On September 12, 2004, the New York Times quoted sentencing-law expert Frank O. Bowman of Indiana University as saying: "There has not been a single case in the history of American criminal law with the immediate impact of this one." Benjamin Wittes, court commentator for the Washington Post, called the case "the single most irresponsible decision in the modern history of the Supreme Court." The case they were writing about is Blakely v. Washington, decided last June. The Supreme Court's decision in Blakely held that portions of Washington state's laws on sentencing were unconstitutional. Why are these commentators, and much of the criminal justice community, up in arms about a decision that invalidates portions of one state's sentencing laws? The answer is: This decision and some of its predecessors gut the entire sentencing-reform movement in the United States. What is still more worrisome, these decisions changed through judicial fiat, without legislation or a constitutional amendment, the rules under which people are sentenced to prison. Worst of all, the Supreme Court has undermined the rule of law by handing down the Blakely decision only a few years after upholding the very same sentencing structure. In fact, it was the subversion of the rule of law by one of the decisions in this line of cases that convinced me to retire from the practice of law after 28 years as a lawyer, with 21 as a prosecutor. In effect, I have gone on strike from the legal system—like the characters in Ayn Rand 's Atlas Shrugged.
For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the "Isn't that disgusting" strategy. By that I mean the strategy of ...
Just as there is much to celebrate in the life of John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), so is there much to loathe in the muckrakers' treatment o
Frank Quattrone, the star investment banker of the dot-com era, was convicted in federal court on two counts of obstructing justice and....
Owen Flanagan (pictured here) is a prominent philosopher of mind who exemplifies the trend in his profession of paying closer attention to..
A Gallup poll taken in May of 2003 found that only 3 percent of Americans believe animals do not need much legal protection. Fully 71 percen
On July 4th, we celebrate the creation of the United States of America. But today, Americans seem more divided than at any time in recent...
What does it mean in practice to hold a philosophy that declares that pristine nature has intrinsic value in itself, and that regards Man...
As Henry Steele Commager noted in The Empire of Reason: "It was Americans who not only embraced the body of Enlightenment principles, but...
Many of the towering figures of the Industrial Revolution could well be described as "the compleat producer." Richard Arkwright, for example
In 1956, an extraordinary three-year agreement on cooperation was signed by the Department of Economics at the Chicago University and the...
For more than thirty years, promoting the development of higher self-esteem has been a major goal for clinical psychologists and educators..
In Atlas Shrugged, Dr. Robert Stadler finds it "outrageous" that a genius such as John Galt would have "performed a major revolution in...
In 1987, during an in-depth interview, Barbara Walters pointedly asked actor Sean Connery why he chose to play golf only with men. It was...
There are museums of art, science, and natural history in major cities throughout the world. New York City alone has dozens of art museums,
Ten years ago the media were full of alarming stories about the number of Americans who did not have health care insurance. That "crisis" was used to whip up support for the Clinton administration's comprehensive health care plan, which would have essentially nationalized the $1 trillion health-care industry. The plan was defeated in Congress. A decade later, however, it seems that nothing was learned. The federal government, along with the states, has continued to expand the regulations and subsidies that created the problems in the first place. And once again the number of people without insurance is on the public agenda. On November 19, the National Academy of Sciences released a report claiming: "The American health care system is confronting a crisis. The cost of private health insurance is increasing at an annual rate of 12 percent. Individuals are paying more out of pocket and receiving fewer benefits. One in seven Americans is uninsured, and the number of uninsured is on the rise." Many newspapers followed up with stories of individuals losing benefits. The health insurance "crisis," like other problems of the health care industry, is the product of government interventions in the market. Tax policies still push most people into employer-based health plans, so that losing a job means losing coverage—a matter of renewed anxiety with the economic downturn. Price controls on insurers—and doctors, hospitals, and drug companies—are lowering the quality of service available to consumers. The cost of malpractice insurance, driven up by courts that have allowed outlandish awards to plaintiffs, are driving doctors out of business. States continue to increase the number of conditions that insurers must cover, driving up the cost of insurance. Over the last half century, layer upon layer of government interventions have so distorted the health-care industry that it can hardly be called a marketplace any longer.
As human beings, we fear chaos and confusion and fight against them. We appreciate order. We celebrate reason, logic, and science because...
