Academic

Goodbye And Good Riddance To 2008.

Posted on December 22, 2008
December 22, 2008br / br / Re: Goodbye And Good Riddance To 2008.br / br / br / br / On December 11th, commenting that I had been ?off the air? for awhile because this had been the busiest fall in 45 years as a lawyer, this writer said he nonetheless could not resist publishing a blog on Blagojevich...

Re: Fitzgerald and Blagojevich.

Posted on December 11, 2008
December 11, 2008 Re: Fitzgerald and Blagojevich. This blogger has been ?off the air? for some time now, basically because the last couple of months have been perhaps the most intense work-siege I have experienced in the 45 years since graduation from law school...

A Practical, Defensible One-Off Solution To The Problem Of True Terrorists At Gitmo.

Posted on November 07, 2008
November 7, 2008 Re: A Practical, Defensible One-Off Solution To The Problem Of True Terrorists At Gitmo. Early on it was made plain here, on five occasions from May through July of 2004, that the reason the Bush administration wanted to use military tribunals to try prisoners was that evidence against them had been obtained by torture and therefore could not be used against them in federal courts...

Obama And Afghanistan; Obama And The Second Coming Of Clintonia.

Posted on November 06, 2008
November 6, 2008 Re: Obama And Afghanistan; Obama And The Second Coming Of Clintonia. We hope for Barack Obama to have all the success in the world. And given his smarts -- he seems far and away the smartest president-elect in the last 45 years -- he should although, as one person put it to me, people hope for so much from him that there conceivably could be no way he will not disappoint and begin to catch tremendous flak, even early on...

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Bring Back Bump Elliott.

Posted on November 03, 2008
November 3, 2008 Re: Bring Back Bump Elliott. Bring back Bump. Only readers who followed Michigan football under Coach Bump Elliott from 1958 through 1968, which probably was the worst single stretch in Michigan football history, can understand in their guts the depth of disappointment, frustration and even anger in that sarcastic remark...

If you Want Economic Recovery, Eliminate The Capital Gains Tax On Profits From Monies Used To Purchase New Plant And Equipment And To Create New Jobs.

Posted on October 27, 2008
October 27, 2008 Re: If you Want Economic Recovery, Eliminate The Capital Gains Tax On Profits From Monies Used To Purchase New Plant And Equipment And To Create New Jobs. Having spent the last two weeks in Prague, Germany and Luxembourg, this writer can attest that one is never really out of touch if one doesn?t wish to be...

Re: Creating And Sustaining The Unsustainable.

Posted on October 10, 2008
October 10, 2008 Re: Creating And Sustaining The Unsustainable. With the stock market tanking and the economic system worsening on a daily basis, there are some thoughts I would like to get off my mind. They may be wrong, but they are the product of years, sometimes decades, of observation and experience...

Re: A New Modest Proposal: The Questions At The So-Called Debates Should Reflect The Answers, Since The Answers Will Not Reflect The Questions.

Posted on October 09, 2008
October 9, 2008 Re: A New Modest Proposal: The Questions At The So-Called Debates Should Reflect The Answers, Since The Answers Will Not Reflect The Questions. I would like to make, in Swiftian words, a modest proposal. This one is half in jest, but also half meant...

Re: Alan Dershowitz On Whether To Prosecute Executive Branch Criminals.

Posted on October 07, 2008
October 7, 2008 Re: Alan Dershowitz On Whether To Prosecute Executive Branch Criminals. Over the years this writer has occasionally made comments relating to Alan Dershowitz. As said before, one?s first conception of him was encapsulated in the joke that the most dangerous place to be in the entire world was between Dershowitz and a television camera...

Reasons Why

Posted on October 03, 2008
Misfits in America Chapter 4 Did the materialism and anti-intellectualism of post war America discourage a generation from pursuing public service?  For Bronze and Wolfe, college in post-war America was dominated by a  male group mentality that created a fraternity class full of boys intent upon verbally putting one another down while competing mightily in intra-fraternity games in pursuit of athletic glory rather than intellectual growth...

