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Booze, Fights, and Federalism
As Justice Fish pointed out in a recent lecture on “The Effect of Alcohol on Canadian Constitution,” “alcohol has nurtured our constitutional development from its earliest days.” Canadian constitutional lawyers can proudly say, with Churchill, that we “have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of” us. For instance, the double aspect…
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Pity the Censor
I have started reading the WWI memoir of a British journalist, Philip Gibbs, called Now It Can Be Told. At least part of the reason for the title is that during the war, what he saw could not be told because of military censorship. Gibbs’ description of the censors’ modus operandi is worth quoting at…
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In Memoriam, Boris Strugatsky
Boris Strugatsky died on Monday in Saint-Petersburg, aged 79. The Guardian has an obituary which conveys something of his and his brother Arkady’s importance to Russian culture. The Strugatsky brothers are―are, since the books remain―among my favourite writers. I want to say something about them here. I have sometimes mentioned science-fiction on this blog, especially…
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Judicial Independence, Freedom, and Duty
Judicial independence is a familiar idea, though it is also a difficult one, in more than one sense. Difficult to accept, on the one hand, because independence from political, and ultimately electoral, control seats uneasily with our notions of democracy in which political power (which judges exercise, since they make their decisions in the name…
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The Future is Even Creepier
There is an interesting story in today’s New York Times that brings together a couple of my recent topics, the tracking of internet users by the websites they visit and the use of the data thus generated in advertising, about which I wrote here, and the use of target-specific outreach and advertising by President Obama’s…
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The Future Is Creepy
I had the chance today to be at a talk by two of the members of the legal “brain-trust” of President Obama’s re-election campaign, NYU’s professors Rick Pildes and Sam Issacharoff. (I have to brag: it was one of those moments that make NYU the best law school in the world.) Yet although they spoke…
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Petty Punishment
The Court of Appeal for British Columbia has struck down yet another element of the “tough-on-crime” agenda of the Conservative government in a recent decision, Whaling v. Canada (Attorney General), 2012 BCCA 435, holding that the abolition of accelerated parole could not be applied to prisoners sentenced before the coming into force of the Abolition of Early Parole…
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Why Can’t They Vote?
At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has a response to my post yesterday arguing that lowering the minimal voting age to 16 is a better way of redressing the exclusion of minors from the franchise than prof. Somin’s proposal to allow any minor to vote provided that he or she can past a test assessing…
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Si jeunesse pouvait
Je voudrais revenir, en cette journée post-électorale, sur un billet qu’Ilya Somin a publié hier sur Volokh Conspiracy. Prof. Somin y remet en question le déni du droit de vote à « une part énorme de notre population: les enfants de moins de 18 ans » (je traduis). Selon lui, cette exclusion est « injuste…
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The Idea of the Marketplace
Apologies for the lack of blogging for the past week. We had this minor disturbance of a hurricane, and then I went to a conference in Chicago to present my paper on federalism and judicial review. My topic today is the highlight of that conference, a keynote address by Robert Post, Dean of the Yale…
Double Aspect 