'The Conversation' Category Archive

The Problem of Context Revisited: The Massachusetts Example

Let me be the first to welcome Dean Chemerinsky to the fray.  Perhaps he will draw some fire while I reload (so to speak).
Bob Levy thinks a gun lobby strategy of using the “slippery slope” argument to keep gun owners in a perpetual state of anxiety about gun confiscation would be “bizarre and ineffective,” while […]

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Standards of Review: A Review

When it comes to the Second Amendment, Dennis Henigan believes in “greater judicial deference to legislative judgments.” Why? Because the right to keep and bear arms “has immediate and direct implications for the health and safety of others.” Hmm. What about publication of a manual for hit men, or a booklet […]

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If this Is Defeat, We’ll Take It

Cloaking himself and the Brady Center in the mantle of “reasonableness,” Dennis Henigan disclaims the statement of Brady co-founder Pete Shields and asserts that it “has never been” and is not now the policy of his organization to “make possession of all handguns . . . totally illegal.” Perhaps so. Perhaps, as Henigan […]

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The NRA and the Supreme Court

Dennis Henigan is a smart lawyer who knows a great deal about gun laws and the Second Amendment. But one subject on which he is not an expert is the internal deliberations of the National Rifle Association. Reading Henigan to learn the secret motives of the NRA is akin to reading Richard Dawkins to learn […]

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Take It up with the NRA

I fear that Dennis Henigan has somehow mixed up his blogs.  This blog — Cato Unbound — is an exchange between Henigan, Kopel, Chemerinsky, and Levy.  The blog on which Henigan has most recently posted is an exchange between Henigan and the NRA — somewhat complicated by the fact that the NRA is not a […]

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What Did They Mean in Massachusetts?

In a previous post, Dennis criticized me for not “responding to the evidence, presented in my essay, of Justice Scalia’s manipulative and inconsistent textualism.” OK.
Much of the post does not merit a response because it does not advance the discussion, as it amounts to a précis of the arguments made by Justice Stevens in his […]

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One Man’s “Sensible” Is Another Man’s “Extreme”

Dennis Henigan’s criticism of Bob Levy leaves a little to be desired in terms of accuracy. Levy had quoted Nelson “Pete” Shields’s explanation of his plan for gradual handgun prohibition. Here’s the full quote:
“The first problem is to slow down the number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is […]

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Does Heller Point the Way to Victory for Reasonable Gun Laws?

Bob Levy is uninterested in the “old debate” about the meaning of the Second Amendment because Heller decided the issue, while David Kopel thinks Heller hangs on a fragile 5-4 thread that could be severed by the Obama Administration conspiring with the United Nations to use unratified treaties to undermine Second Amendment rights. I […]

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More on the “The” and Pre-existing Rights

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals said that the word “the” in “the right to keep and bear arms” shows that the Second Amendment protected a pre-existing right. All nine Justices agreed. The majority opinion makes exactly this point. (”The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and […]

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Slope Still Slippery

Dennis Henigan’s theory that Heller paves the way for new gun controls, by eliminating fears of the slippery slope, might be possible in the long run, but is probably not correct in the short run.
First of all, Heller was a 5-4 decision. Even if a Supreme Court a few years from now did not formally […]

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Does the Second Amendment Issue Turn on the Word “The”?

I look forward to responding to Bob Levy in a subsequent posting. For now, I’ll address David Kopel’s claim that the knockout blow against the “militia purpose” view of the Second Amendment is the appearance of the article “the,” as in, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.”
Instead of responding to […]

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Looking Ahead to Heller’s New Paradigm

Because the caption for our online exchange is After Heller: The New American Debate about Guns, I will resist the temptation to join Dennis Henigan in revisiting the old American debate, pre-Heller, on the question whether the right to keep and bear arms can be exercised only in the context of militia service. […]

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Closing Thoughts

[T]he real question here is how to divide the value created by the combination of the copyright system and technological innovation, all the while accounting for three important facts: we want both, copyright provides input that makes many of the relevant technologies more valuable, and technological advancement typically makes copyrighted work more valuable too.

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Copyright and Innovation

The “business models” we should be concerned about are not only those concerned with the creation of music and movies, but also with the development of new technologies for manipulating sound and video. A copyright policy that gives content creators veto power over technological innovation may marginally deter file sharing (I have my doubts) but it will also dramatically affect the pace of innovation in digital media devices.

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Copyright’s Losers

Perhaps copyright law can avoid favoring one art form over another. It cannot, however, avoid picking winners and losers.

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Picking Winners

I think copyright law should do what it can to accommodate as many business models as plausible. So if new technology can lead to a rebirth of local live performances, copyright law should try to support those efforts. And if Paramount thinks that there is still room for the major motion picture even now, copyright law should again endeavor to leave that door open.

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Movies: Major Art or Minor art?

Any intelligent discussion about copyright and movies must carefully define what it is that the law should safeguard. Is it the artistic use of moving pictures in general, or is it the format of big-budget feature films under conditions established in the last century?

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