Friday Roundup, June 14th
- In our Books section this week, Alan Tarr, master scholar of state supreme courts, reviews James Gibson’s book Electing Judges. An excerpt:
Many of those concerned about the effects of campaign activity on judicial legitimacy have assumed that citizens share the legal profession’s view that politics undermines judicial independence and hence judicial legitimacy. Gibson’s research suggests, however, that public attitudes are more diverse and more complex. While some respondents shared the legal profession’s strong concern about judicial independence, many others favored judicial independence from the executive but were skeptical of judicial independence from the community and its values. . . . Many respondents believed that mechanical jurisprudence was either undesirable or unattainable, and there was strong support for a relatively politicized model of judging. . . . Moreover, although they valued judicial efforts to act impartially, they also believed that judges should in some sense reflect the views of their constituents.
- Made-to-Order Embryos, an essay by Glenn Cohen and Eli Adashi in the New England Journal of Medicine.
- Getting down to business: David Henderson reports on a cost/benefit analysis of the NSA surveillance program.
- Who taught you how to do this stuff? I learned it from your theories, practices, and illiberal condemnations while on campus. That’s what Peter Berkowitz tells us in this piece that connects the causal dots between the regnant liberalism of higher education and the Benghazi and IRS scandals.
- Leon Wieseltier gives us the truth about the humanities.
- John Taylor’s dismal thoughts on jobs and population.