EconTech

More at 1986.
Brad DeLong writes Impeach Antonin Scalia. Impeach Him Now:

Outsourced to Hilzoy:
Obsidian Wings: Returned To The Battlefield: In his dissent in Boumedienne (pdf), Justice Scalia wrote: “At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.”
When I read this, I wondered about the word ‘returned’, since it seems [...]

Robin Hanson writes, To What Expose Kids?:

State courts recently rebuked Texas Child Protective Services and told them to return 440 kids to their polygamous Mormon parents. The main complaint I’ve heard is that these teen girls can not really consent to polygamous marriage because they were not exposed enough to the rest of the [...]

Lazy Lineup Study
Thursday’s Nature suggests standard police line-ups may not be so bad:
The traditional US procedure is familiar to any fan of television cop shows. Witnesses are presented with a line-up that includes both the suspect and a number of innocent people, or foils’, and are asked to identify the perpetrator. In the early 1990s [...]

The Puzzling Consensus in Favor of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act
The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which bans certain types of genetic discrimination by employers and insurers, passed the House by a vote of 414 to one, and the Senate by a vote of 95 to zero. That means it’s a good idea, right? Wrong.
Suppose an [...]

Appeals Court Rules U.S. Bills Discriminate Against Blind
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON — In a decision that could drastically change the appearance of American money, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Tuesday that the United States discriminates against the blind because the country’s paper currency is the same size regardless of a bill’s value.
The 2-to-1 [...]

Debating Polygamy

What is wrong with polygamy?
Nineteenth-century Americans coupled it with slavery, calling both “the twin relics of barbarism.” Today, it is used as a scare image to deter people from approving same-sex marriage, lest it lead down a slippery slope to that horror of horrors.
But what, exactly, is bad about it? Looking at the Texas [...]

That’s what it means to say something fails the Turing test: they are not identifiable as human, though usually in the context of computers and artificial intelligence:
What Does John Yoo Believe?
A correspondent sends me to a 2000 article by Yoo, “The Imperial President Abroad”, an article that opens:
Aside from getting himself impeached, President Clinton’s most [...]

And I’m pretty sure he gets it all wrong:
Google: As Open and Neutral as It Wants to Be

I hope to return to blogging more regularly now that the college-hunting process is over for my high-school senior son—our family’s first time through what is an amazingly-daunting (and time-consuming) process—and I still have a backlog of other [...]

Marty Lederman Defends John Yoo

Wow. Just wow. This is supposed to be a defense:
Balkinization: There has been a great deal of discussion in the blogosphere and the legal academy about the question of whether the OLC torture memoranda were not merely wrong, horrifying and indefensible, but actually criminal. My own view, roughly speaking, is… that [...]

I’ve long thought that licensed ‘purchased’ materials is an asinine business plan that some day some hero will come through and shatter. Much of our cultural history has been created through sharing and reshaping. Now that the technology has come along to do it, companies and governments are attempting to create technological and legal barriers [...]

From the nerdy(-ier?) Freakonomicist (otherwise I probably would’ve never written about this, and sorry for the length):
Think Twice Before You Wear Your “Free Mumia” T-shirt

By Steven D. Levitt

I was sitting in the student union at the University of Chicago last week when a student came by putting “Free Mumia” leaflets on the tables.
I have never [...]

Certainly this, at a minimum, violates FOIA.
Oregon: publishing our laws online is a copyright violation
The State of Oregon takes exception to Web sites that republish the state’s Revised Statutes in full, claiming that the statutes contain copyrighted information in the republication causes the state to lose money it needs to continue putting out [...]

IANAL
I’m still waiting for the AMA to strip the license of any physician that participates in the development of execution technologies or executions themselves for breach of oath.[1] They have said they are “troubled” by the requirements of many states to have a physician assist in executions but that seems like a rather easy position [...]

Sorry. Really, I had to.
The response Brad links to does not respond to the questions that he had previously brought up (and that plenty of people are asking). I do want a response as to why public funds are still paying this man to build a falsified case for crimes against humanity.
As a note for [...]

IANAL
The NYT is reporting that the preemption legal theory (here, the idea that regulatory approval shields a company from liability) has a rather decent chance of winning in the Ortho Evra case. I have previously discussed the merits (and limits) of such a theory. I am confused as to how anyone can take seriously the [...]