Law Students

What Backlash Against Activist Judges?

Posted on December 19, 2007
In the past few years, conservative academics and even a few liberal law professors have claimed that activist judges of the 1960s and 1970s spurred a great public backlash against the judiciary, and that the activist decisions of that era did grave damage to the popular legitimacy of the judiciary...

Political Warfare

Posted on December 16, 2007
At the final Democratic debate in Iowa, the moderator asked John Edwards how he would accomplish his "agenda after spending a lot of months calling [Washington special interest] groups corrupt." He looked a little taken aback by the question, which assumed he would have to work within Washington to accomplish his policy goals, and his answer suggested that he rejected that premise:[S]ome people argue that we're going to sit at a table with these people and they're going to voluntarily give their power away...

The last Democratic debate

Posted on December 14, 2007
The last Democratic debate was a spectacularly uneventful affair, which wasn't surprising given that no candidate wants to risk a negative storyline this late in the game. Instead, the candidates stuck to their well-rehearsed pitches, and all of them managed a pretty competent job of it, despite having flown from Iowa to Washington and back in the space of a day...

The Bali Global Warming Conference

Posted on December 13, 2007
Those who advocate a free-market solution to global warming lack the courage of their convictions. A true free market system would treat greenhouse gas emissions like any other property regime: it would assign an initial distribution of property rights in greenhouse gas emissions and let the free market trade them at will...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

The U.N., Kosovo, and Darfur

Posted on December 12, 2007
A professor here, Lea Brilmayer, made an interesting point at lunch today about a possible link between Kosovo's impending independence and Sudan's backtracking on its plan to let peacekeepers into Darfur. Regardless of the objective merits, from the Sudanese perspective the Kosovo precedent has to be troubling: U...

Harvard for free?

Posted on December 12, 2007
With Harvard announcing dramatic tuition cuts for all but the very wealth, I thought I'd link to some of my past writing on the subject. Here and here.

Some more bad news for the dollar

Posted on December 12, 2007
One thing the dollar has long had going for it was its status as the international currency of business. Businesses bought dollars (and helped prop up the dollar's value relative to other currencies) just because, well, other businesses wanted to conduct business in dollars...

Beware Bushies Bearing "Environmental" Proposals

Posted on December 11, 2007
It looks like Bush may veto the bill raising American auto-mileage standards to 35 miles per gallon because unless it specifies that the Department of Transportation--not the Environmental Protection Agency--has primarily responsibility for regulating tailpipe emissions...

Oprah's Obama Endorsement

Posted on December 11, 2007
Ideally, endorsements do two things. First, they get a political candidate a bit of media attention, and perhaps some credibility with reporters. Second, though endorsements by themselves rarely convince voters to support a candidate (few Americans cast their vote for a candidate just because someone else tells them to), an effective endorsement can get voters to take a look a candidate and give the candidate himself an opportunity to make his pitch for their vote...

Are we more we growing more similar across national boundaries than within our own?

Posted on December 10, 2007
Liberals in America's great coastal cities have felt a certain disquietude in recent years that, just perhaps, they have more in common with the liberal elites of London, Madrid, Bombay and Buenos Aries than they do with the hoi polloi of middle America--or even the contractors, widget makers, and service industry denizans who make limousine liberalism such a comfortable ideology...

The Huckabee Flack

Posted on December 10, 2007
The fact that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal ran virtually identical stories Sunday about Mike Huckabee's 1992 comments on AIDS and alleged assistance in getting a convicted rapist paroled was the first sign the Arkansan's opponents were taking him seriously: when that kind of story breaks in multiple places at once, it is because a rival campaign plants it, not because of some sudden insight on the part of the reporters...

Binding Emissions Targets

Posted on December 09, 2007
I'm not surprised that the Bush Administration rejected committing the U.S. to binding reductions in greenhouse gases. I wonder, though, whether Bush's refusal to do so means that we'll ultimately see reductions greater than we would if Bush was willing to set a target during his presidency...

Law, Economics, and the Subprime Mess

Posted on December 06, 2007
In liberal circles, the law and economics movement has a bit of a bad reputation--it's seen a tool that lets large business interests justify relatively small damage awards for personal injuries. But a deeper impact of the law and economics movement has been its contribution to a broad shift in the law's understanding of fault, and of fault's relationship to to the party that should pay for some injury...

