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A little while back I read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and had the opportunity to meet him and hear him speak at a book party in NYC. I’ve been meaning to say a few things about it and the recent appearance of a piece […]

I just read a very interesting article, Daniel Sockwell, Writing a Brief for the iPad Judge. The basic problem: [M]ore and more judges are reading briefs primarily on iPads or other tablets…. The Fifth Circuit judiciary reads the majority of their briefs on iPads, and, from conversations with numerous judges and clerks, the other Circuits […]

That’s a graphic from an article last month in Vocativ, titled “Way More People Die in Texas From Drunk Driving Than Anywhere Else. (Vocativ is a new media startup that got a good deal of buzz last Fall, including for relying on “data ninjas.”) Here’s some of the analysis accompanying the graphic: Texas, in many […]

Denizens of Boston may be interested in the premiere of a new radio show this weekend, “Real Clear Radio Hour with Bill Frezza” brought to you by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  It will air from 10:00-11:00 AM on Bloomberg radio’s WXKS 1200AM & WJMN 94.5FM-HD2.  You can also find it on several Internet services (at the […]

Embarrassing as it is for me to admit, I’ve been pretty absent-minded about maintaining our “social media presence,” such as it is. We’re delighted that we have almost 10,000 Twitter followers — with the Twitter feeds automatically coming from our RSS feed — but I can’t figure out how to sign on to manage one […]

For those of you who have been following FDA actions against the consumer genomics company 23andMe (see my prior posts here and here), you may enjoy the commentary that Robert Green (geneticist at Harvard) and I published in Nature today. We argue that it’s an open question whether FDA has jurisdiction over the health-related interpretations that […]

We take a break from law and politics to bring you this heartwarming story of a Filipina caregiver who never sang before in public winning Israel’s X-Factor. Oh, and she happens to be gay. Here’s the audition video And here she is singing Bohemian Rhapsody (of all things). If you don’t speak Hebrew, skip to […]

Will Baude’s post on commandeering  prompts me to revisit the doctrine after a twenty-year absence.  I have fond memories of the doctrine, because it can be traced directly to an amicus brief that I wrote for the Council of State Governments in New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992). The original understanding of the […]

I very much appreciate Tim Sandefur’s careful response to my question about his view of the Constitution. If I understand Tim’s view, though, it’s actually not about the U.S. Constitution in particular. Instead, it’s a theory of all governments throughout human history. In these posts, he happens to be advocating his approach for the U.S. […]

Ann Althouse celebrates 10 years of blogging. I remember the first time I met Ann. In the 1990s at the AALS annual meeting, Philip Hamburger and I put together a program on law review editing and the quality of writing in American law reviews. I invited Ann to be on the panel because of something […]

President Obama boasted during the Presidential campaign that the taxpayer bailouts of Chrysler and GM saved “Detroit” (a particular locution that he wisely doesn’t use any more, as I noted yesterday). But as John Berlau also observed yesterday, with respect to the Chrysler bailout it might be more accurate to say that it “saved Turin,” […]

If it did, it wouldn’t have published this obituary of Ariel Sharon by professional anti-Israel agitator Max Blumenthal. I’m not a big Sharon fan, but it’s not the negative nature of the obituary that’s problematic. Rather, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more consistently dishonest appraisal of historical fact in the Arab-Israeli conflict, at […]

Reading Tim Sandefur’s first guest post, I have a quick clarifying question. Let’s say that the public disagrees with Tim’s view, and that to make its point, a constitutional amendment pursuant to Article V is passed that explicitly approves the existing status quo of judicial interpretation and explicitly rejects the Declaration of Independence as a […]

Over the past few weeks Fiat finished buying Chrysler and the government sold its final stake in General Motors. I have a summing up of the “The Corporatist Legacy of the Auto Bailouts” at the Law and Liberty blog today.

… a word that cannot effectively be used in conversation (or in writing) because your audience likely doesn’t know what it means? Credit to David Steinberg for the question.