Freespace

Second Amendment, Clean Water Act, Indian Child Welfare Act, and football

...and other stuff was grist for the mill in my conversation with Armstrong and Getty this morning. You can listen here:

Upcoming appearances

I’ll be speaking at the Sacramento Federalist Society on January 11 about freedom of speech in our public schools.

January 27, I'll be speaking (online) to the San Diego Federalist Society lawyers chapter about "The Right to Earn a Living."

On February 8, I’ll be doing an online presentation with advice about writing book reviews, for the Objective Standard Institute.

In February 23, I’ll be speaking to the University of Kentucky Federalist Society about the constitutional thought of Frederick Douglass 

March 24, I’ll be speaking at the University of San Diego Federalist Society about the same topic.

December 2021 update

Best and worst books I read this year

I take a look at the best and worst books I read this year. The best was Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Fankl, recommended to me by my friend Andrew Heaton. The worst was probably Freedom: An Unruly History by Annelein de Dijn, which is just flat out dishonest. (You can read my review of it here.)

Speaking of intellectual dishonesty…

For those following the saga of the American Indian Law Review’s cancellation of my article “The Federalism Problems with the Indian Child Welfare Act,” the editor emailed me last week to say that they would go ahead and publish the article, after all—but they wanted a bunch of changes, first. These changes were transparent efforts to retroactively justify their decision to breach their contract with me—for example, the editor claimed that “Part I of the article is dedicated largely to the biological classification [in ICWA]. However, Morton v. Mancari, U.S. v. Antelope, Rice v. Cayetano, and U.S. v. Sandoval..." etc., etc.—wanting me to address these cases. But as you can see by just looking at the article, Part I is not devoted at all to the biological classification in ICWA! That is the subject of a separate article, “The Unconstitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act,” that is scheduled for publication in another journal. For a second, I wondered if the American Indian Law Review folks had confused the two….

What I read in 2021 and what I thought of it

Best book I read this year:

1. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl*

I read this on my friend Andrew Heaton's recommendation. An outstanding examination of how human life needs meaning just as it needs nutrition and shelter, and when starved of it, they will fail to thrive. I particularly like the concept, introduced toward the end, of “learned meaninglessness,” parallel to “learned helplessness,” which is a perfect way to describe the subcultures of gangsterism or of the fashionable nihilism of the past couple decades.

Honorable Mentions: