As I’ve mentioned before, Dahlia Lithwick’s “Supreme Court Dispatches” are generally a delight to read, and are often quite insightful. She’s a very good writer, and a colorful one; and I realize that part of that color is the injection of her own viewpoints. Her piece yesterday on the latest Supreme Court advising-defendants-of-the-right-to-counsel case was […]
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Times Have Changed:
Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting in United States v. Roth (1972): “In my view, every citizen who applied for a government job is entitled to it unless the government can establish some reason for deny in the employment.” It’s hard to imagine a Justice writing this today. Reading USSC opinions from the early 1970s (the Court’s […]
Chicago in midwinter:
Michael Green gives a pretty good sense of what it’s like. If you’re nearby and able to venture out of doors, however, you might want to come by this conference on constitutionalism in Israel and Palestine. Speakers range from distinguished North American academics such as Gordon Wood and Charles Taylor to supreme/ constitutional court justices […]
Carol Moseley Braun supports right to bear arms:
Edward Boyd reports, quoting OpinionJournal’s Political Dairy (it’s subscription only, so I haven’t checked it myself): . . . Before she withdrew from the presidential race, Carol Moseley Braun shocked a D.C. debate audience when she said she would sign a bill to repeal the District’s gun ban. “I think under the Constitution people have […]
“Black” and “white”:
An amusing and insightful story from InstaPundit: My brother — who doesn’t look any blacker than I do — is sometimes asked by Nigerians (in Nigeria) whether he is black. At first he thought this was odd, but one explained “We have Americans coming here all the time who say they are black, but they […]
Unplaced Bet:
I wish I had gotten around to placing a bet against Howard Dean (and Clark) last week, when I was convinced that the likelihood of his winning the Democratic nomination was way overblown. I noticed that Iowa was still competitive, and considered that Iowa often offers a surprise, that Dean seemed to be faltering in […]
THE BUSH CONSPIRACY GENERATOR:
From Buttafly.com: Want to come up with your own conspiracy theory about Bush? Don’t let Al Franken, Michael Moore, and MoveOn.org have all the fun! Use this handy George W. Bush Conspiracy Theory Generator to come up with your own conspiracy theory!* * This tool may not be used to create Democratic presidential candidate speeches […]
Should you buy freedom for slaves?
Readers of The New York Times Op-Ed page will know that Nicholas Kristof has recently purchased the freedom of two young girls in a brothel. It appears that the young girls were held there against their will and tricked or coerced into joining in the first place. As an economist of course I wondered whether […]
Academia/ political theory news:
Princeton’s Provost, and my graduate school advisor, the political theorist Amy Gutmann, has been selected the next President of Penn.
Volokh on USSR:
Catching up after returning to town, I want to commend Eugene for his moving post yesterday on American supporters of the Soviet Union: A little bit of embarrassment seems to be in order. I would add that this support was widely advocated by some American liberals throughout my childhood and continuing up through college and […]
Emigration from Israel:
Easily missed in this story about emigration from Israel is that most of the 68,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union who have since left Israel were individuals not registered as Jews. This means that they were not Jewish according to Jewish law, which requires Jewish matrilineal descent. Israeli authorities will not register an individual […]
Nominee Claude Allen:
President Bush has renominated Claude Allen, an African American deputy secretary of HHS who used to work for Jesse Helms, to the Fourth Circuit. An academic expert on Helms once told me that unlike every other southern Senator, Helms never actually renounced his segregationist past, and indeed never publicly supported any civil rights legislation, regardless […]
Likely First Amendment violation:
According to the Omaha World-Herald, A small group of Westside High School students plastered the school Monday with posters advocating that a white student from South Africa receive the “Distinguished African American Student Award” next year. The students’ actions on Martin Luther King Jr. Day upset several students and have led administrators to discipline four […]
The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism
is the title of a thoughtful review essay in The Nation. I ultimately disagree with what I think is the author’s crucial assertion, that Islamic anti-Semitism is the product of a political conflict, and will dissipate when that conflict is resolved. Rather, I think anti-Semitism in the Moslem and Arab world has taken on a […]
Statistics and the SAT:
The the L.A. Times anti-SAT op-ed, which I criticize in the post below, has one especially noteworthy statistical claim: “[W]hite students score 206 points higher on average than nonwhites” on the SAT, “according to Psychology Today.” To begin with, this seems to be a misquote of the Psychology Today article, which says “Whites outscore African […]