Dixie Chicks lead clucker Natalie Maines has fans wanting to kick her in the tail feathers. Cumulus Broadcasting is even banning the Chicks from all its 260 stations. Some have suggested, however, that the Cumulus decision violates Maines' First Amendment rights. "I...
LAW
Shackling Nike: Supreme Court Should End the Distinction Between Political and Economic Speech
Nike is an innocent victim of this Court’s rigid insistence on maintaining the commercial speech doctrine.
Bush’s Attack on Partial-Birth Abortions Is a Scheme to Outlaw all Abortions
In his State of the Union address, President Bush demanded an end to “the practice of partial-birth abortion.”
Abortion and the Left: All the Rights But One
Last month marked the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case which overturned a Texas ban on the procedure. To commemorate that anniversary, the well-known abortion rights group NARAL hosted a public event that...
Blacks and Guns
Black Americans have a serious problem with guns. They don't have enough of them. Despite being victimized by crime at several times the rate of whites, only 30% of black adults own guns, compared to 43% of whites.(1) Blacks are also heavily represented in California...
Guns: A Loaded Argument
The language of the Second Amendment seems straightforward: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Yet the debate rages on: Does each American citizen have the...
Abortion Rights are Pro-Life
Thirty years after Roe V. Wade, no one defends the right to abortion in fundamental, moral terms, which is why the pro-abortion rights forces are on the defensive. Abortion-rights advocates should not cede the terms "pro-life" and "right to life" to the...
Capitalism and Job Safety
What is essential for safety is not bureaucratic regulation, but free, motivated human intelligence and judgment, which includes a consideration of the costs of achieving greater degrees of safety.
Clinton-Era IRS Regulation Threatens Economy and Financial Markets
Three days before President Bill Clinton left office, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) proposed a regulation (No. 126100-00) that would have forced American banks to report the interest they pay on the deposits of nonresident aliens. The IRS openly admitted that the...
“Hate Crime” Legislation is an Assault on Free Speech
If images of people being persecuted for "thought crimes" strike you as the stuff of science fiction -- or, at worst, something that happened when communism was at its height and jackboots were storming Europe -- get ready for a wake-up call. It comes from Britain....
Rights and The Constitution, Part Three
The purpose of this article is to trace and to explain the history of the concept of rights in judicial treatment.
A Physician Comments on Abortion and the Morning After Pill
I was recently confronted in the Emergency Department with a situation I rarely encounter: a woman requesting "the morning after pill." Since I practice in a largely conservative state, for a few minutes I introspectively debated whether I should provide her with such...
Gun Control Myths and the Facts
Most people who are in favor of gun control laws support such laws because they believe that these laws will reduce the number of firearms deaths. Such people are not the problem. Their minds can be changed when they learn that the facts are very different from what...
Gun Control Myths: Gun Restrictions and Murder Rates
Talking facts to gun control zealots is only likely to make them angry. But the rest of us need to know what the facts are. More than that, we need to know that much of what the gun controllers claim as facts will not stand up under scrutiny. The grand dogma of the...
Gun Control Myths: The Case of England
Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm of Bentley College deserves some sort of special prize for taking on the thankless task of talking sense on a subject where nonsense is deeply entrenched and fiercely dogmatic. In her recently published book, "Guns and Violence," Professor...
The Legitimacy of Intellectual Property
Revolutionary technologies always disrupt society and one of America's biggest "digital age" disruptions is occurring in the area of intellectual property (IP). Indeed, the digital revolution has re-ignited a heated debate over whether intellectual property is even...
Gun Statistics for the Second-Amendment-challenged
Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D) recently urged a ban on Saturday Night Specials and "assault weapons," while recommending a national ballistic fingerprint database. The interviewer, CNN's Judy Woodruff, asked no difficult follow-up...
More Gun Control, Please!
Gun-control proponents, predictably, in the wake of the Beltway sniper, urge still more gun-control laws. So, as news watchers sit through another round of softball interviews with gun-control advocates, we humbly offer Second Amendment-challenged hosts some...
Hate is not a Crime
Last month, the Canadian government detained several newsletters from the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) defending "Israel's moral right to exist" out of concern that "they may constitute obscenity or hate propaganda." Although the government later decided that the material...
The Sniper and the Gun Controllers
It was perhaps inevitable that the recent sniper killings in the Washington area suburbs would be seized upon by advocates of gun control. Like so much in the agenda of the political left, gun control arguments would collapse like a house of cards if people just...
A Cycle of Injustice: Mob of Teenagers Beat Man to Death
On September 29th, 2002 in Milwaukee, a 14 year-old teenager threw an egg at a man, named Charlie Young. The man in turn struck the teenager for throwing it, knocking out the teenager's tooth with the force of his hit. "According to police, a mob of boys as young as...
Rights and The Constitution, Part Two
The purpose of this article is to trace and to explain the history of the concept of rights in judicial treatment.
Would-Be Intellectual Vandals Get Their Day in the Supreme Court
In 1998 Congress, pursuant to its Constitutional power to determine the duration of federal copyright protection, passed a law extending the term of that protection by 20 years. This law brought United States copyright protection in line with that already afforded in...
Permission to Speak: The End of Free Speech
Two recent events show the real meaning of two popular ideas: "hate speech" regulations and campaign finance controls. The real meaning of both is the end of free speech. The first story comes from Canada, where "hate speech" laws are already on the books. Last week,...
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