Academia

Climate “skepticism,” ideology, and sincerity

There’s an interesting discussion about a whole lot of things — for example, the sincerity of climate scientists and think tanks, the behavior of scientists, the relative funding of “skeptics” and climate scientists and others who believe climate change is happening and is caused by human activity — between my colleague Ann Carlson and Professor …

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Is Richard Epstein Autistic?

Delightfully so!  Here is Adrian Vermuele (no secret Kenyan Muslim socialist he) in The New Republic, reviewing Epstein’s latest: Many scholars have offered withering critiques of the Epstein program, but there is little sign that the arguments of the critics have been heard and considered. Epstein’s latest book targets the administrative state as the enemy …

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Peter Gleick, the Heartland Institute, and Scientific Ethics

  The Heartland Institute is a climate denial shop well-funded by fossil fuel interests and standard right-wing extremist foundations, which has underwritten attacks on climate scientists and has plans to disrupt authentic climate science education in K-12 classrooms.  Peter Gleick is one of the most respected scientific researchers in the world, who has done extremely …

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Legal Planet Takes Over the Yale Law Journal

Along with Dan, I also have a response to the Ewing/Kysar paper at YLJ Online.  (For those of your keeping score at home, two out of three commissioned responses were Legal Planet bloggers: we win!). It should surprise no one that while Dan’s is elegant and technical, mine is cranky and dyspeptic.  Here’s the abstract: This …

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What’s it like to be climate scientist Michael Mann? Think bounty (not the good kind)

Renowned climate scientist Michael Mann was at UCLA and the Emmett Center today to give a talk promoting his soon-to-be-released book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.”  Mann, who has been called “one of the most vilified men in the highly vilified field of climate science,” created the famed “hockey stick” …

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Svitlana Kravchenko

We are saddened by news of the death yesterday of Svitlana Kravchenko, the director of the LLM Program in Environmental and Natural Resources Law.at the University of Oregon Law School and wife of John Bonine, a distinguished environmental scholar. She was the author of 12 books and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. Among her …

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Maryland representative thinks law clinics should only represent the indigent

Maryland representative Patrick McDonough apparently believes that Maryland law clinics should be restricted to representing only the indigent. He just introduced a bill, HB 751, that attempts to legislate just that: Except for pro bono litigation on behalf of an indigent individual, a law clinic affiliated with a law school at a constituent institution of the …

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Information or Ideology? The Dilemmas of a Property Professor

It often occurs in teaching law school classes that opportunities present themselves for discussing current issues.  And that presents a problem: how can a teacher do it without engaging in ideological indoctrination?  The easiest way is to avoid the issue entirely.  But is that also avoiding the responsibility to actually address important topics? I ran …

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Does Public Transit Improve Air Quality?

Yihsu Chen and Alexander Whalley of UC Merced think they know.  They have analyzed some useful data from the opening of Taipei’s new subway, in a recent article in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy: The transportation sector is a major source of air pollution worldwide, yet little is known about the effects of transportation infrastructure …

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Is Bureaucratic Leadership an Oxymoron?

History shows that that those much-maligned bureaucrats are sometimes the unsung heroes of policy improvement.

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