At its mid-year meeting this week, the ABA did two notable things. First, the House of Delegates “voted overwhelmingly” to approve a resolution calling on the President to follow the law with respect to domestic spying. Among other things, the six-clause resolution “call[ed] upon the President to abide by the limitations which the Constitution imposes on a president…” (Paragraph 1), and “urge[d] the President, if he believes [the law] is inadequate…to seek appropriate amendments or new legislation rather than acting without explicit statutory authorization” (Paragraph 2). In other words, Mr. President, you must abide by the Constitution, and if you don’t like a statute, you can’t just violate it; you should go to the legislature and get it amended.

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In an op-ed published in Saturday’s W$J (slightly updated version available here for free), Prof. David Bernstein drew attention to the American Bar Association’s proposed revision to its law school accreditation standards concerning student and faculty racial diversity. Bernstein criticized the ABA proposal for, in essence, calling on law schools to ignore constitutional and statutory provisions governing the use of racial preferences in admissions and hiring. Indeed, the revision’s interpretive guidelines (which apparently carry the same weight as the standards themselves) state that…

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Yesterday’s W$J reported on an effort by oil companies to change the way reserves are reported in securities filings. SEC rules, it seems, mandate that reserves be measured in a manner that understates the actual amount of available oil. For example, the rules (available here) require that only proven reserves (those for which there is a “reasonable certainty” of actual recovery) be reported. On first glance, this doesn’t sound unreasonable, but the manner in which “reasonable certainty” is determined essentially translates the criterion into one of “virtual certainty.”

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Today’s New York Times accuses President Bush of getting things “exactly backwards” by exhorting Congress to demonstrate political courage by resisting the urge to raise taxes. The politically courageous move, the Times says, would be to raise taxes (i.e., to refuse to extend the 2003 cuts beyond their expiration date). In particular, the Times calls for brave lawmakers to eliminate the “special low tax rates for investment income,” which “overwhelmingly enrich the rich and will be even harder to justify in the years to come, when, by all reasonable estimates, the country’s financial outlook will have deteriorated further.” It was, the Times says, “Orwellian” for President Bush to suggest that courage would be required to extend the tax cuts on investment income.

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An article in today’s W$J reports on former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio’s planned defense in a criminal insider trading action brought by the SEC. The defense is perplexing.

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In yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, an anonymous reader posed the following question to The Ethicist…

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Today’s New York Times reports on a new cigarette bar in Chicago, where the city council has just imposed a sweeping smoking ban. (I recently criticized the ban at Ideoblog.) The proprietors of the Marshall McGearty Tobacco Lounge insist that the lounge is permitted because of a loophole allowing smoking in retail tobacco shops. Not surprisingly, Chicago’s anti-smoking zealots are seeking to shut down the business, which they say violates the intent of the anti-smoking ordinance.

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A few weeks back, Josh had a nice post (on Ideoblog) regarding Judge Alito’s antitrust record. He was pretty optimistic, dismissing Judge Alito’s antitrust critics and concluding that “what little Judge Alito has written on antitrust issues is properly described as fastidious analysis complemented by strict application of doctrine.”

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I didn’t pick the name of this weblog, but I really like it. It encapsulates, I believe, much of what the blogosphere is about.

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