Legal Commentary

A few weeks back I had some critical things to say about the Volokh folks' blogging on the election.  Although I regret the last line of that post, I thought then and still think that 1) the criticism was itself fair, and it is too trite a defense to say that people can blog about what they like; and 2) they're adults and can take honest criticism.  I didn't subscribe to Dan's blog version of the 11th Commandment, although I certainly am not convinced that shooting matches between blogs are especially productive.

That having been said, it behooves me to point out that Orin Kerr and David Bernstein have excellent posts up today taking some of the wind out of the sails of a Drudge story capitalizing on an old radio interview to suggest that Obama would use the courts as a tool of economic redistribution.  The posts are excellent not because they support Obama -- that's less my concern, and in any event both of those writers make clear that they do not support Obama -- but because they insist on reasonably and thoughtfully reading the interview in its appropriate context.  The posts leave room to criticize Obama for supporting economic redistribution at all, but make clear that the interview itself was really about whether the courts should be vehicles for redistribution via positive constitutional rights -- a point on which Obama suggests he would prefer political change to judicial fiat. 

Good reading, in both cases.