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Some perspective from Daniel Pipes, who notes that bipartisan official Washington ignored both warnings from terrorism experts about the danger of militant Islamicists, and, more ominously, scores of anti-American terrorism incidents abroad and a few at home committed by terrorists inspired by radical Islamic ideology. Worse yet, he notes signs that the government officials have […]

I began the Sunday Song Lyrics with a song by one of America’s greatest, if most short-lived, songwriters: Hank Williams. Though I enjoy posting more contemporary rock lyrics, it’s about time I post a lyric from another one of America’s greatest songwriters: Edward Kennedy Ellington — better known as “Duke.” As with Williams, there are […]

Here’s a quick reference for prior Sunday Song Lyrics:– March 21 – Nine Inch Nails – The Fragile– March 14 – Incubus – Megalomaniac– March 7 – Rush – The Trees– February 29 – Oingo Boingo – Only A Lad– February 22 – Bob Mould – Heartbreak a Stranger– Feb. 15 – Yaz, Ode to […]

The controversy Eugene blogged about yesterday reminded me of one of the more outrageous such incidents, back in the late 1980s. UCLA suspended an editor of the student newspaper for running an editorial cartoon ridiculing affirmative action preferences. In the cartoon, a student asks a rooster on campus how it got into UCLA. The rooster […]

Apparently the complaint brought against the newspaper and its faculty advisor (see the post several posts down, the one with the cartoon) cited as authority the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1996 (I think they might mean 1978), the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 (presumably mostly referring to this section), and the Southwest […]

Peter Northup offers a careful reading of, and response to this defense of the French ban on “ostentatious” religious symbols in schools, written by Patrick Weil, a member of the commission that recommended the ban. Weil argues that the ban is needed to prevent (mainly) students bullying and compelling other students into wearing headscarves. Peter […]

who has just been named the new Dean at Georgetown Law. Via Brian Leiter.

Cathy Young on rape shield laws, in Salon — very much worth reading.

FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, writes: Southwest Missouri State University (SMSU), a public institution bound by the First Amendment, is investigating the faculty advisor and student editor of its campus newspaper, The Standard, for publishing an editorial cartoon that a Native American group found “offensive.” SMSU has refused to rule out a […]

In summer 2002, I went to the Institute for Humane Studies‘ Social Change Workshop for grad students (and, as one of IHS’s graduate summer research fellows, I was a TA of sorts at the workshop, presenting a paper and running discussion sections). There’s going to be another one from June 19 to 25, and you […]

Did you know?: Before unionization and its attendant wage compression took hold, smart young women (and assumedly men) demanded a premium on the teaching market? I can’t imagine why smart, ambitious, hard-working, and not unusually altruistic individuals would be willing to commit to a career in public school teaching today, knowing that they would get […]

Note to self: Never, never, never, not even with an epically hagiographic video of one’s own life as an introduction, be the guy who has to give a speech after Bill Clinton.

Christine Hurt, a lawprof at Marquette, has been running an interesting pedagogical experiment: [My] students were required to read the WSJ daily and to post weekly [here] on some topic that they read there. They were also required to comment to someone else’s post four times in the semester. Both the students and I realized […]

A reader writes, apropos checking sensitive source code for sabotage: I spoke to [someone] from the NSA, about this subject a couple of years back. As you probably know, although the NSA has teams of cryptographers at its disposal, a large amount of the successful interception it carries out is simply due to exploiting software […]

I’m passing this along from some Boalt Hall students: CREATIVE WRITING CONTEST $150 cash prize LAW & aesthetics Imagine there is something called “Law & Aesthetics” that is studied and taught at law schools. Now, write its encyclopedia entry. There are no restrictions other than those suggested by the title of the encyclopedia entry. As […]