Harvard Law Professor William J. Stuntz in New Republic has a provocative essay on the history of privacy (both that private citizens and that of government), attitudes of the left and right toward both, and considers the contemporary impact and proper limits of the right to privacy of the individual and exposure to public scrutiny of government operations.

Convicted terrorist Ilych Ramirez Sanchez, known world-wide as “Carlos the Jackal,” though serving a life sentence, was permitted by the enlightened government of France to give an interview in 2004 broadcast by French M6 television.

In that interview, Sanchez argued that his crimes were justified and that there were no innocent victims of terrorism. He also expressed satisfaction over the September 11 attacks in the United States and allegedly laughed that “the Great Satan got it up the arse.”

French prosecutors sought a fine of E20,000 ($34,022) for these remarks. But, at the end of the judicial proceedings, French courts only fined him E5000 ($8505), finding that his arguing that terrorism was justified did constitute a crime under French law, but his expressions of pleasure at the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States represented only a personal reaction, and were not justiciable.

Guardian – Telegraph (Australia) – Reuters

There has been an increasing volume of criticism in recent years of the strange double-standard of contemporary American universities in which diversity consisting of the presence on campus of representatives of recognized victim groups is esteemed as of essential educational value, but diversity of faculty political opinion is conspicuous by its absence, and not valued at all.

Adam Liptak, in yesterday’s Times, has a great deal of fun noting the astonishing unanimity of law professors from prestigious schools on the right of American universities receiving money from the federal government to exclude military recruiters. Last Monday’s Supreme Court decision in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights produced a highly embarassing rebuke.

Hundreds of law professors at the nation’s finest law schools, representing the all-but-unanimous views of the legal academy, filed a series of briefs last year on one side of a Supreme Court case. On Web sites and in lecture halls, the professors spoke out about the case, which they called a crucial test for gay rights and free speech.

Marshalling their collective intellectual firepower and moral outrage, the professors, from Harvard, Yale and elsewhere, made it sound obvious: Universities should be allowed, they said, to take government money but oppose the military’s policies on homosexuality by restricting military recruiting on campus.

On Monday, the best minds in the legal business struck out. The vote was 8-to-0 against them — a shutout, a rout, a humiliation. It is one thing for liberal academics to fail to persuade conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. But the law professors did not produce so much as a sympathetic word from liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. (The newest justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., did not participate.)And if the result was not embarrassing enough, there was also the tone of the court’s unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In patient cadences, the kind you use in addressing a slightly dull child, the chief justice explained that law students would not assume that their schools supported the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy if they saw military recruiters on campus.

So traumatic was the unanimous SCOTUS decision that, already, a variety of theories accounting for the discrepancy of opinion have been articulated:

There is the reactionary Supreme Court hypothesis. William N. Eskridge Jr., a Yale law professor who helped shape the losing side’s arguments, said the defeat demonstrates the “ridiculously obvious” point that the Supreme Court is “a justificatory instrument” for military policy.

Then there is the clueless law professor theory.

Peter H. Schuck, a Yale law professor who thought the law schools’ legal position was misguided, said that many professors were so indignant about the military’s treatment of gay men and women and so scornful of the military itself that their judgment became clouded.

“There is often a feeling that if something is morally wrong it must be legally wrong and that clever arguments can bring those two things into alignment,” Professor Schuck said.

The elite law schools have for decades been overwhelmingly liberal, Professor Schuck said, and that may have blinded professors to problems with their arguments. Only one law school brief, organized by members of the faculty of George Mason University School of Law, supported the military.

“If you put together a Vietnam legacy, a gay rights ideology, the idea that courts can solve all problems and the legal academy’s echo chamber, you get this result, ” said Joseph Zengerle, an adjunct professor at George Mason who helped write the brief.

We’ll vote for the latter. Uniformity of opinion allowed to thrive too long insulated from challenge inevitably breeds subjectivity and self indulgence.

David Schmidtz at Cato discusses which forms of inequality matter, i.e., which deserve intervention and redress. Replies from Peter Singer, Tom G. Palmer, and Jacob Hacker will be forthcoming. The essay is excerpted from his new book, The Elements of Justice.

The key philosophical point: that there is a prior moral question about which inequalities are ours (i.e., society’s) to arrange, lies outside the specific scope of this essay’s focus.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Eric at Classical Values identifies the typical maneuver employed by statists to expand the definition of crime:

Existing laws don’t “work”! New laws are needed! I’m confused about what seems to be a recurrent pattern in this country. When there are laws against something, and these laws are not enforced, instead of enforcing the existing laws, there’s always a demand for new laws.Tougher laws.

