Category Archives: Major Print Outlets

Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s media appearances in print publications.

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How the Media Again Failed on the Duke Lacrosse Story

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Real Clear Politics

More than a dozen major newspapers and magazines have rushed in recent weeks to publish reviews heaping praise on what we have demonstrated — and will demonstrate again below — to be a guilt-presuming, fact-challenged new book about the Duke lacrosse rape fraud of 2006. Meanwhile, author William D. Cohan has ratcheted up his wild claims and misleading innuendoes during at least 10 broadcast and print interviews about the book, even, in some cases, after proof of their falsity had been published by us and others. Most of the interviewers have been as fawning as most of the reviewers, leaving […]

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The Big Snoop: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists: A Brookings Essay

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Brookings Institution

The divergent views of four respected experts help frame the debate over the future of the NSA in the Snowden Era By Stuart Taylor, Jr. April 29, 2014 When Edward Snowden hit the send button on a laptop in Hong Kong last June, just shy of his 30th birthday, he became the poster boy for an acutely American conundrum: the tension between the government’s constitutional commitment to the privacy of individuals and its responsibility for the safety of the nation.

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The Many Ways in Which The New Book About the Duke Lacrosse Case is Wrong

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The New Republic

The most striking thing about William D. Cohan’s revisionist, guilt-implying new book on the Duke lacrosse rape fraud is what’s not in it. The best-selling, highly successful author’s 621-page The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities adds not a single piece of significant new evidence to that which convinced then–North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper and virtually all other serious analysts by mid-2007 that the lacrosse players were innocent of any sexual assault on anyone. Unless, that is, one sees as new evidence Cohan’s own stunningly credulous […]

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Book Review: ‘The Rule of Nobody’ by Philip K. Howard

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The Wall Street Journal

Amid the liberal-conservative ideological clash that paralyzes our government, it’s always refreshing to encounter the views of Philip K. Howard, whose ideology is common sense spiked with a sense of urgency. In “The Rule of Nobody,” Mr. Howard shows how federal, state and local laws and regulations have programmed officials of both parties to follow rules so detailed, rigid and, often, obsolete as to leave little room for human judgment. He argues passionately that we will never solve our social problems until we abandon what he calls a misguided legal philosophy of seeking to put government on regulatory… Continue reading […]

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Justices To Weigh Contraceptive Mandate Against Religious Freedom Claims

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Kaiser Health News

The Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court partially upheld in 2012 when it issued one of the most important decisions in decades, has spawned more litigation — topped by two consolidated cases that could become the justices’ biggest ruling on religious liberty in years. The oral arguments regarding the law’s contraception coverage mandate, slated for March 25, will be a rematch between two lawyers who squared off in the first health law challenge — Obama administration Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. and former Bush administration Solicitor General Paul Clement. The key question is whether privately owned businesses can be hit with […]

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Will This Man Make Gay Marriage Legal Everywhere?

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The Daily Beast

Stuart Taylor, Jr. Stuart Taylor, Jr. facebook tweet post 5-402.22.1411:21 AM ET Can This Man Make Gay Marriage Legal Everywhere? Justice Anthony Kennedy has more power than any president or justice in history to decree the law of the land. Agree with him or not, there is something wrong with this picture. Federal district courts around the country have been ordering states at a surprisingly rapid clip to endorse (not merely tolerate) gay marriage in the months since the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to do so last June. This may give the impression that the judges are merely […]

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Book Review: ‘For Discrimination’ by Randall Kennedy

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The Wall Street Journal

The case for racial preferences in higher education has long been made using sophistry designed to hide the heavy social and moral costs of affirmative action. In “For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law,” Randall Kennedy makes that case with rare intellectual honesty and fair-mindedness. And while it won’t persuade opponents of the policy, the book has the salutary effect of clarifying the terms of the debate. The author, a professor at Harvard Law School, begins building his case for racially… Continue reading the column here.

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Are Racial Preferences Now Entrenched for Decades?

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Minding the Campus

As a critic of the current regime of very large racial preferences, I hope that Fisher v. University of Texas opens the way for a healthy shift of the focus in such lawsuits from legal abstractions to the growing body of evidence that large preferences harm many intended beneficiaries and reduce socioeconomic diversity. I detailed here the reasons for this hope, and I join other racial-preference critics in seeing the decision as a narrow if unsatisfying win on principle. But I also have a fear, explained below, that Fisher could be a prelude to entrenching racial preferences in university admissions […]

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Racial preferences punt opens door to facts: Column

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USA Today

The Supreme Court’s narrow decision Monday keeping alive a challenge to racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas may open the way for a healthy shift in the debate from legal abstractions to whether these preferences are working as advertised. That should bring attention to the growing body of evidence that large preferences harm many intended beneficiaries and reduce socioeconomic diversity. The seeds of a potentially rich debate in future lawsuits and around the country about how racial preferences operate in practice and their effects on students can be found in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s spare opinion for himself […]

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Obamacare’s Slush Fund Fuels A Broader Lobbying Controversy

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

Forbes

A little-noticed part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act channels some $12.5 billion into a vaguely defined “Prevention and Public Health Fund” over the next decade—and some of that money is going for everything from massage therapists who offer “calming techniques,” to groups advocating higher state and local taxes on tobacco and soda, and stricter zoning restrictions on fast-food restaurants.

The program, which is run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has raised alarms among congressional critics, who call it a “slush fund,” because the department can spend the money as it sees fit and without going through the congressional appropriations process. The sums involved are vast. By 2022, the department will be able to spend $2 billion per year at its sole discretion. In perpetuity.

What makes the Prevention and Public Health Fund controversial is its multibillion-dollar size, its unending nature (the fund never expires), and its vague spending mandate: any program designed “to improve health and help restrain the rate of, growth” of health-care costs. That can include anything from “pickleball” (a racquet sport) in Carteret County, N.C. to Zumba (a dance fitness program), kayaking and kickboxing in Waco, TX.

“It’s totally crazy to give the executive branch $2 billion a year ad infinitum to spend as they wish,” said budget expert Jim Capretta of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Congress has the power of the purse, the purpose of which is to insure that the Executive branch is using taxpayer resources as Congress specified.”