Writing at the Cato Institute’s blog, Cato@Liberty, Walter Olson gives us a single paragraph that captures why the Supreme Court should reject the Second Circuit’s ruling that Connecticut and other states could sue five electric utilities for contributing to global warming. From “AEP v. Connecticut: Global Warming as Political Question”:

By its nature, global warming is exactly the sort of policy question traditionally entrusted to the political branches: it is wholly unsuited to individualized justice based on links between particularized emissions and particularized effects, its proposed remedies are much disputed and likely to be the result of inevitably arbitrary compromise, sovereign negotiations with foreign actors play a crucial role, and so forth. As the courts have long recognized, one does not generate a case for judicial action simply by piling atop each other the propositions “something needs to be done” and “the political branches have not done it.” Indeed, the Obama administration itself has more or less invited the Supreme Court to dismiss the action on political-question grounds.

The media coverage of Tuesday’s oral arguments we read highlighted the Administration’s argument that the need for the public nuisance suit by the states and environmental groups had been obviated by the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation of greenhouse gases. As Greenwire framed it: “[The] Obama administration maintains that U.S. EPA, through its recent efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, has “spoken directly to the question plaintiffs ask the courts to resolve.” (continue reading…)

Walter Olson of the Cato Institute and founder of the original law blog, Overlawyered.com, has a new book out, “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America.” The blurb:

From Barack Obama (Harvard and Chicago) to Bill and Hillary Clinton (Yale), many of our current national leaders emerged from the rarefied air of the nation’s top law schools. The ideas taught there in one generation often shape national policy in the next.

The trouble is, Walter Olson reveals in Schools for Misrule, our elite law schools keep churning out ideas that are catastrophically bad for America. From class action lawsuits that promote the right to sue anyone over anything, to court orders mandating the mass release of prison inmates; from the movement for slavery reparations, to court takeovers of school funding—all of these appalling ideas were hatched in legal academia. And the worst is yet to come. A fast-rising movement in law schools demands that sovereignty over U.S. legal disputes be handed over to international law and transnational courts.

It is not by coincidence, Olson argues, that these bad ideas all tend to confer more power on the law schools’ own graduates. In the overlawyered society that results, they are the ones who become the real rulers.

The Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus website excerpts the book here. (continue reading…)

The Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial today (subscription) is a thorough refutation of S.3816, the mistitled Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act, which the Senate is taking up. From “The Send Jobs Overseas Act“:

One of the two major parties in the world’s supposedly leading economy is trying to hold on to its majority by running against foreign investment and the free flow of capital. This is banana republic behavior.

We’re all for increasing jobs in the U.S., but the President’s plan reveals how out of touch Democrats are with the real world of tax competition. The U.S. already has one of the most punitive corporate tax regimes in the world and this tax increase would make that competitive disadvantage much worse, accelerating the very outsourcing of jobs that Mr. Obama says he wants to reverse.

And …

The real problem is a U.S. corporate tax rate that over the last 15 years has become a huge competitive disadvantage. The only major country with a higher statutory rate is Japan, and even its politicians are debating a reduction. A May 2010 study by University of Calgary economists Duanjie Chen and Jack Mintz for the Cato Institute using World Bank data finds that the effective combined U.S. federal and state tax rate on new capital investment, taking into account all credits and deductions, is 35%. The OECD average is 19.5% and the world average is 18%.

The Cato Institute report is “U.S. Effective Corporate Tax Rate on New Investments: Highest in the OECD.”

The National Association of Manufacturers last week registered its opposition to the legislation through a letter to the Senate here.

UPDATE: The Hill cites the NAM’s opposition in its Monday round-up report, “Money in the Morning“:

Business groups aren’t happy about it, reports The Financial Times. While the bill would provide a payroll tax exemption for companies that that bring overseas jobs back home, it would also limit tax deferral for U.S. companies’ overseas profits and deductions for U.S. plant closings. “The National Association of Manufacturers took specific aim at the provision on the deferral of taxes on foreign income, saying it would ‘place US affiliates at a cost disadvantage vis-à-vis their foreign-based competitors…’” http://bit.ly/ahQQIM

Congratulations to Walter Olson, who has joined the Cato Institute and is making the move south to the Mid-Atlantic. Walter pioneered legal blogging at his Overlawyered.com, and he has had a tremendous influence on civil justice reform, making the issues understandable for the general public.

From Walter’s announcement at Overlawyered, “Joining Cato, and a farewell to the Manattan Institute“:

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve joined the Cato Institute as a senior fellow, effective this week. As most readers of this site know well, Cato is the premier voice for individual liberty in our nation’s capital, and a think tank of tremendous accomplishments across the board. Its program on law, led by Roger Pilon, includes such outstanding thinkers as Tim Lynch, Ilya Shapiro and Robert Levy. Cato is particularly known as a place where free speech, civil liberties, and the Bill of Rights are given the centrality they deserve in legal thinking, and it’s also a powerhouse in studying the ill effects of government regulation. In fact, the publication where I got my real start in the policy world, the magazine Regulation (originally published by the American Enterprise Institute), has made its home at Cato for many years now. In short, it’s hard to imagine a better fit with my writing and research interests. (continue reading…)

Investor’s Business Daily editorializes on the United States falling behind as a nation and economy benefitting from trade, arguing in “Losing Out Big Time” that the decline must be reversed quickly or become a permanent disadvantage.

Tuesday, Cato Institute economist Daniel Griswold took issue with U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk’s congratulatory claim that the U.S. is “the most open market in the world.”

Actually, it slipped from No. 2 in 2000 to No. 26 in 2007, the last year for which data are available, in Cato’s 2009 Economic Freedom of the World annual report.

“If an Olympics were held for the most open economy, the United States would be out of medal contention,” Griswold wrote, citing tariffs, regulatory barriers and other factors.

It’s reportedly down to No. 28 in 2008 data, and getting worse. Given that size of government, freedom to trade internationally and regulation are the criteria used in Cato’s index, you can bet that the U.S. ranking will drop even lower in 2009.

It puts the U.S. behind Hong Kong, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Chile, the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Slovakia and Estonia, all nations that have seen their living standards rise based on an aggressive strategy of free trade.

Here’s Griswold’s column at Cato@Liberty, “U.S. ‘the Most Open Market’? Not Even Close.”

Investor’s Business Daily also cites the NAM’s Frank Vargo, who has analyzed export data and finds that the United States ranks last among 15 industrialized countries in the percentage of its manufactured goods exported. (See this Shopfloor.org post.) The editorial concludes:

Competitiveness isn’t lost through a single event; rather, it’s lost over time as the effects of many bad policies are felt. Right now, on trade, the U.S. is going in the wrong direction. It could turn things around quickly by getting back on the free-trade bandwagon.

The Cato Institute bought a full page ad today in The Washington Post, one of those ads that features a long list of signatories, in this case scientists. The text:

“Few challenges facing America and

 the world are more urgent than combating

 climate change.The science is beyond

 dispute and the facts are clear.”

— PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA, NOVEMBER 19 , 2008

With all due respect

Mr. President, that is not true.

We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now.^1,2 After controlling for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather-related events.³ The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior.⁴ Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect.

Here’s the PDF version, with the names.