The structure of our federal system can be explained in major part by the final two provisions of our Bill of Rights, the Ninth and Tenth
On September 12, 2004, the New York Times quoted sentencing-law expert Frank O. Bowman of Indiana University as saying: "There has not been a single case in the history of American criminal law with the immediate impact of this one." Benjamin Wittes, court commentator for the Washington Post, called the case "the single most irresponsible decision in the modern history of the Supreme Court." The case they were writing about is Blakely v. Washington, decided last June. The Supreme Court's decision in Blakely held that portions of Washington state's laws on sentencing were unconstitutional. Why are these commentators, and much of the criminal justice community, up in arms about a decision that invalidates portions of one state's sentencing laws? The answer is: This decision and some of its predecessors gut the entire sentencing-reform movement in the United States. What is still more worrisome, these decisions changed through judicial fiat, without legislation or a constitutional amendment, the rules under which people are sentenced to prison. Worst of all, the Supreme Court has undermined the rule of law by handing down the Blakely decision only a few years after upholding the very same sentencing structure. In fact, it was the subversion of the rule of law by one of the decisions in this line of cases that convinced me to retire from the practice of law after 28 years as a lawyer, with 21 as a prosecutor. In effect, I have gone on strike from the legal system—like the characters in Ayn Rand 's Atlas Shrugged.
For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the "Isn't that disgusting" strategy. By that I mean the strategy of ...
Just as there is much to celebrate in the life of John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), so is there much to loathe in the muckrakers' treatment o
Frank Quattrone, the star investment banker of the dot-com era, was convicted in federal court on two counts of obstructing justice and....
Owen Flanagan (pictured here) is a prominent philosopher of mind who exemplifies the trend in his profession of paying closer attention to..
A Gallup poll taken in May of 2003 found that only 3 percent of Americans believe animals do not need much legal protection. Fully 71 percen
On July 4th, we celebrate the creation of the United States of America. But today, Americans seem more divided than at any time in recent...
What does it mean in practice to hold a philosophy that declares that pristine nature has intrinsic value in itself, and that regards Man...
As Henry Steele Commager noted in The Empire of Reason: "It was Americans who not only embraced the body of Enlightenment principles, but...
Many of the towering figures of the Industrial Revolution could well be described as "the compleat producer." Richard Arkwright, for example
In 1956, an extraordinary three-year agreement on cooperation was signed by the Department of Economics at the Chicago University and the...
For more than thirty years, promoting the development of higher self-esteem has been a major goal for clinical psychologists and educators..
In Atlas Shrugged, Dr. Robert Stadler finds it "outrageous" that a genius such as John Galt would have "performed a major revolution in...
In 1987, during an in-depth interview, Barbara Walters pointedly asked actor Sean Connery why he chose to play golf only with men. It was...
There are museums of art, science, and natural history in major cities throughout the world. New York City alone has dozens of art museums,
Ten years ago the media were full of alarming stories about the number of Americans who did not have health care insurance. That "crisis" was used to whip up support for the Clinton administration's comprehensive health care plan, which would have essentially nationalized the $1 trillion health-care industry. The plan was defeated in Congress. A decade later, however, it seems that nothing was learned. The federal government, along with the states, has continued to expand the regulations and subsidies that created the problems in the first place. And once again the number of people without insurance is on the public agenda. On November 19, the National Academy of Sciences released a report claiming: "The American health care system is confronting a crisis. The cost of private health insurance is increasing at an annual rate of 12 percent. Individuals are paying more out of pocket and receiving fewer benefits. One in seven Americans is uninsured, and the number of uninsured is on the rise." Many newspapers followed up with stories of individuals losing benefits. The health insurance "crisis," like other problems of the health care industry, is the product of government interventions in the market. Tax policies still push most people into employer-based health plans, so that losing a job means losing coverage—a matter of renewed anxiety with the economic downturn. Price controls on insurers—and doctors, hospitals, and drug companies—are lowering the quality of service available to consumers. The cost of malpractice insurance, driven up by courts that have allowed outlandish awards to plaintiffs, are driving doctors out of business. States continue to increase the number of conditions that insurers must cover, driving up the cost of insurance. Over the last half century, layer upon layer of government interventions have so distorted the health-care industry that it can hardly be called a marketplace any longer.
As human beings, we fear chaos and confusion and fight against them. We appreciate order. We celebrate reason, logic, and science because...
The structure of our federal system can be explained in major part by the final two provisions of our Bill of Rights, the Ninth and Tenth