Think Tank West

Orin Kerr is a law professor at George Washington University and a blogger on the popular Volokh Conspiracy. He is a thoughtful, open-minded legal scholar, but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he reliably sides with law enforcement on Fourth Amendment issues. He recently posted a draft article defending the third-party doctrine, which [...]

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Texas ruled that Child Protective Services (CPS) abused its discretion by seizing 468 children from the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints ranch in Eldorado. Eugene Volokh has a roundup of the legal analysis. I wrote about this case a few days ago at NRO, but space limitations kept me from going into [...]

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This week I’m filling in for libertarian blogger Megan McArdle at the Atlantic. Yesterday I finished a three part discussion of Patent Failure, an excellent new book on the patent system by James Besson and Michael Meurer. The use of the phrase “intellectual property” to describe patents and copyrights has become so commonplace that we [...]

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Passed into law Wednesday: Section 1. AS 44.99 is amended by adding a new section to article 1 to read: 4 Sec. 44.99.040. Limitation on certain state expenditures. A state agency may not expend funds solely for the purpose of implementing or aiding in the implementation of the requirements of the federal Real ID Act [...]

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I recently received a complimentary copy of Peter Gosselin’s new book,  High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families.   Mr. Gosselin is the national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.  Here is an excerpt from the book jacket:  The recent downturn seems to have brought an end to some of the strongest, smoothest growth [...]

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“The Supreme Court this week made big news because it hardly changed the law at all,” reports The Washington Post. “The court broke no new ground in deciding that workers are protected from retaliation for complaining about discrimination, just as they are protected from discrimination itself.”  The story goes on to quote part of this press release that [...]

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There’s good news and bad news in the world of tax policy. The good news is that a growing number of nations now have flat tax systems instead of so-called progressive tax schemes that punish people for contributing more to economic growth. The bad news is that the United States is conspicuously absent on the [...]

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The Washington Examiner reports: Attendance at Nationals Park has fallen more than a quarter short of a consultant’s projections for the stadium’s inaugural year, cutting into the revenue needed to pay the ballpark bonds and spurring a D.C. Council member to demand the city’s money back. The District’s ability to pay down the debt on [...]

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President Bush told Neil Cavuto of Fox News on Friday, “Fiscal conservatism is one of my defining issues for the remaining months.”

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Mark Lampkin, Executive Director of ED in ’08, about which I wrote on National Review Online last week, has responded to my piece with a letter to the editor. Apparently, my explanation for why reform efforts within the current system are largely futile, and fundamentally altering the system is the key, was “narrow-minded.” It makes one [...]

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