HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: The Market for Law School Applicants — A Milestone to Remember. “We are indeed living through a business school case study, which is both bad and good. At many schools — likely well more than half — hard choices need to be made to ensure survival. (And for the record, virtually all schools, regardless of rank, are feeling uncomfortable levels of heat.) A law school needs cash to pay its expenses. But it also needs faculty and curricula to attract students. The deeper a law school cuts, the less attractive it becomes to students. Likewise, pervasive steep discounts on tuition reflect a classic collective action problem. Some schools may eventually close, but a huge proportion of survivors are burning through their financial reserves.”

Related: Law Schools Still Have A Ways To Fall.

DAVID BOAZ: Eric Garner could spark American Spring.

#GREENFAIL: A Two-Day Battle to Charge My Car Convinced Me We’re Not Ready for EVs.

CHEAP OIL COULD kill off biofuel mandates. I wouldn’t mind keeping cellulosic ethanol research going, but food-based biofuels have been a disaster.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Holiday Gift Guide in Electronics.

Also, shop the Golf Gift Guide.

RATHER A LOT, REALLY: The Pentagon Finally Details its Weapons-for-Cops Giveaway. Plus, scroll down and you can search by state to see what was given to police forces in your area.

COMPUTERS AND IMAGING TECHNOLOGY PRODUCING AN ASTRONOMICAL REVOLUTION: 55 Cancri Super-Earth Spotted With Ground-Based Telescope. “Computer and sensor advances have made telescopes of all sizes much more powerful. What this means: Any intelligent civilization that reaches our level of technological development will be able to search for and find planets which have a substantial chance of harboring life. Any civilization in our neighborhood that is much older than ours was able to detect our sun a long time ago and find evidence of the planets in orbit around our sun. Surely technologies for detecting intelligent life are also very advanced in civilizations that past our point of development a long time ago. So what strikes me: If there are other intelligent and industrialized species out there in our arm of the Milky Way Galaxy some must know our planet harbors life. But do any yet know our planet has intelligent life? Have any already made the decision to reach us for some purpose?”

Fermi’s Question with a slightly different spin. Of course, maybe they’re on the way. . . .

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nearly perfect carbon nanotubes key to energy-saving lights.

OUT: WOMEN DON’T LIE ABOUT RAPE! IN: Washington Post: U-Va. fraternity to rebut claims of gang rape in Rolling Stone.

A lawyer for the University of Virginia fraternity whose members were accused of a brutal gang rape said Friday that the organization will release a statement rebutting the claims printed in a Rolling Stone article about the incident. Several of the woman’s close friends and campus sex assault awareness advocates said that they also doubt the published account.

Officials close to the fraternity said that the statement will indicate that Phi Kappa Psi did not host a party on Sept. 28, 2012, the night that a university student named Jackie alleges she was invited to a date party, lured into an upstairs room and was then ambushed and gang-raped by seven men who were rushing the fraternity.

The officials also said that no members of the fraternity were employed at the university’s Aquatic Fitness Center during that time frame — a detail Jackie provided in her account to Rolling Stone and in interviews with The Washington Post — and that no member of the house matches the description detailed in the Rolling Stone account. . . .

Will Dana, Rolling Stone’s managing editor, also released a statement with new doubt. “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced,” he said in a statement.

Will U.Va. President Teresa Sullivan apologize for her evidence-free collective punishment of the entire Greek system? Actually, she should resign.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: DARPA Is Getting Closer to an Iron Man Suit.

RANDY BARNETT: How To Finally Kill ObamaCare: The Supreme Court is more likely to act if Republicans have an alternative bill ready.

JAMES ANTLE: Wounded Donkey: The Democratic Party’s Obamacare Disaster. “Both Harkin and Schumer are liberals lamenting what will likely be the Obama administration’s main domestic-policy legacy. They are both now saying the Democrats blew it.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 575.

ROB LONGLEY: Republicans Use Constitutional Experts — and President’s Own Words — in Debate Over Immigration Decree.

“President Obama has stated over 20 times in the past that he doesn’t have the constitutional power to take such steps on his own — and has repeatedly stated that, ‘I’m not a king,’” Goodlatte said in his opening statement.

He then played a video showing a series of clips in which Obama insists he can’t unilaterally change or make immigration law.

He said the president’s 180-degree turn on the issue has lit the fuse of a “full-fledged” constitutional crisis.

“The Constitution is clear,” Goodlatte said. “It is Congress’ duty to write our nation’s laws and, once they are enacted, it is the president’s responsibility to enforce them.”

Indeed.

STEPHEN L. CARTER: Law Puts Us All in Same Danger as Eric Garner.

On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn’t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it’s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes, or loosies, in violation of New York law.

The obvious racial dynamics of the case — the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, is white; Garner was black — have sparked understandable outrage. But, at least among libertarians, so has the law that was being enforced. Wrote Nick Gillespie in the Daily Beast, “Clearly something has gone horribly wrong when a man lies dead after being confronted for selling cigarettes to willing buyers.” Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, appearing on MSNBC, also blamed the statute: “Some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive.”

The problem is actually broader. It’s not just cigarette tax laws that can lead to the death of those the police seek to arrest. It’s every law. Libertarians argue that we have far too many laws, and the Garner case offers evidence that they’re right. I often tell my students that there will never be a perfect technology of law enforcement, and therefore it is unavoidable that there will be situations where police err on the side of too much violence rather than too little. Better training won’t lead to perfection. But fewer laws would mean fewer opportunities for official violence to get out of hand.

Yes, but fewer laws also offer politicians fewer opportunities for graft.

FLASHBACK: Waco: When The Press Loved Militarized Policing. “As Kaus notes, it was strange to see reporters fawning over Reno after she presided over a catastrophic failure that left twenty-six children dead.”

Lot of white people killed by the police that day, though to be fair the Branch Davidians were a pretty diverse bunch.

CHUCK TODD ON OBAMACARE: “This Bill Is A Mess.” Kinda makes you wish people had read it before they passed it, huh?

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Reid vs. White House Tensions Cloud Majority’s Final Days: Divides over electoral strategy and a tax deal reflect stresses between the Senate’s top Democrat and the Obama administration.