. They may sound formal because they seem […]

— and once-and-present brother — Sasha is now officially engaged to the lovely food-and-cat-blogger Hanah Metchis, of Quare (“The blog that doesn’t rhyme with ‘square’”). No, they didn’t meet through blogging. Best wishes to the happy couple!

I am embarrassed to admit this, but following in the footsteps of recent newspaper scandals, we here at The Volokh Conspiracy have done comprehensive background checks on all our bloggers and discovered that . . . Sasha Volokh is not really my brother. Yes, that’s right, it turns out that his brother credentials had been […]

Several people noted, taking varying degrees of umbrage, that “witches” is also the term used by people who belong to neo-pagan (I think that’s right) religious groups that are sometimes also known as Wicca. I’m aware of that; but as I think my posts made pretty clear, I’m talking about “witches” in the traditional sense […]