Posts Tagged ‘WO writings’

Now up at Forbes.com: my reactions on Ricci

I’ve got an opinion piece up at Forbes.com on today’s Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DiStefano, the New Haven firefighter reverse-discrimination case. The title: “Sued If You Do, Sued If You Don’t: Through the Looking Glass on Affirmative Action” (& link thanks to Ramesh Ponnuru, NRO “Corner”, Daniel Schwartz, Connecticut Employment Law Blog, Jon Hyman, Ohio Employment Law (to whom thanks for the kind comments as well), and Scott Greenfield, Simple Justice).

NYT “Room for Debate” food safety discussion

Today’s New York Times carries an article sounding alarms about packaged and frozen food safety. I didn’t at all care for the article, which I thought went out of its way to characterize as new and “increasing” a number of safety problems that are neither new nor necessarily on the increase. (A sample of the piece’s breathless, accusatory tone: “Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. … almost every element, not just red meat and poultry, is now a potential carrier of pathogens, government and industry officials concede.” You’d never guess that depending on which years you look at, food poisoning rates are either declining or flat.) At any rate, the editors at the Times generously invited me to discuss the general topic at their popular “Room for Debate” online feature, and the results are here.

David Liss vs. my NYTBR review

It may be recalled that in a recent review for the Sunday NYT I didn’t much care for David Liss’s new historical thriller about the Alexander Hamilton era, The Whiskey Rebels. This morning author Liss makes clear in a letter in the Times that he didn’t much care for my review. He corrects me on one instance of badly misplaced snark, in which I took one of his characters’ references to “Macaulay” as an anachronistic reference to the Victorian Macaulay, when his intended reference was to the histories of Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay, which were popular among colonial American readers. I should have checked and caught that, which is my fault. More broadly, he thinks I couldn’t have approached his novel with an open mind because the politics he wears on his sleeve differs sharply from mine. The thing is, I have no problem recommending works whose politics I find wrongheaded when they offer up plausible dialogue, satisfying plot turns, witty observation and narrative, and so forth. It’s when they don’t that the buzz of political axe-grinding begins to obtrude.

In the New York Times Book Review

I’ve got a review in today’s Sunday Times of The Whiskey Rebels, a new “historical thriller” set in the early federal era against a background of the rise of Hamiltonian finance capitalism, by David Liss, author of “The Coffee Trader” and “A Conspiracy of Paper”. You can read it here.

Update Feb. 22: David Liss responds in a letter to the Times (including a significant correction on one point in the review) and I reply.

New at Forbes.com: RFK Jr. to EPA?

I’ve got a new opinion column just out at Forbes.com on the reports that president-elect Obama may be considering America’s Most Irresponsible Public Figure®, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Earlier this week I posted on the topic here and here (welcome Jonathan Adler/Volokh, Ron Coleman/Likelihood of Success readers).

More: Orac advises writing letters to the Obama transition team urging them to consider the harm to their credibility should a figure such as RFK Jr. get the nod. His comments section includes many good examples of such letters, and Kathleen Seidel, autism blogger extraordinaire, contributes one at her site as well. See also this perhaps unintentionally ironic dispatch by MSNBC’s Alan Boyle on Thursday listing as among president-elect Obama’s “top tasks” “taking the ideology out of scientific issues” and quoting Chris Mooney, author of “The Republican War on Science,” to the effect that “the war has ended, and science has won”. The Center for American Progress’s ScienceProgress site, to which Mooney contributes, doesn’t seem to have weighed in on the RFK Jr. matter.