Small State Primaries

Posted on December 05, 2007
Mike Huckabee's meteoric rise over the past few weeks is another illustration of the virtues of allowing a few small states to hold the first presidential primaries. Huckabee, the affable former governor of Arkansas, has raised little money and, until recently, drew even less media attention--two facts that would have doomed his candidacy beyond any hope if he actually had to compete in the next few weeks in the populous American states...

Does Reading Matter?

Posted on December 04, 2007
The WSJ's Daniel Henninger had a thought piece last week about a new study showing that total recreational reading--books, magazines, newspapers, and online sites--has dwindled to just seven minutes each day. The study, by the National Endowment for the Arts, excluded the countless hours that modern office workers spend slowly going blind from staring at computer screens at work, as well as text-messages and several other forms of communication that might fall within a broad definition of reading...

The voters in New Hampshire

Posted on December 03, 2007
Meryl and I were in New Hampshire this past Saturday, knocking on doors to try to persuade undecided voters to support Barack Obama next month. And while I do think we need to open the primary system up to a broader selection of states, my few hours in New Hampshire gave me at a modicum of appreciation for the current system...

The Supply-Side Theory of Religion, or, How to Build a Mega-Church in New England

Posted on November 30, 2007
I confess my skepticism a few years ago when Rodney Stark, Roger Fink and other economists argued that Americans are more religious than Europeans because we have a free market for religious services. Basically, this "supply side" theory of religion argued that American churches have to offer innovative, popular religious services or the bank will foreclose on church property and send the pastor packing--a fact that encourages ministers to drum up new religious "business...

CNN GOP Debate

Posted on November 30, 2007
I didn't watch the GOP debate last night (hey, I'm a Democrat), but I have some sympathy for Republicans irate that CNN and YouTube offered up a number of questions from known supporters of various Democratic presidential candidates. What seems particularly galling to the right is that the prevalence of Democratic questions focused the debate on the issues that Democrats think matter to Republicans--guns, god, abortion, and gays--rather more than the issues that many Republicans think matter to republicans (national security; lower taxes; government spending)...

Marriage

Posted on November 28, 2007
A few weeks back I went to a talk here at Yale by Patrick Sammon, the head of the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay and lesbian conservatives who are trying to promote gay rights within the GOP. The talk was hosted by the Yale Law Republicans and also by the Yale OutLaws, the law school gay and lesbian organization, and it attracted a pretty diverse group of students...

Why do so many Americans support the writers' strike?

Posted on November 26, 2007
More than 60 percent of Americans say that they side with the writers in their strike against the Hollywood studies, according to today's Times article. That's a remarkable figure given the general American apathy towards union disputes, an apathy that often verges into distaste, and makes one wonder what lessons there might be for other trade unions...

Democratic Supreme Court Picks?

Posted on November 19, 2007
Being at Yale, there's a certain (self serving?) presumption on the part of the students and faculty that a Democratic president would appoint legal academics or federal judges to the Supreme Court, should any vacancies arise. Yet at last Thursday's debate, several of the Democrats actually seeking the presidency suggested that they want Justices who come from the outside the insular worlds of the academy and the bench...

Talk about bad press for Wal-Mart

Posted on November 19, 2007
For a company already facing a PR nightmare over its health-insurance program, surely Wal-Mart should have known that this would only make it look worse:JACKSON, Mo. -- A collision with a semi-trailer truck seven years ago left 52-year-old Deborah Shank permanently brain-damaged and in a wheelchair...

International Law and Pakistan

Posted on November 18, 2007
There is some deep irony in the Bush Administration's conclusion--revealed in the New York Times this weekend--that "legal restrictions" prevented the U.S. from offering Pakistan our best technology for securing its nuclear warheads. Bush's is, after all, an administration that ignores legal restrictions on torture, on domestic spying, and on due process rights, programs that, whatever their merits, seem less critical to American security than securing known nuclear warheads against anti-American terrorists...

Tonight's debate

Posted on November 16, 2007
Hillary's solid performance in tonight's debate isn't important because of the minuscule audience tuned in to CNN from 8-10; it's important because it cuts off the downward spiral she'd been in since her mediocre performance in Philadelphia two weeks ago...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.