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A reader cc’d me on a copy to Duke Professor Robert “Stupid People Are Generally Conservative” Brandon; here’s what the letter said: People with above average IQ’s are more likely to be original thinkers, not mind numbed robots mouthing the party line so they can become tenured and then go to sleep for the next […]

A new service claims it can make your connection to Kazaa anonymous, for $5.95 a month. “Available for $5.95 per month, AnonX sets up a virtual private network, or VPN, between a user’s computer and the company’s computers. The AnonX computers act as proxies, and actually do the Web surfing for the subscriber. In theory, […]

David Kaufman passes along this AP story: Dressed in a demure black suit, a 35-year-old Frenchwoman has married her dead boyfriend, an exchange of vows that required authorization from President Jacques Chirac. Under French law, Christelle Demichel became both bride and widow in the ceremony, which was performed Tuesday at Nice City Hall on the […]

From the New York Times (thanks to reader Matthew Elkin for the pointer): Facing growing public pressure from civil liberties advocates, federal prosecutors on Tuesday dropped subpoenas that they issued last week ordering antiwar protesters to appear before a grand jury and ordering a university to turn over information about the protesters. . . . […]

My former student Eric Soskin (of the Ex Parte blog) makes two points, apropos the “guy who first used the Constitution to codify bigotry” argument: But I see a larger question here. Should President Bush (and other elected leaders) prioritize the question of how they “want to be remembered” when making policy decisions? Just four […]

I’ve added some more material to my post below, which criticizes Dahlia Lithwick’s Slate question “Does President Bush really want to be remembered as the guy who first used the Constitution to codify bigotry?” Key point: Questions like this, which simply assume that one is right and ask why the other side would want to […]

(See post immediately below.) In short, the FMA would be almost unique in that, for almost the first time, the federal government would say not only that federal law overrides or supersedes state law, but that the former could define the latter. The miscegenation statutes were (rightly, of course) held to violate the Fourteenth Amendment. […]

One further thought about the proposed marriage amendment. (You have all read Eugene’s careful parsing of it, right?) Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that […]

Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate argues thus: The reality is even more compelling: A Defense of Marriage Amendment would enshrine, for the first time, language of intolerance and exclusion in a document that was intended to set forth basic rights. Does President Bush really want to be remembered as the guy who first used the Constitution […]

Dahlia Lithwick, in Slate, urges Bush to support a particular approach to gay marriage (which, I assume from her article, is “letting Massachusetts set its own rules and letting the courts chew over the whole mess for a few years”): There is a principled, moderate resolution to this issue, but he has thus far ignored […]

Unlearned Hand blogs about the debate over the role of government in promoting and sustaining Jim Crow. He gives a fair summary of my position, as well as the position of my friend Mike Klarman, Hand’s professor at U. Va. I should note however, that the dispute between Klarman and myself is relatively narrow: we […]

Here is a link to the new NYU Journal of Law and Liberty.

Eugene has (rightly) given Tim Noah a very hard time for his “Bushisms of the Day.” [UPDATE: My apologies. As Will Baude just pointed out to me by e-mail, it’s Jacob Weisberg who writes that feature.] But Noah is spot-on in highlighting the grotesque lie in Bush’s Meet the Press appearance: RUSSERT: But your base […]

Several VC readers have asked me the following question: can we not have free immigration into the United States, but deny immigrants welfare benefits? Several European nations, such as Denmark, already have watered-down versions of this idea, here is one recent proposal. Can immigration without welfare work? Yes and no. I favor increasing legal immigration, […]

My friend Glen Whitman points to this post on The Language Log, which starts: Can’t anybody use a dictionary anymore? I enjoy a good curmudgeonly rant about how English is going to the dogs these days, I really do. But why can’t the journalists who crank out such screeds check their lexical prejudices against a […]