And: tons of mostly helpful blog reactions. At ScienceBlogs, besides Orac, there are the influential P.Z. Myers/Pharyngula (“another irrational purveyor of woo and fluffy substanceless hysteria”), Chad Orzel, Uncertain Principles (“his highest-profile activity in recent years has been the promotion of nutbar conspiracy theories”), Mike the Mad Biologist (“every bit as ridiculous as creationism”), Around the Clock (“He is the typical paranoid, conspiracy-theorist, hyperbolic quack. A kind of person shunned, ignored and marginalized by the Democratic Party for decades now for two good reasons: such people’s judgment cannot be trusted, and such people give the party a bad name”), James Hrynyshyn (“More worrisome is the fact that Obama on at least one campaign occasion, pandered to the anti-vaccine crowd by describing the science on the subject as “inconclusive” despite loads of studies that show no link”, PalMD, ERV, Science Woman, Effect Measure, SunClipse, and Mark Hoofnagle. Plus: Skepchick, DarkSyde @ DailyKos, Rondi Adamson (“gives me the creeps…The guy’s a complete wingnut”), Wendy Williams, Steven Novella, Neurologica (“This would be an unmitigated disaster for science in government … Putting a known antiscientific crank in this position is inexcusable”), The Amateur Scientist (“an absolutely terrible idea … the guy’s bad news”), Brandon Keim, WiredScience (“America doesn’t need more political officials who skew science to fit personal beliefs.”), Thinking Outside, Science Avenger, Colossus of Rhodey, Politico. Liz Ditz has a great roundup of critical opinions.

Further: Edward John Craig at NRO “Planet Gore” here and here.

“New Talk” discussion of loser-pays

Philip Howard’s new online discussion series, New Talk, is back today with a discussion of loser-pays, moderated by Rebecca Love Kourlis. I’m one of the discussants, as is Marie Gryphon of the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy, and a galaxy of others, including several law professors who can be expected to oppose the idea strongly. You can tune in here (cross-posted from Point of Law).

More: publicity from Kevin Williamson at NRO Media Blog.

Rebutting Bill Lerach in Portfolio

The editors at Conde Nast Portfolio were kind enough to invite me to contribute a rebuttal, which is now online, to William Lerach’s egregious apologia pro crookery sua. The allotted space permits me to address briefly only a couple of Lerach’s worst howlers, in particular his bald assertions that his concealed kickbacks did no harm to class members or to competing lawyers. (It’s true that named class representatives do a very poor job at their intended mission of standing in for other class members’ interests, but secretly aligning their incentives with the size of fee awards, rather than the value of the settlement to the class, is a corruption meant to keep them from ever living up to their theoretical watchdog role.)

For a more extended look at what’s wrong with Lerach’s article, let me recommend Joseph Nocera’s excellent column a week ago in the Times:

In the article, Mr. Lerach expresses zero remorse, positions his crimes as having hurt no one while serving a greater good and makes the absurd claim that he was railroaded by his political opponents.

It is a brazen, shameful piece of work — and it must infuriate the prosecutors who made the plea agreement with him, and the judge who accepted it, especially since Mr. Lerach wrote his own remorseful letter to the judge ahead of his sentencing. It also ought to infuriate anyone who cares about the law. Plenty of criminals head to prison still believing they’re above the law, but Mr. Lerach takes the cake.

Ted Frank has some further thoughts on that point. And note (from Nocera) that Lerach’s “everyone did it” swipes at his colleagues — which many, including we, have read as grounds for an investigation — are by no means passing without contradiction from colleagues:

Mr. Lerach’s statement has infuriated other plaintiffs’ lawyers. “It would just be unthinkable” to give kickbacks to lead plaintiffs, said Max Berger, of the firm Bernstein, Litowitz, Berger & Grossman. Added Sean Coffey, another Bernstein, Litowitz partner: “It is bad enough that this confessed criminal cheated for years to get an unfair advantage over his rival firms. But for this guy, on his way to prison, to say that everyone does it is just beyond the pale.”

(cross-posted from Point of Law; & welcome San Diego Union-Tribune blog readers).

P.S.: For another example of just how slippery Lerach’s careful phrasings can be, check this Roger Parloff post from an earlier point in the scandal. And Stephanie Mencimer, whose writings are nearly always criticized in this space, deserves due credit for seeing through Lerach’s “liberal folk-hero status” to the “pretty sleazy” realities beneath in this February article.

Spitzer and white-collar prosecution: live by the sword…

I’ve got a piece in this morning’s National Review Online on some of the ironies of the Spitzer scandal, which recalls echoes of the former prosecutor’s own “imperial CEO” rhetoric and may hinge on a crime — the “structuring” of cash transactions — whose enactment was very much part of the trend toward more ferocious white-collar law enforcement that you might call Spitzerization. (Walter Olson, “Saving Spitzer”, Mar. 11). P.S. I’ve also rounded up a lot of web coverage of the scandal over at Point of Law.