It’s as if there’s some magical belief system that the tougher the law is, the stronger it is, and the more likely that human conduct will be deterred. Enforcement of existing laws never seems to enter anyone’s mind.

The point here is not whether I happen to agree with the laws. It’s just a recurrent pattern. The drug laws started as a tax measure in 1914, and ever since, they have become ever more draconian. Examples aren’t really needed, although the latest trend (now that they’ve run out of drugs to make illegal) is to criminalize precursor ingredients. So Americans are no longer allowed to buy cold medicine over the counter — all because it might be used to manufacture illegal drugs. What’s next? Glassware which might be used to cook drugs…

The pattern seems to be pass laws, ignore them, wait until the problem is huge, then pass draconian laws, plus new laws against conduct which resulted from the previous climate of non-enforcement.

It has long been illegal for felons to buy or possess guns, and to buy, sell, or transfer a gun to a felon. But felons buy guns all the time illegally. Which means that we need a crackdown on what? On perfectly legal purchases of guns by ordinary citizens.

Add to this the trend of sending in SWAT teams to perform routine law enforcement, and it’s fair to wonder whether the goal is to create a police state.

I hate police states — and I’m just wondering whether neglecting to enforce the law is one of the precursor ingredients.

Ben Shapiro listened to Al Gore’s wild accusations, made in a speech in Saudi Arabia, alleging that the US had comitted atrocities against Arabs, and wondered why, in time of war, this kind of activity is not prosecuted.

At some point, opposition must be considered disloyal. At some point, the American people must say “enough.” At some point, Republicans in Congress must stop delicately tiptoeing with regard to sedition and must pass legislation to prosecute such sedition.

“Freedom of speech!” the American Civil Liberties Union will protest. Before we buy into the slogan, we must remember our history. President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus and allowed governmental officials to arrest Rep. Clement Vallandigham after Vallandigham called the Civil War “cruel” and “wicked,” shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, and had members of the Maryland legislature placed in prison to prevent Maryland’s secession. The Union won the Civil War.

Under the Espionage Act of 1917, opponents of World War I were routinely prosecuted, and the Supreme Court routinely upheld their convictions. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rightly wrote, “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” The Allies won World War I.

During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans, as well as allowing the prosecution and/or deportation of those who opposed the war. The Allies won World War II…

This is not to argue that every measure taken by the government to prosecute opponents of American wars is just or right or Constitutional. Some restrictions, however, are just and right and Constitutional — and necessary. No war can be won when members of a disloyal opposition are given free reign to undermine it.

Pretty much everyone today passes along by email some daily item of of news or amusement (a joke, disaster story, or just an anecdote offering a moment’s entertainment). People also commonly exchange stories of just how rudely people will sometimes behave in business these days in situations when no further profit is to be expected. The combination recently ran amok bringing 15 minutes of unwelcome fame to a naughty little Boston attorney.

Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly

Feb. 19) – Two weeks ago, newly minted young Boston attorney Dianna Abdala e-mailed a prospective employer, William Korman.

“The pay you are offering would neither fulfill me nor support the lifestyle I am living,” she wrote, turning down his job offer.

Korman was not happy.

“You had two interviews, were offered and accepted the job (indeed, you had a definite start date).”

He’d already ordered her stationery and business cards, and set up her office computer and was amazed she conveyed her second thoughts by e-mail.

“It smacks of immaturity and is quite unprofessional,” he wrote.

Abdala’s response? “A real lawyer would have put the contract into writing and not exercised any such reliance until he did so,” she wrote.

“This is a very small legal community,” Korman responded. “Do you really want to start pissing off more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?”

Abdala finally answered, “Bla bla bla.”

An ordinary office spat? Nope. Korman forwarded the exchange to a friend … and it spread throughout the Boston legal community — and then to the Boston Globe, to the International Herald Tribune, to ABC News’ “Nightline.”

It was the “bla bla bla” heard round the world — making Abdala the most famous, perhaps notorious, 24-year-old lawyer in America.

asks the Liberator Online in the February issue.

Before you answer, consider:

In January, an Atlanta man was arrested and handcuffed for selling a subway token at face value. Donald Pirone observed another passenger having difficulty with a token vending machine, so he gave him a $1.75 token. After the man insisted on paying him, Pirone was cited by a transit officer for a misdemeanor, since state law prohibits selling tokens — even at face value. A MARTA spokesperson denied that handcuffing a customer for helping another customer was excessive. “There are customer service phones for people who are having trouble getting tokens out of the machine,” she said.

