Epidemics of Ideas

Epidemics of Ideas By George Liebmann The greatest of American judges, Learned Hand, warned of Americans’ susceptibility to epidemics of ideas. His concerns about media concentration led him to impose public utility standards on the Associated Press in a famous antitrust case in recognition of the non-economic interests at stake. Judge Robert Bork and his […]

A Tale of Two Commissions

A Tale of Two Commissions by George Liebmann Those amazed by the parlous state of today’s Democratic Party can find its roots in the fate of two national commission reports of twenty years ago. National commission reports are not usually brought by the stork. These bodies are usually created by Presidents for their own purposes. […]

A Sense of Proportion

A Sense of Proportion by George W. Liebmann The Democratic Party is distinguished by its almost exclusive focus on identity politics. Its Republican adversaries offer opposition to any tax increases and ritualistic nationalism. The contending forces have in common the absence of any sense of proportion. Consider immigration. One faction envisages closed borders, mass deportations, […]

Mencken on Church and State

REMARKS OF GEORGE W. LIEBMANN BEFORE THE MENCKEN SOCIETY, AT THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY, MENCKEN DAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2017 MENCKEN ON CHURCH AND STATE I am honored to be asked to deliver this talk, but in some measure your presence here is due to false advertising. I am a lawyer who has written about constitutional […]

Mencken on Church and State

REMARKS OF GEORGE W. LIEBMANN BEFORE THE MENCKEN SOCIETY, AT THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY, MENCKEN DAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2017 MENCKEN ON CHURCH AND STATE I am honored to be asked to deliver this talk, but in some measure your presence here is due to false advertising. I am a lawyer who has written about constitutional […]

Baltimore Under Mob Rule

To the Editor: Once this City had a newspaperman, H. L. Mencken, who deemed it his duty to quench public passions, not to feed them, and who fought the Anti-Saloon League and Prohibition Amendment, lynching, and the Red Scare. Today it has editors who in at least six disgraceful editorials and without any fair discussion […]

On Morons: Executive and Legislative

On Morons: Executive and Legislative by George W. Liebmann As a Baltimore Republican who is a Child of Manhattan, I am twice a politically homeless person. Our President has told us that the first species is nonexistent, while New York County gave Governor Kasich his only county-level primary victory outside of Ohio. Not only Baltimoreans […]

More Than A French Feminist

RIP: Simone Veil: More Than a French Feminist by George W. Liebmann   theamericanconservative.com, July 24,2017 The recent death of Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor who as French Health Minister in the centrist Gisgard d’Estaing government was the sponsor of a liberalizing French abortion law, and who thereafter was the first President of the European […]

Judicial Control of Gerrymandering: A Quack Cure-All

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-legislatures-are-polarized-between-extreme-factions/?print=1 Judicial Control of Gerrymandering: A “Quack Cure-All” by George W. Liebmann Believers in government by judicial thunderbolt look to a case, Gill v. Whitford (No.16-1161), making its way to the Supreme Court as a possible vehicle for judicial control of legislative gerrymandering. It will be recalled that the reapportionment decisions of the 1960s unlike […]

Comments on Proposed Baltimore City Police Consent Decree

To: Baltimore.consent.decree@USdoj.gov I make these comments only because I have been a public critic of this ‘Consent Decree’ and do not wish silence to be taken as acquiescence. I shall not appear at the April 6 hearing, unauthorized by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, since, like others before it in this Court’s Housing case, […]