Volokh lends me an argument

" For most, quite possibly all, of us, our moral beliefs ultimately rest on unproven and unprovable moral axioms. The Constitution doesn't consign those whose moral beliefs rest on unproven and unprovable religious axioms to a lesser citizenship, under which they may not enact their views into law, while others with the same views that rest on unproven and unprovable secular axioms are free to do so."

 

And boy, did I need it.

 

For the record, I think cominginsecond is an idiot anyway.  One of those guys who absorbs platitudes and sound bites and spits them back without checking them out for himself. I mean, he subscribed whole hog to the "fake but accurate" theme of the forged National Guard memoes. What a maroon.

Seamus Hasson

Brilliant man. Came to the law school last night to talk about his new book, The Right to be Wrong: Ending the Culture War over Religion in America. I think he's right on about how to go about ensuring that everyone has the right to believe in public. I do NOT believe that people have some sort of right to avoid being exposed to ideas they don't believe in. It's not secondhand smoke, people.

Alice Batchelder

She's my choice.

Right to Bear Arms

This post sums up my jurisprudential view on the 2nd Amendment. I love it when people who've heard a soundbite or two cry "It's a militia right!" Oh, now they're originalists? Except they forgot the 14th Amendment has to come into play. Oh, and Roper is ok to invoke a (phantom) national consensus but 2nd Amendment jurisprudence has no such right?

A small experiment

I wonder if I'll be depressed  unhappy if this doesn't work. 

Anti-State or Anti-Left?

I'm absolutely an anti-state conservative, well, libertarian. But, like Dale, I see anti-statism as the sine qua non of conservatism. I believe Reagan did also. George W. Bush? Not so much.

Very Cool

You have to try this optical illusion.

The new bill granting some immunity to gun manufacturers

The anti-gun commenters at Volokh are really dense. Over and over people try to explain to them about personal responsibility and how a gun is an inanimate object which requires a live person for its utility, and try to explain the difference between negligence and strict liability. I will make two quick comments. One, there's a Kossack there who thinks guns are an "ultrahazardous item" and therefore gun manufacturers should be treated accordingly. When someone points out that automobiles actually kill many more people each year than guns do, and you don't hear a cry to make those an "ultrahazardous item", the Kossack says, yeah, but guns are intended to kill. So they're ultrahazardous, even though they aren't very hazardous, because of the intent of the manufacturer? (or someone. I'm not clear who the intender is). Which is it? Of course, that grants his proposition that guns are manufactured with the intent to kill, well, something.

 

People proceed on this issue with no facts. They have a gut instinct, a knee-jerk reaction, and then they go with it. Guns are dangerous! Guns kill people! The news media is complicit in spreading the story that guns are only used for evil, and for tons of evil, at that. Lost are the stories of someone who uses a gun in a proper manner, who protects with it, who saves another. Lost are the statistics that show that a bucket of water around the house causes more deaths each year than guns. I don't pretend that you can find truthful statistics on such a polarizing issue. But most of these folks don't even look for them.

Harriet Miers = Warren Burger

I've been reading The Brethren, by Woodward, and it's a pretty bleak picture of the jurisprudence of Warren Burger. It was all about the correct result. How is Harriet Miers any different?

Judicial Activism and the Commerce Clause

I could write an article about slippery slopes in real life, and only talk about Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

Buckley on Jurisprudence

The article of William Buckley referenced in this post at QandO expresses how I feel about Constitutional jurisprudence. I don't want judges to "do the right thing." It's not their job. It's the job of the legislature. If you can't convince enough people that what you want is "the right thing", it should give you pause that maybe it isn't. Not that that sort of awareness ever stopped Chairman Mac. The "right thing" for judges is to apply the law that is already written, not write their own moral choices into the law. Emanations and penumbras, indeed.

Trolls

How annoying. And then to go back to the original place they came from in order to gloat about how aware and righteous they are, and how backwards and foolish we are. What is this, the 3rd grade? Drives me nuts.

Why couldn't it have been Kozinski?

I mean, the reaction to Harriet Miers has not been good from either side of the aisle. Why couldn't Bush just have nominated Alex Kozinski?

I am SO behind the times

I JUST BARELY figured out with this newfangled internet thingy, how I could post to my blog using email. Will I use it more often now? I guess we'll see.

Telegraph | Opinion | Making a pig's ear of defending democracy

Mark Steyn cites a story out of Britain that is scary. I second Eugene Volokh's comments on the subject. Once you have a right not to be offended, the only way that right can be enforced is by controlling each and every act of the people with whom you come in contact, with the incredibly subjective standard of "Did X's actions/word bug me?" as the threshold for state action.

More links on Scalia's Jurisprudence

A collection of links about Scalia's jurisprudence.

Scalia's constitutional interpretation.

Scalia's constitutional interpretation.: "it's what the people who agreed to the text understood it to mean when they voted to ratify."