In the Winter 2012 Independent Review, I review David Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform. Here’s how it starts: Few Supreme Court cases receive more scorn in U.S. law schools than Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45), the 1905 decision that struck down a New York law limiting the number of [...]
Several years ago, I wrote a review of The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom by Cato Institute chairman Robert A. Levy and Institute for Justice co-founder William Mellor. As its subtitle suggests, the book criticizes twelve U.S. Supreme Court decisions that are especially offensive [...]
Law professor Lawrence Lessig has famously challenged recent extensions of intellectual property law and defended the importance of a public-domain "cultural commons" through his books such as Free Culture. Some libertarian theorists and economists have gone even further and proposed that we should abolish intellectual property, particularly copyrights and patents, entirely. I've summarized some of [...]
In the latest Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, I review UCLA law professor Stuart Banner's book Who Owns the Sky? The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On. Banner’s book is outstanding because it presents the history of air law -- particularly the struggle to determine who would have property rights in and [...]
This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America By Ryan Grim • John Wiley & Sons, Inc. • 2009/2010 • $24.95 hardcover; $15.95 paperback • 272 pages Americans really like to get high, and they’ll go out of their way to do so even when the government threatens to [...]