Archives for January 2012

 Mark Wilson 

While we were away on the holiday break, President Obama used his constitutional authority to appoint Richard Cordray as the director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Senate Republicans — who not only promised not to confirm Cordray, but also promised not to confirm anyone to the position — expressed the requisite outrage.

There are certainly some questions about the degree to which the Senate’s pro forma sessions permitted (or did not permit) President Obama to exercise his interim appointment authority. But there’s an even bigger question, here.

Why did he have to resort to an interim appointment? [Read more…] about Richard Cordray Is the Latest Symptom

Peter Dunne 

It is now twenty years since the Los Angeles Riots – the week of violence which broke out in America’s second largest city following the brutal beating of Rodney King and a subsequent trial where all five of his police attackers were acquitted of assault.

The riots in Los Angeles laid bare America’s many (yet unacknowledged) social problems in the post-Reagan era – chronic unemployment, youth isolation and intercommunity distrust. They forced Americans, some for the first time, to confront the reality of institutional racism and led to calls for a major rethinking in how rank and file police officers engage with the wider public. [Read more…] about The Legacy of Stephen Lawrence and The Los Angeles Riots

Yevgeny Shrago

For the next three weeks, I’ll be doing a clinical with the New Orleans City Law Department, which involves a deep dive into the city’s licensing regime. I’ll try to share some of the more entertaining things I’ve gleaned from my work and see what sorts of insights it might give for larger liberal policy.

In New Orleans, the city code thankfully ensures, in a single sentence, that bread flour not be mixed with any “unwholesome, deleterious substance.” There’s a little added definition, but decisions about what constitutes such a substance seem to be left up to the health inspector’s discretion. In the next three sections, the code specifies, in painstaking detail, not just the materials that the paper wrapping the bread must be made of, but the weight of the paper, and the minimum number of loaves that can be delivered to a restaurant while wrapped in this paper. Based on their relative treatments in the text, it seems like the New Orleans city council that passed these laws though that the paper needed to be more strictly regulated than what actually went into the bread. [Read more…] about Adventures in municipal licensing