November 6, 2007
Why lawyers are protesters in Pakistan ::
legal — tagged lawyers, legal, marshall law, pakistan and politics
8:23 am
Slate has a good piece explaining why we’re seeing attorneys at the center of the protests against Musharraf’s recent imposition of Marshall Law. Sure, there’s the whole point that they were the only remaining group who could muster the power to get together after Musharraf took power in 1999 and chased all the opposition parties out of the country; and yes, the courts made for a convenient place for the lawyers to gather. But there’s a historical and cultural context in which all of this occurred:
Lawyers and the law have played a central role in politics since the beginning of Pakistan’s history. The founder of the country, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a barrister—he mounted a series of successful arguments for how the 1947 separation from India would take place; at heart, Partition was a legal arrangement.And throughout the decades of Pakistan’s existence, lawyers have fought for the development of legislative and judicial institutions in opposition to military dictatorship and the existing bureaucratic rule.Do you want download mp3 music from online mp3 archive,You find where mp3 music download for mp3 player.
August 30, 2007
No Goldwater ::
politics — tagged politics, senate and washington dc
7:47 am
Slate discusses whether the Republicans lashing out against Larry Craig is consistent with the fundamental principles of conservatism—namely, by asking what Barry Goldwater would have done in the same situation. Looking back to the 1964 campaign for President, when Goldwater decided against attacking Johnson for keeping his aide Walter Jenkins after Jenkins had been arrested for the same behavior in a Washington, D.C. YMCA, Slate argues that Republicans today have drifted far away from their more principled—not to mention personally decent—roots. Goldwater recounted his reasoning for leaving the matter alone:
As Goldwater later wrote, “It was a sad time for Jenkins’ wife and children, and I was not about to add to their private sorrow. Winning isn’t everything. Some things, like loyalty to friends or lasting principle, are more important.”
I can imagine the sort of personal turmoil this incident has created for the Senator’s family. That his colleagues have either abandoned him or have decided to openly attack him speaks volumes on their current lack of decency.
January 30, 2007
Executive (dis)order ::
politics — tagged admin law, executive orders, legal and politics
12:15 pm
I haven’t read the Bush Administration’s executive order that the New York Times reported on this morning (note, it seems not to have been posted yet over at the FR website here it is), but I have to say I’m kind of intrigued by the idea, but for different reasons than the liberal political blogs are dwelling on. Sure, there are many who are saying that it’s another step in politicizing what should be an area of pure regulation that functions well only when it’s based on the best evidence and best practices and not on ideology. And I would agree if I thought there was any possibility of the program working. But look—how many federal regulatory agencies are there out there? (I really have no idea, so it’s not just a rhetorical question.) And how many of them are going to report to the White House? And with all the problems the Bush administration is currently facing, is there any way that any group of humans could handle this new bit of chaos? It just seems too overwhelming a project to manage in any coherent way.
So it makes me wonder if maybe it’s something of a back door strategy on the part of the Bush administration. While everyone is screaming that this is just another attempt to coddle regulated industries, in reality what is happening is the Bush administration is taking down regulations by simply performing an impossible task incompetently.
Incidentally, this is a perfect example of micromanagers are really not effective leaders. They just can’t do the amount of work that is required to in order to exercise the amount of control their pathologies demand.
November 20, 2006
One week, one day ::
personal — tagged politics, vermont and work
7:25 pm
I started my new job last week. I won’t be talking about my work at all here, except for in the most general terms. That said, here’s some general background: as a law clerk for Vermont Legislative Council, it’s my job to perform legal research and help draft statutes for members of the Vermont Legislature. Although it may sound like I spend my days locked in a windowless office in front of a computer searching WestLaw, the position actually entails much more than that. Namely, I’ll be working directly with the members, discussing legal matters with them, and advising them as they make different policy decisions. And of course, that work is complemented by plenty of time spent in front of a computer in a windowless office searching Westlaw. So it’s a nice contrast, and should keep the work interesting.
But that’s that. You should know that, at least in the professional realm, I’m quite happy indeed.
