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I’m delighted to say that Ronald Collins and, briefly, Floyd Abrams will be guest-blogging this week here at the Conspiracy. Prof. Collins, the Harold S. Shefelman Scholar at the University of Washington Law School, is the author of many articles and books, including On Dissent: Its Meaning in America (2013, with David Skover) and Nuanced […]

Henry Farrell takes apart a James Harkin essay on Marx and public choice in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and it ain’t pretty.

My old friend Matt Harrington now runs a Center for the Study of Common Law at the University of Montreal Law School and he blessed me with an invitation to speak a program last week on common law as a regulatory system and the interaction of common law with regulation.  My job was to add […]

I missed this controversy when it broke two weeks ago, but Matthew Yglesias noted that the “entire Internet” seemed to be mad at him for a post that, really, just reflects common economic sense. He wrote: Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, […]

I’d like my First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic students to read some excellent amicus briefs, to see what works, and to see the various kinds of briefs that work. I have some samples, but I’d love to see more, and in particular briefs that are not U.S. Supreme Court merits briefs. [UPDATE: I at first […]

I’m pleased to say that three of the six items in The Post: Good Scholarship from the Internet, vol. 3 — a new journal from the Journal of Law people that reprints blog posts that its editorial board found especially worthy — come from the Conspiracy. Here is a list of all the posts; you […]

I have a post up on the Reason Foundation’s web site on government contractor immunity. Here’s the beginning: An important question in contracting out is always how the contractors’ legal regime differs from the government’s. There are accountability mechanisms in the private sector, but they generally differ from the ones available in the public sector; […]

An Investor’s Business Daily column claims: Like other states, Delaware originally enacted its unclaimed property laws as a consumer protection mechanism to reunite Delaware residents with dormant bank account balances, uncashed paychecks, and other unclaimed property…. But Delaware is now interpreting those laws against businesses to create a colossal revenue source for the state government. […]

It’s here, via How Appealing. The embedding function only has the 1st 20 minutes, which you can watch below (and which will then ask you to click through to the PBS page for the rest). Watch A More Perfect Union on PBS. See more from Constitution USA with Peter Sagal.

In my article Prison Vouchers, I speculated on information problems for prisoners choosing prisons (and the analogous problems for school choice) and how those might be resolved (some paragraph breaks added): Convicted defendants may not know the actual quality of prisons, just as parents may not know the actual quality of schools. Does this argument […]

I’ll be testifying this morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on crime and terrorism. My testimony will touch on the Attribution Revolution in cybersecurity, the need to move from attribution to creative forms of retribution, and the need to give victims more leeway to investigate the hackers who attack them. Here are some excerpts: That […]

Some recent conversations I’ve heard about “positive rights” and American legal traditions made me want to repeat something I’ve written before: While it’s true that the U.S. Constitution lacks some of the “positive rights” that people sometimes discuss under that label (e.g., a right to shelter, to medical care, to a subsistence income, and so […]