Meanwhile, in late 2005, an Ohio man spent three days in jail because he didn’t put identification tags on his family’s pet turtles and snakes. Terry Wilkins broke a state law requiring owners of native reptiles to tag them with a PIT (personal-integrated transponder). The tags, which are the size of a grain of rice and can be inserted under the animal’s skin, contain a bar code readable by a scanner. Wilkins refused to tag the animals because he said PIT tags cause health problems in small reptiles.

It goes on. In Kentucky, Larry Casteel was arrested for not attending a parenting class for divorcing parents, as mandated by state law. He spent the night in jail. In New Jersey, police are giving tickets to people who leave their cars running for more than three minutes in store parking lots. Stopwatch-wielding police hit the offenders with a $200 fine for violating the state’s anti-idling law. In northwest Georgia, 49 convenience store owners were arrested for selling legal products to customers. The owners — mostly of Indian background — sold cold medicine, baking soda, table salt, matches, and lantern fuel. Police said the ingredients could be used to make methamphetamine. In Burlington, Vermont, police are ticketing people for not removing keys from the ignition and locking their cars. Police said the state law prevents car thefts. Violators are fined $79.

So — are you still sure you can get through a day without violating a law? If so, don’t worry. Legislators are making more things illegal. In New York City, a city council member wants to make it a crime to ride a bike without a registration number tag. Violators would face up to 15 days imprisonment. In Illinois, a state senator wants to make it a crime not to have a carbon monoxide detector installed in your home. In Pennsylvania, a state senator filed a bill to allow police to fine drivers $75 if they don’t clean snow off their car. In Virginia, a state legislator wants to make it illegal to show your underwear in public. Girls (or boys) with low-rider pants would get hit with a $50 fine if their thongs show.

Novelist Ayn Rand once wrote: “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws.”

Have we reached that point? Is it impossible to live without breaking laws? Before you answer, better check to make sure that your pets have transponder tags, that you didn’t leave the keys in your car, and that your underwear is not showing.

Constitutional originalists shuddered when Justice Stevens exercised his intellectual ingenuity in Kelo v. City of New London to do to the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment what veterinarians commonly do to tomcats. And Yolo County, California is currently in the process of providing further opportunity for judicial creativity.

New London succeeded in winning the right to take residents’ homes by eminent domain, in order to convey their properties to developers, whose residential and commercial projects would promote the city’s economic development. Yolo County wants to seize the 17,300 acre Conaway Ranch, and operate it itself, precisely in order to preclude economic development.

The county intends to get the money from the spectacularly civic-minded (and casino-owning) Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians. The noble red men might be looking for space for another bingo hall, what do you think?

But all this is taking place in America’s Dystopian Future, California, where nobody misses a trick. The beleagured ranchers have reorganized themselves into a rival preservation organization, the Conaway Preservation Group, complete with wildlife management plan.

1/17 LA Times — 2/5 SF Chronicle

Posner brings lucidity and skepticism to the NSA electronic surveillance brouhaha in New Republic.

The streets of the United States may not be paved with gold, but the America culture of complaint can be awfully lucrative.

Two Salvadoran illegal immigrants found themselves confronted in 2003, upon making their way informally into the United States, by pistol-wielding Casey Nethercott, a member of Ranch Rescue, a right-wing volunteer group trying to protect private property along the Southwestern US border from incursions by illegal aliens.

Fatima del Socorro Leiva Medina and Edwin Alfredo Mancia Gonzales accused Nethercott of pistol-whipping them, and he was acquitted of the charge, but (thanks to the intervention of the Southern Poverty Law Center) the lucky Salvadorans get to stay in the United States as “crime victims,” and they are also now property owners.

A Cochise County judge awarded the pair ownership of Mr. Nethercott’s 70 acre ranch near Bisbee, Arizona, when Nethercott, now serving a five year term in Texas for illegal possession of that pistol (having had some sort of previous conviction), failed to contest their lawsuit asking for $500,000 in damages. It appears that no legal do-gooding organization was assisting Mr. Nethercott.

AP — KLTV

Justice David Souter voted with the Supreme Court majority in the infamous case of Kelo v. New London, which upheld the right of city government to use eminent domain to take away a individual’s property for private development.

On the principle of “what’s sauce for the goose,” Silicon Valley Objectivist Logan Darrow Clements took advantage of the law in Souter’s home state of New Hampshire to file a petition for Mr. Justice Souter’s hometown of Weare to take his property for a development project consisting of the erection of a “Lost Liberty Hotel.”

Voters in Weare will decide the fate of Souter’s colonial house on March 14th.