In Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices, Noah Feldman, the Bemis Professor of International Law at HLS, paints the lives of Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson. Feldman argues FDR’s appointees were largely outsiders. Both Justice Black and Justice Jackson had a scant legal education. … Read more
Bob Dylan is coming to Lowell, MA tomorrow for a concert. Excited yet? Frankly, there’s a lot that excites me more than the prospect of seeing Dylan live in concert. As everyone knows, Dylan likes to mess with his music; he sings every line too fast, and he mangles the old melodies, and at the moments … Read more
In the high-powered, well-researched world of Middle Eastern border politics, everyone knows about the Golan Heights, the Litani River, and the Sinai Peninsula. But nobody’s ever heard of Ghajar. A bucolic riverside village of 2,000 in the Galilee’s far north, Ghajar could fit inconspicuously anywhere on the Syrian, Lebanese, or Israeli landscape. Until regional tumult … Read more
In another bizarre chapter in the ongoing controversy that surrounds her, Virginia Thomas, Tea Party activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, indicated recently that she may step down from her position as head of Liberty Central. Thomas’s involvement in the group, intended to support conservative activists and Tea Party campaigns, drew concern … Read more
America is the richest country in the world. Karl Smith suggests three reasons why: I am going to go pretty conventional on this one and say a combination of three big factors The Common Law Massive Immigration The Great Scientific Exodus during WWII You’ll notice that four of the top five countries in the Human Development Indexhave … Read more
Alright Max, bait taken. We could have a longer debate about why America is rich, which is kind of a ridiculous question to take on with three bullet points, especially ones not obviously correlated to economic superiority and that don’t include the fact that the rest of the world was torn to pieces after WWII … Read more
Paul doesn’t know what I’m talking about: I’m a little bit unclear what you mean by public-wealth. Are you defining private-wealth as rich people and public-wealth as everybody else? Or are you defining private-wealth as the wealth of citizens and corporations and public-wealth as that of the government? So let me clarify. I’ll start with … Read more
“At the root of human responsibility is the concept of perfection, the urge to achieve it, the intelligence to find a path towards it, and the will to follow that path if not to the end at least the distance needed to rise above individual limitations and environmental impediments. It is man’s vision of a … Read more
From the New York Times: “Senate Leader Deals Blow to President on Arms Treaty.” It’s as if Charlie Wilson were minority whip. Photo Credit: Flickr (Chuckumentary)
The Republican wave of victory in the November 2 midterm elections was a dramatic rejection of the recent political agenda of President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. The widely predicted Republican takeover of the House of Representatives has been interpreted by political pundits and partisan commentators as the expression of public dissent over the Obama Administration’s reforms of … Read more