Jon Henke, via Twitter, expresses a view I used to hold but now think is pretty clearly erroneous: Thought: There should be no difference between freedom of speech and freedom of press. It is not “special speech”. It’s just speech. Since we now understand the phrase “freedom of speech” in the First Amendment to cover […]

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Like Conor Clarke, I can only assume that anesthesiologist Ronald Dworkin’s op-ed opposing the health care reform bill will come as an unpleasant surprise to the other Ronald Dworkin. Quite coincidentally, some whim impelled me to pluck (the more famous) Dworkin’s Law’s Empire off the shelf earlier this week, and I was immediately saddened that […]

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A commenter on the other day’s patent post makes an important point: I also thought that even if an idea is obvious, it won’t be implemented until someone realizes that they have a need for it. I guess this falls under the question of whether there’s prior art, but it would also be a reason […]

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The stories appear so frequently these days that it’s practically a new genre: The lawsuit over some patent claiming monopoly on a bang-your-head-on-a-desk obvious procedure, emerging from the shadows to threaten a technology that’s long been ubiquitous.  The most recent instance is likely to get some play outside the tech press because it’s resulted in […]

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Ezra notes the forthcoming release of Mark Kleiman’s intriguing book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment.  It cuts against our retributionist instincts, but holds out the promise of achieving crime reduction while also having less recourse to prison. Having heard Kleiman talk about his thesis—and the empirical work behind […]

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Disturbing as I find it to defend Pat Buchanan in any dispute about race, one aspect of the argument Rachel Maddow makes in this much-blogged-about exchange seems rather odd to me.  She challenges Buchanan to explain why 108 of 110 Supreme Court justices have been white, arguing that this suggests minority candidates have been unfairly […]

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Quinn  Hyler is very eager for someone to press Sonia Sotomayor about how differences in judging may stem from inherent physiological differences. I hate to disappoint him, but there’s a thoroughly boring answer he could have unearthed himself with about ten seconds of research. The line originates in a speech Sotomayor gave that was exclusively […]

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I’ve already written about this at some length, but I see that one of the bogus charges against prospective OIRA director Cass Sunstein is actually holding up his confirmation: Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) has blocked President Obama’s candidate for regulation czar, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, because Sunstein has argued that animals should have the […]

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Yglesias has a good point on the proposed French burqa ban: [T]his sort of ban seems extremely unlikely to actually help anyone who’s genuinely in need of help. A woman whose husband and/or other male relations have enough power over her to force her into a burqa against her will is only going to be […]

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So, obviously it’s never a good sign for democracy when the president is bustled out of the country under military guard. But I’m nevertheless a bit perplexed about the univocal condemnation—and simliarly one-sided coverage—of the  ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. Without pretending to any expertise on the Honduran political scene, here’s what I’ve gathered […]

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