Everyone’s doing it, and now David Friedman is doing it.
What’s wild is that my bookmark chooser showed me his home page, with a prominent link to “My New Blog”, about eleven hours after his first post.
a symptom of something or other
Each member of the California State Bar Association (which is a state entity) has a number, and the Bar’s website lets you search by number or by name. Barrister No. 1 was William Harrison Waste, admitted in June 1894. The highest number is 237747, belonging to Rex John Phillips, admitted in September 2005. You might ask, how long has it taken for the roster to double? Easy: look up barrister #118874, Andrew Henry Milinkevich, admitted in July 1985.
How did the medical marijuana case now before the Supreme Court come to be called Ashcroft v Raich? I gather that it began life as a criminal case, which would normally be titled US v Raich. Or it could be a civil suit seeking an injunction against certain practices of the DoJ, in which case it might be titled Raich v Ashcroft.
Are appeals often renamed? Is there a rule?
Dec.23: Todd Larason comes through, citing the Raich camp’s website:
It began as Raich et al. vs Ashcroft et al. — Raich is suing Ashcroft, seeking an injuction preventing Ashcroft & others from doing certain things; it isn’t an appeal of a criminal case as US v. Lopez was.
Ashcroft filed the petition for certiorari, so at the supreme court level he’s the petitioner, and it turned from Raich v. Ashcroft to Ashcroft v. Raich.
oh goody, an obscure question of common law
(This item was written in October but somehow never got out of “draft” status.)
Constructive Trusts and Restitution After Theft: Rasmusen discusses a legal quandary.
It hits me that this item calls for a law category not under politics. I’m surprised that this is the first such.
Atheism and Unalienable Rights by Robert E. Meyer (also cited today on RRND):
Skeptics want to deny that rights come from God, but if they are correct, then there is no sound philosophical footings undergirding their perpetual claim to any rights. They are walking on a tenuous tightrope of conceptual fiat. Obviously they have not thought this issue through very carefully. . . .
In other words, atheists who speak of rights are guilty of what Ayn Rand (an atheist) called “the fallacy of the stolen concept”. Obviously Meyer has not taken the time to find a libertarian atheist (how hard can it be?) and ask a few questions. It would be amusing – for a few minutes – to hear him and an Objectivist debate the roots of rights. ( . . more . . )
netfilter project was granted a preliminary injunction against Sitecom GmbH
“To my knowledge, this is the first case in which a judicial decision has been decreed on the applicability and the validity of the GNU GPL”, says Dr. Till Jaeger, partner of the Berlin and Munich based law firm JBB Rechtsanwaelte that represented the netfilter/iptables project in the litigation.