It’s the lazy days of August and the blogs are quiet, but there are still posts of interest. I know I link to Mirror of Justice quite a bit, but it’s just that good. They have a great discussion of the Park 51 project in New York.

Over at Opinio Juris, Hofstra’s Julian Ku is impressed with criticisms of the International Court of Criminal Justice’s assertion of jurisdiction over “agression” by Hertitage’s Brett Schaefer and George Mason’s Jeremy Rabkin. He offers the following money graph from Rabkin:

The problem is that, in the absence of a world legislature, advocates of international law tend to treat silence as consent (and they treat incoherent mumbling as equivalent to silence). That is how “consensus” leading to new “customary international law” gets established. A new “consensus” gained a lot of momentum at Kampala without any serious opposition from the United States. The world took another large step toward isolating and stigmatizing the American understanding of the “inherent right of self-defense.”

Are we looking for provocative on a hot and humid Friday before classes begin? Maybe not, but I got it if you want it. Professor Bainbridge identifies the following as the basic problem with the Supreme Court of the United States:

Fundamental public policies all too often hang on the whims of one unelected old guy in a robe. And, as old guys in robes go, Kennedy isn’t Gandalf or even Yoda. So it would be nice to find a way of making it less important whether Kennedy gets up in the morning on the conservative or liberal side of his bed.

At Concurring Opinions, George Washington political scientist Brandond Bartels provides a preview of some empirical work calling into question the characterization of the Robert’s Court as “the most conservative in living memory.”

Think of property rights as a bundle of sticks. Each stick represents a different right. Different bundles will include different sticks. Everyone remembers the first day of Property class. It was this idea that came to mind when I was reading the recent Supreme Court decision in Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection. In this case, the state of Florida, by way of the Department of Environmental Protection, sought to add seventy-five feet of famous white sand beach in Destin, Florida to renourish beaches that had suffered from erosion.

Sounds good, right? Not if you are an owner of Destin littoral property.

There’s an interesting article by Jim Manzi in the most recent issue of the City Journal. In it, he addresses the weaknesses of empirical research in the social sciences, a problem he attributes to the greater “causal density” of questions concerning human behavior. Because of he complexity and number of potential causes for an outcome, it is extremely difficult to conduct randomized field trials that isolate the cause to be tested.

 Manzi begins his article by referring back to the debate about the stimulus package. Noting that Nobel laureates lined up on both sides of the question, he writes that “[f]ierce debates can be found in frontier areas of all the sciences, of course, but this was as if, on the night before the Apollo moon launch, half of the world’s Nobel laureates in physics were asserting that rockets couldn’t reach the moon and the other half were saying that they could.” The only thing that could be said for sure about the stimulus is that, however it turned out, “several Nobelists would be wrong about it.”