Hoisted from comments: Joe S.: I'm a lawyer. I agree with Brian. The smoking gun has long been in plain sight: Yoo's omission of Youngstown Sheet & Tube in his torture memo. The recent release merely adds to it. However, as a lawyer, let me point out something else. It will be extremely hard to conv...

Berkeley Political Economy Group Major Advisory Committee and Stakeholders' Meeting: Background The phrase "political economy" has at least four meanings: the heir of Enlightenment moral philosophy, in the same sense that today's proper sciences are the heirs of Enlightenment natural philosophy. the...

Greg Mankiw's desire to move Harvard to someplace better adapted to human life than Massachusetts was triggered by: Greg Mankiw's Blog: Time for Harvard to Move?: The Wall Street Journal reports one of the most pernicious ideas I have heard of late: "Massachusetts legislators, demonstrating a growin...

Law professor Mark Graber--who we last saw using Martin Luther King Day weekend to blog about how Dred Scott was rightly decided by Roger Taney, and how Taney's opinion was legally correct when it stated that no Black man had any rights that the white man was bound to respect--pokes his head out of ...

Jacob Levy responds to my "I say cut the Gordian knot. THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!!" by saying: Jacob T. Levy: [F]eh. Scoring points is fun and all, but the point being scored here is entirely beside the, well, point. Brad...

Jacob Levy thinks he has a problem: he cannot present conservatism attractively in his classes because there are no attractive modern conservatives: Jacob T. Levy: Tyler Cowen... makes the insightful point that "none [of the 20th century American conservatives] have held up particularly well, mostly...

Cosma Shalizi is driven into shrill unholy madness by the Chronicle of Higher Education: Clothes Make Working for the Man Easier: I have just had one Prof. Erik M. Jensen's op-ed "A Call for Professional Attire" referred to me by multiple sources (none especially pointedly, thanks), and I find mysel...