Think Tank West

Sen. John McCain issued a ringing endorsement of the Supreme Court’s Heller decision: Today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right – sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly. You can’t get much stronger than that. Except . . .  wait . . . what was it McCain said about our [...]

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It’s not one of the big cases decided by the Supreme Court this term, but Indiana v. Edwards  shows how these justices are all over the map — from a libertarian legal perspective.  The issue was whether a person can choose to represent himself in court in a criminal case.  This corner of the law was [...]

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Yesterday I posted the first in a continuing series about tax credits we don’t need to illustrate how absurd it is that more politicians don’t support the one good kind of tax credit; education tax credits. I noted that one of the more popular tax credits is for saving old buildings that some people don’t [...]

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To echo Tim Lynch’s previous post . . . Bob Levy, Alan Gura, Dick Heller, and the other original plaintiffs in District of Columbia v. Heller are to be commended for securing a landmark Supreme Court ruling affirming that the Second Amendment protects the right of law abiding individuals to keep and bear arms.  It’s silly and sad [...]

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USA Today reports today on the findings of a preschool study, which concludes that Oklahoma’s government-run preschool gives a boost to the performance of all students in the short-term. Its news because the collective conclusions of previous studies overwhelmingly suggest that preschool boosts at-risk children in the short-term, but not children from middle and upper-income [...]

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Events of the past few weeks have made it clear that President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is a dictator and a bully who presides over a sham democracy epitomized by today’s mock “election.” But does that sad fact require or even justify imposing sanctions against that already tortured southern African country? European Union leaders are [...]

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Those who just days ago were proclaiming a new “era of good feelings” on the Court have been definitively proven wrong. Indeed, the last two weeks have seen more 5-4 divisions than the entire rest of the year to that point. While we have seen more unanimous rulings and fewer narrow splits than last term [...]

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Congrats to Bob Levy, the prime mover behind yesterday’s landmark ruling concerning the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.  Congrats also to his legal team of Alan Gura and Clark Neily.  And congrats to Eugene Volokh (of the Volokh Conspiracy blog) who had three of his law review articles cited in the majority opinion. Brian [...]

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France has reportedly called an extraordinary meeting of European Union trade ministers to discuss EU trade negotiating strategy in the World Trade Organization’s floundering Doha round of trade talks. France takes over the EU’s rotating presidency on 1st July for six months, inconvenient timing considering that the WTO’s Director-General Pascal Lamy has called a July [...]

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In the interview touted below by Jim Harper, the faux-neocon character played by Stephen Colbert asks constitutional scholar Neal Katyal, “Where does the Constitution get off telling the government what it can and cannot do?” He’s ostensibly speaking for the four conservative justices who dissented in the Boumediene v. Bush case. But today he could [...]

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