Anecdotal evidence, the basis of so much journalism prior to the rise of the data movement and still, to my mind, over-relied upon — is just that: anecdotal. Roughly 65,000 people voted in the Cantor-Brat primary; Brat won by more than 7,200 votes. Assuming that what a non-scientific sample of 1, 10 or even 100 […]
The mortgage servicing abuses continue: by Yves Smith Repeated Foreclosures on an On-Time Borrower Demonstrates Failure to Fix Servicing and Fallacy of “Save Banks at All Costs” Policy It was obvious at the time of the various mortgage “settlements” that the Administration’s policy was to make only cosmetic fixes in a badly broken servicing […]
Uh-oh, hedge fund managers and Goldman Sachs partners. Obviously, few of you are evangelical Christians. So this guy, who wants good markets, has his sights set on you. But, luckily not on that carried-interest tax-benefit thing y’all get to use, praise the Lord. So maybe you hedge-fund types can skip church again this Sunday, after […]
by David Zetland (re posted from Aguanomics) Who has the right to leaked water? SM sent this question a few months ago: My thesis is about conjunctive water use and the hydrologic externalities that arise from a change in water use (e.g., increased irrigation efficiency or canal lining). I am focusing in the canal seepage/lining […]
Also via the New York Times comes an article on NSA versus the internet giants like Google. I haven’t a clue (other than skepticism and ‘how does that work?’) as to what it actually means. Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest […]
I’ve written extensively here at AB about a two-time Supreme Court case called Bond v. United States, first three years ago when the case was heard the first time, then in the last few months as the case was heard there again. My most recent post on it, from May 15, was called “The Supreme […]
Readers of my AB posts know that a recurring theme of mine is the right’s cooptation of the word “freedom” to disembody the word from actual physical freedom–e.g., from imprisonment–or from personal choice, and to instead define it as a Reagan-era Conservative Legal Movement checklist. And that these folks achieve this by declaring it mandated by the Constitution’s […]
Correction appended below. —- Scott Lemieux weighs in at The Week, writing that, although “Supreme Court voting is too complex to be explained by any single factor,” the “attitudinal model” – which posits that “Supreme Court votes are explained by what judges consider desirable policy” – “still contains a good deal of truth.” — Amy […]
Update appended. 5/17 at 1:37 p.m. —- I’ve written several times in the last three-plus years about a Supreme Court case called Bond v. U.S. Actually, to be precise, Bond v. U.S. is two Supreme Court cases, although it’s only one lower-court case. This is not unusual, but the case itself is; both the facts and the […]
It’s not every day that a law professor has his book quoted by the Supreme Court, and so the University of Baltimore‘s Michael I. Meyerson was understandably intrigued when his 2012 work about the Framers’ views on religion made it into Monday’s decision on public prayer. But the plug from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the […]