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.”
Archive for 2014
December 5, 2014
DAVID BOAZ: Eric Garner could spark American Spring.
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.
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.
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.”
IN THE MAIL: From Frank J. Fleming, Punch Your Inner Hippie: Cut Your Hair, Get a Job, and Make America Awesome Again.
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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?
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IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: The Hill: Watchdog: IRS Withholding Documents on Taxpayer Data Requests. “A watchdog group says the IRS is withholding documents between the agency and the White House that show inappropriate requests for taxpayer data, according to multiple reports. . . . A court has said the agency must hand over the documents. But IRS officials have said that they will not release the documents, citing a part of the tax code that protects the confidentiality of individual tax returns.” They’ve got something to hide.
CHANGE: Mark Levin urges states to ‘take back your power’ from ‘runaway’ Obama.
The building national movement for a constitutional convention of states to block President Obama’s executive orders got a huge boost Thursday when leading advocate Mark Levin urged state lawmakers to throttle all of Washington, including Republicans.
“Take your power back,” he demanded of the hundreds of lawmakers attending the American Legislative Exchange Council convention on Capitol Hill. “You are the last line of defense of liberty.”
Levin got star billing because a focus of the winter meeting of the limited government group is pushing for a convention of states, a project of the Citizens for Self-Governance, who sponsored the top talk show host who recently wrote a book laying out constitutional amendments the nation should consider. The process is offered in Article V of the Constitution.
He described a nation that is morphing into a “post-constitutional” crisis where state legislatures are “irrelevant,” and the president and Congress do whatever they want, and nobody in Washington provides checks and balances.
“We have a president of the United States who says, ‘Hey, Congress won’t act. I will.’ Excuse me? Well what’s that? Sounds like a runaway convention to me,” he said.
Ditto for Republicans. “Throw out the establishment Republicans and others who are stopping you from doing what you need to do,” Levin urged.
To applause, he pushed legislators to consider a convention of 2,000-3,000 delegates to review procedures for hosting a constitutional convention as a warning shot to Congress and the White House. “That alone would shake up this city,” he said.
The Tennessee Law Review published a special symposium issue on constitutional conventions a few years ago. I wrote the Foreword, Sandy Levinson wrote the Afterword, and an all-star cast including Randy Barnett, Brannon Denning, Richard Epstein, Tim Lynch, Rob Natelson, and too many other luminaries to mention contributed the stuff in between. Here’s my contribution, which focuses specifically on spending. And here’s video of me talking about it at the Harvard Law School conference on constitutional conventions.
WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Healthcare.gov average premiums increasing in 2015.
ROLL CALL: Obama’s Push for Political Ambassadors Reaching Lame-Duck Limit.
President Barack Obama won the latest round Tuesday, when senators voted almost straight down party lines to confirm two new diplomats whose most obvious calling cards were raising a combined $4 million to elect and re-elect the president. That would be Colleen Bell, a Hollywood soap opera producer who will now spend the next two years running the U.S. embassy in Budapest; and Noah Mamet, a public relations consultant who got his start as a fundraiser for House Democrats two decades ago and is off to take the corner office in Buenos Aires.
Starting next year, the advantage in the argument will go to the Republicans, because once they take over the Senate they’ll have total power to ignore into oblivion any diplomatic choice they view as unqualified.
The mystery is what happens in the next week. Beyond the big-ticket legislative items, Majority Leader Harry Reid is confronting a mountain of routine bills and nominations, knowing he can’t possibly get it all done even if he stretches the lame duck beyond Dec. 12. He’s not tipping his hand on how hard he’ll push for action on would-be ambassadors — although in the short time available the Nevada Democrat will have more success with the 13 career diplomats waiting in the wings than with the dozen political appointees.
By recent historic standards, Obama is starting to test the ceiling for putting friends and campaign supporters in U.S. diplomatic posts. Altogether, 35 percent of Obama’s assignments so far have gone to political people. But in his second term, the number has grown to 41 percent according to research by the American Foreign Service Association, the union representing career diplomats that would like more strict enforcement of a 1980 law that says campaign donations may not be considered a qualification for any foreign posting.
Well, I’d say that law is constraining Obama about as much as, well, all the others.
THE HILL: Obama signals he’ll put muscle behind response to police killings.
During a Thursday speech, Obama said he intends to “take more steps” with leaders like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio “in the months ahead to make sure that all Americans have confidence that police and law enforcement are serving everybody equally.”
“When it comes, as we’ve seen, unfortunately, in recent days, to our criminal justice system, too many Americans feel deep unfairness when it comes to the gap between our professed ideals and how laws are applied on a day-to-day basis,” Obama said.
He acknowledged addressing the issue was a big challenge, but said it should galvanize the country and bring Americans together.
The New York grand jury’s decision to not indict a police officer in the death of Garner, who was placed in a chokehold and said “I can’t breathe” as he was pulled to the ground, hit Washington like a sledgehammer.
The decision came just two weeks after a separate grand jury did not indict a white police officer in the death of Michael Brown, a black teenager.
Both decisions have provoked protests around the country, elevating the issue of criminal justice and police behavior.
But it remains unclear how long Obama and the White House will be focused on the issue given a breadth of other challenges facing the administration.
It’ll be interesting to see if the Dems really make a clean break with the police unions. Related: Police union leader says de Blasio threw officers ‘under the bus.’