Interesting stuff

Some interesting stuff I've come across:

* This PBS Newshour transcript of a segment on Sandra Day O'Connor's importance and influence. Participants in the discussion include Kathleen Sullivan (dean of Stanford Law School), Doug Kmiec (who somewhat surprisingly has nothing but good things to say about O'Connor), and John Yoo, who says the following:

The question to ask is should she be the most powerful woman in American history? Should we have an unelected person making these final decisions for American society on a lot of these different questions? And it's true she is a moderate in the sense that she likes to be in the middle. But the problem with that is that makes her very politically powerful. The problem is that she doesn't have any real judicial ideology. She doesn't really have a consistent theory that she brings to the law, she just likes to, I think, be in the middle, to be in the center of a court that's fairly polarized, that makes her the center of attention, people craft arguments at the Supreme Court to appeal just to her. But that isn't really law, is it, that's more politics. It deprives the court of speaking with a consistent, coherent judicial ideology.

* The new issue of City Journal, which includes articles by James Q. Wilson ("What Makes a Terrorist?), Steven Malanga ("The Curse of the Creative Class"), and Heather MacDonald ("The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave").

* The discussion on the proper role of stare decisis in constitutional adjudication, with posts by Michael Rappaport, Larry Solum, and Randy Barnett. Too bad Virginia law professor Caleb Nelson doesn't have a blog; his article on stare decisis is one of the best treatments of the subject (Stare Decisis and Demonstrably Erroneous Precedents, 87 Va. L. Rev. 1 (2001)).

* The first issue of The New Pantagruel, a brand-new online magazine. Articles include A Tribute to Neil Postman, by Read Mercer Schuchardt; The Idea of a Sabbath Economy: A Theological Framework for Economists, by Norman Wirzba; Let's Roll Over, by Dan Knauss and Caleb Stegall; and much more. The New Pantagruel describes itself as "a quarterly electronic journal run by a cadre of intemperate but friendly Catholics and Protestants who have seen other electronic journals run by Christians, and thought that while they might not be able to do better, they could certainly do no worse."