Legal Eagle’s post on screaming children and deafened passengers on a long-haul flight put me in mind of an interesting (offline) conversation I had with Lorenzo a month or so ago. On LE’s post, I made this comment: I do think we have taken social disapproval of parents disciplining their children in public too far, [...]
Heath Gibson reminded me in a post this morning that we have a renewed opportunity to persuade the Labor party to drop its ridiculous bid to impose net censorship. As he notes, because of the change in leadership, the party can now back away from previous policies without losing so much face (as it has [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Australian internet filter, Internet, Law, Public Policy, Society, Technology
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Tagged Australian internet filter, freedom of speech, internet filter, Julia Gillard, Law, policy, psychology, Technology
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Until I came to do the research for my MPhil, I didn’t realise that Prohibition — that great failed exercise in mass planning — was also known back in the day as ‘the noble experiment’. I learnt of the alternative moniker through Daniel Okrent’s superb history — Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Drugs, Feminism, Free Speech, Internet, Law, Marriage
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Tagged akmal saleh, al capone, clive hamilton, coverture marriage, daniel okrent, EFA, helen razer, internet filter, iorarua, joseph raz, Ku Klux Klan, milton friedman, no clean feed, Prohibition, proudhon, stephen conroy, susan b anthony, timetotellmum, wordsworth donisthorpe
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[Now cross-posted at Online Opinion - 21/5/10] There’s been a lively discussion at Larvatus Prodeo about the possibility that the French will ban the burqa. Of course, this follows on the heels of Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi’s suggestion that the burqa should be banned in Australia. Bernardi suggested that the burqa was not only a [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Feminism
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Tagged australia, Australian politics, burka, burqa, Feminism, france, freedom of religion, islam, laïcité, Politics, Religion, secularism, Turkey, women
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Well, if it isn’t an atheist bunfight, it’s a libertarian bunfight. Last week — in an excellent piece for Reason Magazine — David Boaz argued that libertarians ought to stop looking backwards for some ‘golden age of lost liberty’, because no such age has ever existed. More to the point, no such age ever will [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Feminism, History, Human/Civil rights, Law
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Tagged coverture, David Boaz, Golden Age of Liberty, group rights, individual rights, Libertarianism, Reason Magazine, slavery, Will Wilkinson
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February 23, 2010 – 9:34 am
It is likely impossible to say anything new about New York so I am not going to try. This post is a placeholder and an apology for not being around the blog very much, something likely to continue for the rest of this week while I see the sights. Briefly, I attended a conference in [...]
January 21, 2010 – 8:36 pm
Via a friend, I came across this interesting piece on political correctness on US university campuses. The author starts out with a salutary tale: In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Academia, Australian internet filter, Education, Free Speech, Human/Civil rights, Literature, Politics, Society
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Tagged Free Speech, manners, political correctness, regulation, respect agenda, respect ambassadors, universities
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January 19, 2010 – 9:07 pm
[Update: now cross posted at Online Opinion - 22/1/10] One of the things that I’m thinking about in my PhD is the limits of law. What can law change? And more importantly, what can’t it change? Who enforces the law? Can we change the way in which people behave by regulating them more? Via CoreEconomics, [...]
December 15, 2009 – 8:40 pm
Here at Skepticlawyer we’re shocked to see that the wowsers have apparently won the battle over compulsory internet censorship. The Age reports: The Federal Government has announced it will proceed with controversial plans to censor the internet after Government-commissioned trials found filtering a blacklist of banned sites was accurate and would not slow down the [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Blogging, Free Speech, Human/Civil rights, Internet, Law, Media, Politics, Public Policy, Society
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Tagged freedom of speech, ISP filtering, Senator Conroy
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December 7, 2009 – 9:26 pm
Yet again, a somewhat doubtful aspect of Australia’s immigration policy has re-emerged into the spotlight. The Minister for Immigration revokes the visas of people who have lived for most of their lives in Australia, and then sends them back to their country of origin. The visas are revoked because of the criminal records of the [...]
