Category Archives: Law

On Education

That American education is bereft of meaning in all but the most cloistered areas of its purview is self-evident. Little Liam and Olivia not only don’t know the three Rs by the 6th grade, they likely don’t even know what they are. Many of them and their like will sail through on the SS Ignoble…


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When Race Trumps Merit – Book Review

Heather Mac Donald’s latest book is subtitled: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. It is such a tale of horrors that a number of alternate subtitles come to mind. Animal Farm Redux, How I Came to Love Big Brother, A Litany of Lunacy, 40 Years Before the Mast, Gone…


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Noise – Book Review

Noise – A Flaw in Human Judgement is a book by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. The noise that is their subject is not that of honking geese or backfiring motorcycles; it’s the unwanted variability in judgement or decision making when the facts behind the decision or judgement are the same. Noise and…


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Logic and the Law

Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at George Washington University and the legal affairs editor of The New Republic. He’s the author of a recent article in the New York Times which exemplifies a peculiar disaffinity between law and logic. In this article he professes a fondness for a positive vision of progressive jurisprudence. He…


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Gibbon and the Law

Edward Gibbon (1737 – 1794) is the greatest historian to write in English, and so far as I can tell in any language. His greatness rests on four pillars. His knowledge of his subject (the Roman world from antiquity to the fall of Constantinople in 1453) is more than encyclopedic; it’s beyond understanding. His use…


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The Law and Lewis Carroll

Originally published in 1986, this piece describes a legal climate that has not changed in the intervening 23 years. It also appears on the Commentary page The advent of medical malpractice litigation as a growth industry has spawned many reactions. Physicians, not unexpectedly, respond with outrage. They adduce that most of the increase in malpractice…


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Cocaine and Addiction

I chanced upon this article. Its subject is the advisability of legalizing marijuana. It’s at the usual level of coherence that typifies public discussion of the subject. It sees no conflict between an individual’s right to engage in behavior that harms only himself and society’s right to stop him, indeed to lock him up for…


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Medicine Undefined

The purpose of medicine is twofold. First to prolong life, ie to prevent premature death from disease. The second is to relieve pain and suffering from disease. To many medical “experts” it also appears to include the alleviation of just about anything that can cause distress of any sort. War, murder, crime, and poverty are…


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More on the Medical Establishment

In the January 3, 2008 issue of the world’s best and most important medical journal –The New England Journal of Medicine – Gregory D. Curfman, M.D., Stephen Morrissey, Ph.D., and Jeffrey M. Drazen, M.D. discuss a case before the Supreme Court – Riegel v. Medtronic. The case involves whether state law and federal law conflict…


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