October 12, 2006
The Thermals: The Body, the Blood, the Machine ::
music — tagged indie rock, music, politics, post punk, subpop and the thermals
4:07 pm
There’s a certain point at which I listen to an album enough and it goes from being something I just generically sort of enjoy to something something more distinguished and profound. It’s at that point I realize that I’ve liked this album not because of some catchy hook or some set of impassioned screaming, but because I’m somehow connected to the music they’re playing on a more fundamental level.
This happened today. On their new album The Body, the Blood, the Machine, The Thermals speak to me (or scream at me) in a way that I’ve been wanting a band to for a few years now. Part political commentary, part impassioned (though oblique) love story, the songs never drift too far into one subject or the other, but rather stick right in between the two, both sides pulling against them and adding even more to the tension. The end result is a set of ten songs emblazoned in my mind, which I find myself thinking about—or outright singing—at any given time during the day. (Yeah, you can picture me biking through Montpelier singing “A Pillar of Salt” to myself.)
Part of it, I am sure, is that I’ve been through a set of pretty substantial changes since I bought this album. I picked it up on the day it was released from New World Record, the hipster record store up the street from my parents’ house in Buffalo. I had to harass the clerk to dig the album out of Sub Pop’s box, he had yet to even enter the disc into the store’s database by the time I’d bought it. From there the CD when right into my car’s player, where it’s been ever since. It’s become one of the few albums I’ll listen to straight through, the volume creeping up from medium-loud to close-to-deafening by closing feedback of the last track. All the while I’m listening I’ll think about having graduated from law school (thus losing the structure on which I’d come to depend for the past three years), having taken the bar, having passed the bar, having moved my life up to Montpelier, and generally feeling somewhat confused at how my life could simultaneously have so much direction yet at the same time no direction at all. All of this is happening in a political year, with an increasingly unpopular President focussed on a painfully unpopular and wrong-headed war, with the economy flatlining and building tensions in throughout the Middle East and now in North Korea. Meanwhile all of our elected leaders seem to want to ignore these problems and protect themselves. The outrage at this injustice is palpable. It’s that strange contrast of personal emotion and political awareness that I think first attracted me to this album and has, I now confess, made me fall in love with it.
In any event, I can say in retrospect why I love this album, but it’s impossible for me to predict which bands are going to be a taste-of-the-month and which ones are really going to endure. If I knew what it was about these albums that gives them such staying power, I would probably be much better at selecting music I know I would actually like over the long term, and would likely save a lot of money. But then, if the system were more predictable it wouldn’t be music or art that I was immersing myself in—it would be science or law or something else that would be a lot more boring and much less meaningful.
October 8, 2006
Sunday morning news blogging ::
politics — tagged congress, environment, legal, newsblogging, politics and sustainability
11:08 am
Now that I live without a television, my Sunday mornings are usually spent reading news sources and political blogs rather than idly worshipping the institution of Sunday morning punditry. So with that, let me start what I hope to be an ongoing tradition here at The Pages Within: Sunday morning news blogging. With that, two interesting articles worthy of reading.
The first is an LA Times piece on the products allowed into US markets that other countries ban. At the top of the list is Chinese-produced plywood coated in formaldehyde, which incidentally the Chinese government has banned in its own country. The lack of regulation in the US, however, has created two separate camps of corporations—one that is self-regulating, and the other that chooses to take advantage of the lack of health regulations in this country. The self-regulating companies instead “comply with EU standards, the most stringent chemical laws in the world.”
“We don’t operate to different standards in different parts of the globe, regardless of differing environmental standards,” said John Frey, manager of corporate environmental strategies at Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard.
Those companies that choose to adhere only to the minimal US regulations have a predictable argument:
[T]heir products have undergone rigorous reviews in the United States and are not only legal here but safe. They say some governments, particularly the EU, have overreacted and banned chemicals with little or no evidence of a human health threat.
Similar to this case, his book Collapse Jared Diamond contrasts the business practices of two oil companies, and talks about how one company—Chevron—discovered it was better to self-regulate, setting the bar higher than the law necessarily requires, both because taking precautions is always cheaper than dealing with a disaster, and because, like it or not, the tendency of government is to implement more stringent health and safety requirements. So it’s good to be ready for it.