Uncaring Harvard of the Midwest

Posted on October 01, 2008
Misfits in America Chapter 3 The finest state University in the Country? In 1960?s Ann Arbor cheating, drinking and gut courses were the administratively accepted norm, from simply procured exam exemption letters from the University Psychiatrist, to stuffed student government ballot boxes to failed attempts to scale walls in pursuit of copies of upcoming exams...

Ann Arbor College Years

Posted on September 26, 2008
Misfits in America Chapter 2  To the Jewish brothers of the unnamed University of Michigan fraternity, academics took a stiff back seat to the wondrous goal of winning the intra-fraternity athletic championship.  Their personal identities as jews in America in constant conflict with the hopes and dreams of these smart ambitious young men, Bronze and his friends struggle through their years in Ann Arbor, never keeping their eyes off the prize, Christian friends and acknowledged athletic prowess...

The Misfit Genius from East Europe, Illinois

Posted on September 23, 2008
Misfits in America Chapter 1  In some ways Harry Brohnz was the smartest man I ever met. We lived together in an apartment during the second semester of or junior year in Ann Arbor. that was the semester that he got a 4.2 grade point average - on a 4 point system, you might jokingly say...

Thine Alabaster Cities Gleam, available in print, and now as a free podcast

Posted on September 19, 2008
Dear Colleagues,As many of you know, I have recently published a Quartet entitled Thine Alabaster Cities Gleam: A Slightly Fictionalized Memoir of a Career in the Last Half of the Twentieth Century. The book is now additionally available for free as an audio podcast...

Re: A Crisis Of American Capitalism.

Posted on September 19, 2008
September 19, 2008 Re: A Crisis Of American Capitalism. You don?t have to be a socialist (and I certainly am not) to understand that this capitalistic country is confronting a crisis of capitalism. This is not merely a matter of the huge losses and meltdowns that have taken place and have threatened to bring down the whole system with them...

Re: The Bigger The Company, The More Disastrous The Mistake.

Posted on September 17, 2008
September 17, 2008 Re: The Bigger The Company, The More Disastrous The Mistake. In younger days I was an antitrust lawyer for a considerable number of years. Most of my work, and my cast of mind, was on the plaintiff?s side. This mentality meant, and means to this day, that I favor views expressed by Justices Brandeis and Douglas: Antitrust is not simply about claimed efficiency that supposedly makes things better for consumers...

Attempted Statutory Immunity For The Executive's War Crimes.

Posted on September 04, 2008
September 4, 2008Re: Attempted Statutory Immunity For The Executive?s War Crimes. By now it seems beyond serious doubt that George Bush and company committed numerous war crimes. There has now been book after book detailing their actions; some of the books are legal in character, even when directed at a much broader audience than lawyers, while others are not legal in nature (e...

Re: The Momentary And The More Permanent.

Posted on August 26, 2008
August 25, 2008Re: The Momentary And The More Permanent. If you had to choose, for an important position requiring brains, between a person who was among the best in his class at the Harvard Law School and a person who was near the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy, you would obviously choose, since the position does require brains, the person who was among the best at Harvard Law, right? Well, maybe wrong, if the position is President of the U...

Mukasey -- The Orthodox Jew Who Is A Disgrace To Our Religion -- Again Protects Evil.

Posted on July 31, 2008
July 31, 2008Re: Mukasey -- The Orthodox Jew Who Is A Disgrace To Our Religion -- Again Protects Evil. On December 14, 2007 I wrote a post that assailed Michael Mukasey for a statement -- that he doesn?t know if waterboarding is torture -- which was a sheer disgrace for someone born into his religion, the same one I was born into, and whose parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who fled evil, as were mine...

More MSM Malfeasance -- The Conyers Hearing And Tom Brokaw's So-Called "Interview" Of Obama.

Posted on July 28, 2008
July 28, 2008Re: More MSM Malfeasance -- The Conyers Hearing And Tom Brokaw?s So-Called ?Interview? Of Obama. Here are two recent impressions. They will be stated in conclusory fashion, without the usual supporting elaboration and details. Last Friday John Conyers held a hearing where several witnesses (e...

