Last June in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to require that people who want to carry handguns in public for self-defense demonstrate that they have “proper cause” to do so. New York legislators and Gov. Kathy Hochul responded by eliminating that requirement while simultaneously […]
The marijuana reforms that President Joe Biden announced today follow through on some of the promises that he made during his campaign, but they will have a limited practical impact. His blanket pardon for low-level marijuana offenders, while long overdue, will affect a tiny percentage of people with federal drug records. Without new legislation, marijuana […]
According to the National Youth Tobacco Survey (NYTS), nicotine vaping among teenagers has fallen dramatically since 2019, undercutting fears about an “epidemic” of such behavior. Last spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which oversees the survey, suggested that drop might be illusory because the COVID-19 pandemic reduced youth access to vaping products. […]
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to prevent smoking-related deaths by making cigarettes less appealing. Toward that end, the FDA plans to ban menthol cigarettes and limit nicotine content to “reduce the addictiveness of cigarettes.” Meanwhile, the FDA seems determined to make vaping products, the most promising harm-reducing alternative to cigarettes, less appealing to smokers. The perverse combination of these two regulatory […]
In a Supreme Court brief it filed this week, The Onion claims it was founded in 1756 and has “a daily readership of 4.3 trillion.” The brief describes The Onion as “the single most powerful and influential organization in human history,” with interests in shipping, strip mining, deforestation, and animal testing as well as journalism. […]
An Iowa jury yesterday awarded $12 million to a former elementary school guidance counselor who served six years of a 25-year prison sentence after a student accused him of molestation. Donald Lyle Clark’s 2010 conviction was overturned in 2016 after he persuaded a judge that his lawyer, who died in 2013, had blatantly failed to […]
The standard answer to the question posed by the title of Bill Keller’s new book, What’s Prison For?, cites four goals: punishment, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. But as Keller shows, that last goal is typically treated as an afterthought in the United States. Given that 95 percent of prisoners will eventually be released, Keller argues, policy makers […]
Six years ago, police in Parma, Ohio, arrested Anthony Novak for making fun of them. By creating a parody of the police department’s official Facebook page, they alleged, Novak had violated a broadly worded state law against using a computer to “disrupt, interrupt, or impair” police services. After a jury unanimously acquitted Novak of that […]
A few weeks after the FBI searched Donald Trump’s residence at his Palm Beach resort, Fox News host Steve Doocy, a longtime ally of the former president, posed a question that remains unanswered. “Why did he have all that secret stuff at Mar-a-Lago?” Doocy wondered during an interview with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. Trump’s […]
Americans who are alarmed by online “hate speech” and “misinformation” tend to resent the limits that the First Amendment imposes on government intervention against objectionable content. But German authorities do not suffer from such constraints, and the consequences should give pause to critics who are sympathetic to the idea that freedom of speech sweeps too […]