The second article is a slightly more self-explanatory piece in Slate about Congress’ use of the language of addiction. You might not have thought that the Foley scandal and the passage of the (likely unconstitutional) detainee bill are related, but apparently they are.
October 2, 2006
On this quiet morning, you can almost hear the gavel bang ::
legal — tagged abortion, books, equalprotection, legal, politics and SCOTUS
8:07 am
Well, not literally, because according to the Supreme Court calendar oral arguments don’t start up until tomorrow morning. (Which is actually good news because it will give me a chance to catch up on some of the more interesting cases that the court will be hearing this term.) And as Linda Greenhouse notes in this piece in the NY Times, the court will hear some very important cases this term—namely ones dealing with Congress’ Partial Birth Abortion Ban and two schools’ efforts to acheive racial integration in their schools. My take on the two consolidated cases, distilled into one (long) sentence: It’s hard to tell how the abortion cases (summaries here and here) will turn out; however, if the two school integration cases (summaries here and here) wind up standing it may be for the wrong reasons—that is, local control—and not the right ones—i.e., a more honest application of Equal Protection that has less to do with absolute race blindness and more to do with achieving racial equality after hundreds of years of slavery, segregation, and all the disparities that come with them.
With the oncoming October term, our minds should also turn to the thoughts of fun legal reading. And to fill that mental need comes this 600+ page tome on the life of many a liberal lawyer’s hero, Justice Earl Warren. Apparently, far from painting Warren as a standards-bearer for liberal legal causes, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made doesn’t shy away from the type of figure Warren cut before he made it onto the court:
...Warren was an almost stereotypical Republican before joining the high court. As Jim Newton reveals in his meticulously researched and well-told new biography, “Justice for All,” Warren was a zealous prosecutor, passionately anti-Communist, pro-business, anti-New Deal, anti-gambling, anti-pornography, tough on crime (his father was murdered in their Bakersfield home in 1938), and he favored interning California’s Japanese and their American-born children after Pearl Harbor.
How interesting! One assertion I made in the past was that it was precisely because Republicans of the 1950’s had no political ties to Southern segregationists that they had the freedom to act as both their conscience and the Constitution required them to. Based on the review, it sounds that Warren’s actions once he got on the court were quite consistent with that. But we’ll see what I think after I read the book.
October 1, 2006
A serious downside to judicial elections ::
legal — tagged judges, legal and politics
8:55 am
There are some things you never want to hear a judge—much less a state supreme court justice—utter. I think this line takes it:
Even sitting justices have started to question the current system. “I never felt so much like a hooker down by the bus station in any race I’ve ever been in as I did in a judicial race,” said Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, a Republican member of the Ohio Supreme Court. “Everyone interested in contributing has very specific interests.”
From the New York Times: Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court’s Rulings.
September 30, 2006
Bush’s (and Woodward’s) State of Denial ::
politics — tagged books, bush, iraq, politics and waronterror
9:47 am
I started my weekend catch-up-on-the-news routine with finding out that Bob Woodward has a new book coming out, State of Denial, which is apparently is much more critical of the Bush Administration’s handling of his job—from Iraq and the War on Terror to just about everything else the President has been demanding unchecked authority to control—than anything else Woodward has previously written. Apparently Republicans, particularly members of the administration, are in damage control mode. And I would be to if I had to deal with anecdotes such as these:
Laura Bush telling her husband he should fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Vice President Cheney pushing aides to call the chief weapons inspector in the middle of the night with coordinates for a site in Syria that might have those elusive weapons. Secret White House visits by Henry Kissinger. Bush having to tell Rumsfeld to return Condoleezza Rice’s calls. Memos describing Rumsfeld’s “rubber glove syndrome”—he didn’t want to leave fingerprints on decisions.
