December 16, 2008 | Comments are Closed | —
In today’s Wall Street Journal, the editors lament the number of law centers cropping up at law schools, where students and faculty dedicate their time to working on behalf of the Guantanamo detainees. I don’t see anything wrong with such clinics, in fact I think they provide a valuable service –just as criminal defense clinics do.
However, I do agree with the editors conclusion that some balance and diversity in curricular offerings may be in order. Interestingly, Andy McCarthy noted that when The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies files an amicus brief “it goes on top of a three-inch pile. Against that is a 20-foot stack of thick amicus [briefs] written by everyone from the American Civil Liberties Union to [Yale Law School Dean] Harold Koh.” In fact, I attended oral arguments in Boumediene and this fact was made strinkingly clear by the number of attorneys sitting in the audience who had some role in authoring a brief on behalf of detainees. (An interesting academic question is whether the party with more amicus briefs benefits, or if amici who are not lost in a “20 foot stack” stand a better chance of being heard). Read the full entry »
June 20, 2008 —
Remember in Back to the Future II, when Doc came back from the future in the Delorean? Remember how he powered up that flux capacitor without using plutonium, instead using some trash (a banana peel, some beer and the beer can)?
Well, it looks like the U.S. Army has figured out a similar way to power generators at Baghdad bases. That’s right, they’re using “prototype generators — running on food slop, shredded documents and ammunition wrappers…”
The unit’s are called Tactical biorefineries and they sound pretty cool in a crazy Doc scientist kinda way.
June 13, 2008 —
I woke up today to the voice of a hotel employee announcing that the building’s power was out, as was the power for an entire city block. It turns out that the power outage in DC is a bit larger than my hotel employee knew. I hiked it from the hotel for a few blocks trying to find a Starbucks with power, and every building was out. It seems there is also an unrelated outage of Metro service on the Red Line.
In any case, I ended up hopping in a cab and heading south of The Mall where I found a place to get power and get on the internet. The reports are that this outage is thankfully not terrorism related, but the vulnerability of our electrical infrastructure still rings true. A point I made here in The New York Times, almost 5 years ago.
UPDATE: Here is a map I’ve created detailing the area of the outage:
View Larger Map
Below are links to stories about the DC power outage, I’ll try and update them throughout the day:
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