Jamelle Bouie lays out several reasons why popular election of judges is a terrible idea: The need to fund-raise (especially in smaller districts) creates conflicts with the requirement of impartiality; judges start handing down longer sentences to appear “tough on crime” during election season; because judicial elections are usually low-priority, they create the illusion of […]
The Real Problem With Judicial Elections
April 8th, 2011 · 8 Comments
Tags: Law
Bad Reasons to Be a Moral Relativist
April 6th, 2011 · 12 Comments
Will Wilkinson suggests, in a long and interesting post on the scientific debate over the existence of an innate moral capacity, that the absence of such an inborn faculty would tend to bolster the case for moral relativism, while its existence would cut in the other direction. Adam Ozimek at Modeled Behavior follows up: I […]
Tags: Moral Philosophy
Things That Are Irrelevant to Copyright Policy
March 30th, 2011 · 44 Comments
Sometimes individual creators decide it’s in their best interests to transfer rights to their works—a song, a movie, a story, a character—to big, faceless, generally unsympathetic corporations. This should have exactly no impact on anyone’s view about the proper scope of the underlying right. Yes, sometimes people are hoodwinked into making unwise deals, and that’s […]
Tags: Tech and Tech Policy
Orphan Works
March 26th, 2011 · 23 Comments
The ruling rejecting the Google Books settlement suggests, plausibly enough, that any general solution to the problem of orphan works is more properly the task of Congress than any kind of private agreement. I’ll admit to being a bit puzzled about why this hasn’t already happened. I take it for granted that our current lunatic […]
Tags: Markets · Tech and Tech Policy
Genies and Justice
March 26th, 2011 · 2 Comments
An entertaining thought experiment from the folks at Bleeding Heart Libertarians: Suppose a genie gives you the power to snap your fingers and instantly implement your preferred theory of political justice. By “theory of political justice” I mean, very roughly, your theory about the basic moral constraints that govern what states (or, if you prefer, […]
Tags: Libertarian Theory
Google Books, Fair Uses, and “Copyright” as Misnomer
March 24th, 2011 · 19 Comments
Tim Lee has a great analysis at Ars Technica of this week’s ruling invalidating the controversial Google Books settlement. Tim, like the court, focuses on aspects of the agreement that seem to give Google a unique advantage in the online book market—and hopes that instead Google will now simply defend its copying of books for […]
Tags: Law · Tech and Tech Policy
Werner Heisenberg, Economist
March 18th, 2011 · 8 Comments
Interesting passing observation from Yglesias: [F]or all the horrors of the current recession it’s been managed much better than the Great Depression of the 1930s was. Progress is happening. The only way to make more rapid progress on the science of macroeconomic stabilization would be to have many more recessions so as to gather better […]
Tags: Economics · General Philosophy
What Is Liberty? Does It Matter?
March 16th, 2011 · 11 Comments
The recently-launched Bleeding Heart Libertarians is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blogs. Jacob Levy, in particular, has been articulating with uncanny clarity a whole cluster of thoughts that had been bouncing around the back of my own head for a few months now. But since agreement gets boring quickly, let me pick on one […]
Tags: Libertarian Theory
The Trouble With “Balance” Metaphors
February 4th, 2011 · 40 Comments
Reading Orin Kerr’s new paper outlining an “equilibrium-adjustment theory” of the Fourth Amendment, I found myself reflecting on how thoroughly the language of “balancing” pervades our thinking about legal and political judgment. The very words “reasonable” and “rational” are tightly linked to “ratio”—which is to say, to relative magnitude or balance. We hope to make […]
Tags: General Philosophy · Language and Literature · Privacy and Surveillance
The Voldemort Effect
January 13th, 2011 · 29 Comments
In the Harry Potter books, the titular boy wizard is the subject of a mystical prophecy, destined to come into mortal conflict with the evil Lord Voldemort—and perhaps even capable of vanquishing him. But there’s a wrinkle: One of Harry’s classmates, Neville Longbottom, also fits most of the prophecy’s description: born at the end of […]
Tags: Horse Race Politics · Journalism & the Media · Language and Literature