Ouch. What’s funny is that I noted Woodward’s use of anecdotes in my review of The Brethren. On the one hand the device is useful for telling a compelling story, but on the other hand it sometime seems that Woodward will lay them on too thick, the story at some point becoming more about Woodward and the amount of access he has than it does about the subjects of his stories or the value of investigative journalism in holding elected officials to account. The effect is similar to that of too much mayonaise on your sandwich: what should be just one flavor and texture of the experience becomes the whole experience, and it’s a pretty nauseating one. But what’s particularly interesting here is Woodward’s central theme in his book:
He charges the president has not been straight with the American people about how bad things are in Iraq and how much worse it’s going to get. But his most damning claim—screaming at you right there in the title—is not that Bush is deceitful; it’s that he’s clueless. People many not care if Bush admits reality to the public, but they hope he’s admitting reality to himself.
Yeah, no kidding. My guess? The book will be worth reading because it sounds like Woodward’s first honest account of what’s probably been a reality of Bush administration culture since Bush took office in 2001. But publishing the book likely comes at the expense of Woodward losing the access he he formerly enjoyed with the Bush people. So I guess that means he’ll be going back to his old style of writing while hoping for an understanding candidate taking the White House in 2008.
September 24, 2006
Vermonters secede! ::
vermont — tagged history, politics, secession, vermont and weird
8:36 pm
The LA Times has an article about the Vermont secession movement (NB: I, like 92 percent of those polled in the state, do not support it). Overall the article is ok, though its general tone is a little glib. And the two main problems I found? The article refers to the Ethan Allen Institute as a “non-partisan” think tank. However, for anyone who pays any attention at all to politics in the state, the EAI is famous (or infamous) as a group of conservative free-market zealots. So sure, they may be non-partisan, but who do you think they support come election time? Certainly not the party that advocates for single-payer healthcare.
Secondly I noted something about the leader of the Second Vermont Republic, Thomas Naylor. According to the LA Times piece, Naylor grew quite wealthy after running an software company early in the PC era. (His bio substantiates that he did work in tech, but didn’t mention that he might have gotten rich off it.) But now Naylor spends much of his intellectual efforts (when he’s not defending holocaust-questioning anti-semites) railing against the economic systems and cultural phenomena that made him rich and allowed him to pursue his ongoing political ends. Note particularly his complaints in the Technofascist Manifesto (whatever that may be), e.g., Article 1, entitled “Affluenza,” in which he asks some unnamed vaguely defined body of robot citizens to “[t]each me how to be a moneymaking, money spending machine.” Then in Article 2, “Technomania, he longs to “[m]ake high-tech mountains out of low-tech molehills.” And then my two favorites, Articles 3 and 4, in which he complains of the Internet: “our information, communication trade, and entertainment medium of choice – is a wellspring from which money, meaning, power, and instant gratification flow.” (Please note, I found all this on the Vermont Republic’s website.) And finally, of course, the general complaint in Article 4 that we Americans are under the minstaken belief that “[b]igger and faster make better.” So there is clearly some dissonance between Naylor’s professed beliefs and the reality of his life.
For me, I’m really not even interested in debating the merits of the argument that Vermont should secede. In fact, I have to work hard not to dismiss the argument out of hand, because I just can’t get past the stark hypocracy of the movement’s leader.
September 21, 2006
VDB on those Vermont Senate ads ::
politics, vermont — tagged bernie, cynicism, funny, politics, senate, tarrant, vermont and vitriol
3:13 pm
So, Vermonters aren’t that accustomed to negative campaigning. Well, at least we try not to be accustomed to such things, wishing instead to exude a stoic, detatched understanding of politics, all the while shaking our heads in exasperation at the depths to which political candidates in other states can stoop just to get elected. Well, things are changing this election with the new television ads from Republican Rich Tarrant. And by far, Vermont Daily Briefing has the funniest review of them:
And the ugly, sour, unforgiving hits just kept on coming: every spokesperson in every Tarrant ad looked like your high school gym coach after a three-day bender; more uglythe old woman who lives in the deserted house at the end of the block who chases kids away with a tarnished Civil War saber; or the evil old fart who monitors your apartment from his dank porch in the shade of a diseased elm down the block.
