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There appears to be a new Snowden leak every few days — continuing for how long, we don’t know — and the latest is pretty interesting. From the Washington Post: NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say. If I understand the story correctly, NSA’s monitoring is occuring overseas, catching the […]

My new post, Privatization and the Constitutional Delegation of Coercive Power in Germany, is up on the Reason Foundation website. Here’s an excerpt: The U.S. Constitution is silent on whether any sort of power can be delegated to private actors. The due process clause protects people from the bias of state actors, whether these state […]

I sat down yesterday with Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute on my recent paper, “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Savior or Menace?”  You can listen here.  It is about 15 minutes.

Here’s a question for the medical professionals in the VC audience. In his opinion earlier this week in Jackson v. Pollion, Judge Posner criticizes the magistrate judge and district judge for reaching the wrong conclusion about whether the plaintiff’s failure to receive his hypertension medications for three weeks could have a significant impact on the […]

An interesting discussion.

URLs in Microsoft Word documents by default appear as hyperlinks, and also don’t automatically break across lines. This is sometimes fine, but I think it looks bad in briefs and similar documents. The hyperlink is underlined and set in a different color, good if you want to click on it but otherwise distracting. And the […]

Paul Caron has the scoop: The AAUP Chapter at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the State of Ohio alleging that the law school retaliated against certain faculty in the award of merit raises in 2013 and 2014 because of their union activities. Faculty were placed in four merit […]

I reviewed Juan Zarate’s Treasury’s War for the Wall Street Journal.  If you have a subscription, here’s the paywalled link. For cheapskates, here’s the gist: Treasury has attacked money laundering by big banks, imposing fines up to $2 billion on institutions around the world. As a result, banks have toughened their compliance regimes. Under the […]

I’m just delighted, both as a friend of Ed’s and as one of his future clients. From the state Attorney General’s press release: As the chief appellate lawyer for the Department of Justice, DuMont will lead the new Office of the Solicitor General, oversee all civil and criminal appeals, and litigate the most sensitive, complex […]

I’ll be testifying tomorrow before the House Intelligence Committee.  This post is an excerpt from that testimony.  The full document is here: Baker – HPSCI testimony – Oct. 29 2013. I fear that the campaign by Glenn Greenwald and others who control the Snowden documents has forced the executive branch into a defensive crouch.  Other nations are […]

The annual Federalist Society Lawyers Convention will be in Washington, DC, on November 14th through November 16th. This year’s group of speakers includes five VC bloggers: Jonathan Adler, Randy Barnett, John Elwood, Nick Rosenkranz, and Eugene Volokh.

Multiple choice question: (a) Jews (i.e., Israel); (b) Christians who support the Jews; (c) Muslims You would think the answer would be “c”, but then you’re clearly not as sophisticated a thinker as Diarmaid MacCulloch, who, writing in the Daily Beast, thinks that the answer is (a) and (b) with only “an extremist militant minority […]

Is rational ignorance really the problem, or is it almost entirely “rational irrationality?” I ask because the vast majority of people are not only rationally ignorant about politics, but also about the products they purchase. How much do I really know about my Ford Flex and Honda Odyssey? Compared to how much I could know, […]

I contributed a short piece today to the New York Times on the latest Snowden-generated flap over allegations that NSA targeted Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.  Excerpts: To play the role it has played in the world for the last 70 years, the United States must be able to gather intelligence anywhere in the world with […]