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lawrence Wilkerson, And Barack Obama On Afghanistan.

Posted on July 23, 2008
July 23, 2008Re: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Lawrence Wilkerson, And Barack Obama On Afghanistan. As known by readers of these posts, I consider it rare for my views to meet approbation when first expressed. It usually takes months or years for agreement to arise, if then...

Forgetting The Fundamentals In Regard To Oil And Afghanistan.

Posted on July 21, 2008
July 21, 2008Re: Forgetting The Fundamentals In Regard To Oil And Afghanistan. Forty plus years ago, when friends and I were young, recently graduated government lawyers doing tax or antitrust work in Washington, D.C., five of us used to carpool to and from work every day...

Evil Judges And Dumb Politicians

Posted on June 25, 2008
June 25, 2008Re: Evil Judges And Dumb Politicians. This space, as the media columnists call it, frequently rails against the stupidity of politicians and the evil done by judges. In recent days two events have added to these views. To start with the one that will be more quickly dispatched, there is the comment made by Antonin Scalia at the very end of his dissenting opinion, which was the final opinion appearing, in the recent Guantanamo case...

Prosecuting For War Crimes: As Lincoln Said, The Battle Of Today Is Not For Today Alone, But For A Vast Future.

Posted on June 23, 2008
June 24, 2008Re Prosecuting For War Crimes: As Lincoln Said, The Battle Of Today Is Not For Today Alone, But For A Vast Future. In the last essay he wrote before his death, Arthur Schlesinger spoke of ?national stupidity.? Here is what he said:Sometimes, when I am particularly depressed, I ascribe our behavior to stupidity -- the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidity of our culture...

June 2, 2008Re: Alexander Pekelis

Posted on June 02, 2008
June 2, 2008Re: Alexander Pekelis And Drug Company Cases In Which Consumers Have Been Killed Or Injured. On March 12th, a posting here discussed Alexander Pekelis, a great scholar killed in a plane crash at Shannon Airport in 1946, 62 years ago...

Re: Eric Lichtblau?s Unpersuasive Defense Of The New York Times? Failure To Print His Story On The NSA?s Illegal Electronic Spying In October 2004

Posted on May 20, 2008
May 20, 2008Re: Eric Lichtblau?s Unpersuasive Defense Of The New York Times? Failure To Print His Story On The NSA?s Illegal Electronic Spying In October 2004 - -A Time When The Story Could And Probably Would Have Resulted In Bush Losing The Election And Could Have Spared The Country Immense Disasters And Grief...

Re: The Other Lesson Of Munich.

Posted on May 09, 2008
May 9, 2008Re: The Other Lesson Of Munich. It is perhaps ironic that last week, while I was in Germany, and spent a day in Munich, I read a book showing that there are other lessons to be drawn from Munich than the one favoring military action that has been drawn -- often wrongly -- for the last 60 or 70 years...

Dear Professor Goldman:

Posted on May 08, 2008
Dear Professor Goldman: Thanks much for the very thoughtful email. I appreciate it greatly. I of course agree with much that you wrote, in particular both the point that, and your examples showing that, the nature of the judges is the most fundamental problem...

Re: Courts Should Insist That The Political Branches Do Their Jobs

Posted on April 16, 2008
April 16, 2008Re: Courts Should Insist That The Political Branches Do Their JobsCarefully And Thoroughly, Instead of Shoddily. As the last posting said would be the case, this essay is about an idea which, as far as I know, is quite novel...

Re: Two Relatively New Or Novel Ideas: Starting Today With The Question Of Prosecuting Guilty American Leaders For Torture.

Posted on April 14, 2008
April 14, 2008Re: Two Relatively New Or Novel Ideas: Starting Today With The Question Of Prosecuting Guilty American Leaders For Torture.Those who are not big deals know that ordinary folk often are not given credit for being the authors of ideas they either created or pushed early on...

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