August 31, 2006
Women clerking at the Supreme Court ::
legal — tagged gender, legal, politics, SCOTUS and women
9:33 am
This Linda Greenhouse article in the NY Times on the precipitous drop in the number of women clerking at the US Supreme Court came up in conversation yesterday, and Rick asked me to blog about it. I found the article interesting not so much because of its content—as the SCOTUSBlog people and the article itself noted, Volokh Conspiracy already covered the issue of the underrepresentation of women as Supreme Court clerks—but rather because of how many of the Justices provided interviews that appeared to conflict with each other. Like, e.g., Justices Souter and Breyer both suggested that the drop in the number of women clerking simply “reflected a random variation in the applicant pool.” (Oh, and call me crazy, but I didn’t think David Souter, famous for guarding his privacy, even gave interviews.) By contrast, Justice Ginsburg observed the drop inthe number of women clerking for the Court, declined to give any particular reason, and suggested that Greenhouse “ask a justice who has not hired any women for the coming term….” While such a response doesn’t necessarily call up a reaction of oh, snap!, it does suggest a dynamic among the Justices that is, well, a little less than entirely harmonious.
My memory might not be working right and I may be reading too much into the subtext of the article, but I seem to recall that in the Rehnquist era, Justices were much more reticent when asked to provide this type of information on the inner workings of the court. Could this article foreshadow a new and possible more contentious public face of the Court? I guess time will only tell.
February 28, 2006
Vermont’s campaign finance law in trouble? ::
legal — tagged conlaw, legal, politics, SCOTUS and vermont
2:52 pm
I should have been keeping up more with Randall v. Sorrell, the campaign finance case from Vermont that was argued before the Supreme Court today. But I haven’t. Lucky for me, SCOTUS Blog has a good summary of today’s oral argument:
The common concern among the members of the Court who spoke up appeared to be that Vermont had set its contribution levels so low that it might threaten to cut off any chance of a contender to unseat an incumbent, or that it might threaten to make a race in a competitive district a slam-dunk for the incumbent. Justice Stephen G. Breyer put the question bluntly, seeming to reflect the mood of the Court as a whole: “At what point does a limit become so low that you cuff off the possibility of a challenge?”
Given Justice Breyer’s past tendency to let campaign finance laws stand, to my mind it was significant that he asked such a pointed question. If he winds up deciding to strike down Vermont’s contributions law, then I’ll venture to speculate that the rest of the Court will follow suit. The main question for me right now will be whether he will write the opinion.
February 1, 2006
The truth about Alito? ::
legal — tagged conlaw, judges, legal, politics and SCOTUS
4:35 pm
Fafblog’s take on the Alito confirmation is, well, unique.
[N]o longer a creature of flesh and bone, Alito has been reborn as lifelong Justice of the Supreme Court, a pure and ethereal conduit of the Constitution. Even as we speak he is being anointed by his fellow jurisprudents in the Supreme Court Building, where he will bodily ascend into the empyreal Tenth Sphere of the Law to commune with the wraithlike, undead spirits of the Framers to perfectly comprehend the true meaning of the Constitution before passing through the eye of a black hole to become the Star Child.
Oh, if only we learned about this in Con Law.
January 31, 2006
Roe: when developments happen, they will happen quickly ::
legal — tagged conlaw, judges, legal, politics and SCOTUS
8:56 pm
For all you Due Process/abortion law people out there, here comes an interesting piece over at SCOTUSBlog about the a possible change in abortion law in the near future. The issue involves the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Act, which the Ninth Circuit enjoined the federal government from enforcing. Although under current law it is no surprise the law was struck down. But what’s interesting (and also scary, if you support the protections of Roe) is that things could turn out substantially differently if the case winds up before the Supreme Court.
With a new Justice, Samuel A. Alito, Jr., on the Court, a majority might be assembled to reexamine that core question, and thus to revisit the 2000 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart striking down a state-level “partial-birth” ban. That was decided on a 5-4 vote, with Alito’s predecessor, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in the majority.
I make no predictions on who will vote how on such a case. In fact, I won’t even wager to guess whether the Court will decide to hear the case. But in the event that they do decide to hear the case, we could very well be dealing with a different legal landscape when it comes to Abortion law, not to mention the right to privacy generally.
