April 9, 2024
Judicial Rulemaking and Lucidity: Justice Barrett’s First Amendment Opinion in Lindke v. Freed
Fashioning constitutional rules isn’t easy; Justice Barrett and the Court deserve kudos for their efforts to establish a rule to determine if public officials’ activities constitute state action.
April 9, 2024
The TikTok Ban’s Free Speech Dilemma
TikTok is a perfect villain. The app seems to be connected with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It’s where Osama Bin Laden’s manifesto picked up traction and where antisemitic tropes run amok. TikTok’s impact on kids isn’t heartening, and its data security problems are serious. Still, I’ve got some trepidation about the TikTok bill that just passed the House by a vote…
April 2, 2024
The Re-Emergence of Huawei?
Despite draconian export controls and blacklisting by the United States, the Chinese telecoms giant, Huawei, is alive and well—at least for now. Huawei’s current relatively strong competitive state comes from a variety of sources: Yes, Chinese government subsidies and huge home markets helped greatly, but there are also other factors such as Huawei’s own resilience and forward…
March 28, 2024
“Away for the Day”: Regulating Cell Phone Use in New Zealand Schools
On March 26, New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, well-known for The Coddling of the American Mind, released a new book, The Anxious Generation, where he attributes the transition from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood as being responsible for the “epidemic” of Generation Z young people suffering from anxiety, depression and fragility. Haidt claims that “a great…
March 22, 2024
Why Do Men Dominate Chess?
For years now, sports experts and culture warriors alike have been fiercely contesting the issue of whether transwomen (males who live and identify as women) should be eligible to compete in the female categories of numerous sports—including rugby, swimming, weightlifting, and disc golf. But last August, this debate entered an unexpected domain: the game of…
March 20, 2024
Generative AI’s Napster Moment
It’s likely that LLMs may get worse before they get better. These are not merely necessarily bad consequences, but possible results as an emerging industry matures and the law catches up to technological advancement, producing a new post-disruption equilibrium.
January 17, 2024
Why I Left Harvard
Since early December, the end of my 20-year career teaching at Harvard has been the subject of articles, op-eds, tweets from a billionaire, and even a congressional hearing. I have become a poster child for how the growing campus DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—bureaucracies strangle free speech. My ordeal has been used to illustrate the hypocrisy of the assertions by Harvard’s leaders…
December 23, 2023
A Deal on Permitting Reform Is Still Possible
Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) has failed in his pursuit of a final approval of the Mountain Valley pipeline from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia, as the Senate refused even to give majority support for his effort to attach his “permitting reform” bill to the defense budget authorization. The environmentalist Left and many congressional Democrats have no interest in…
November 6, 2023
Why the CDC Failed Its Covid-19 Test
The Covid-19 pandemic was a disaster. Over a million Americans died—many in isolation in hospitals and nursing homes, far from their friends and family—and millions more became seriously sick, lost their jobs, or felt the effects of widespread economic and social disruption. Students suffered irreversible learning losses, with many exiting the public-school system altogether. Patients delayed or…
August 29, 2023
No One Is Above the Law? Biden’s Bureau of Land Management Thinks It Is.
One central characteristic of the Biden administration is its contempt for the letter of the law. When laws interfere with overriding political objectives, they are cast aside, and the courts are often forced to clean up the mess. Nowhere is this norm-busting reality more pronounced than at the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM),…