“The five law enforcers remain anonymous, and will be stationed behind a gun ported brick wall in the execution chamber. The executioners will be armed with .30-caliber rifles, four of which will be loaded with live rounds. The weapon carrying the blank round will be unknown to the law enforcers.”
Execution Procedures, Utah Dept. of Corrections

Ronnie Lee Gardner committed heinous acts condemned by all civilized people. Given a choice of methods of his own execution, he elected to face death by firing squad.

The procedures instituted by the state suggest more ambivalence about this procedure than one might have expected. The five peace officers called upon to perform this civic duty are to remain anonymous. One can understand that, given possible future shifts in public opinion about the death penalty, it might make sense to hold the executioner anonymous. (This differs sharply, of course, from systems that hold judges anonymous.)

The more intriguing decision is the fact that information is withheld from the executioners themselves. None of the five officers knows if he or she is the one who helped cause the death or if his or her rifle carried a blank.

None of the five law enforcers knows if he or she is indeed an executioner. Why does the State of Utah deny this information from these officers?

I haven't yet made my way through the 1336 pages of Senator Dodd's massive (but, as recent events suggest, necessary) overhaul of financial regulation (full text here), but the basic elements (very helpfully summarized here) look promising. The Bill promises to bring some transparency to the shadow banking system through required disclosures to financial authorities. It increases the government's power to shut down failing financial enterprises (and even requires companies to submit their own "funeral plans" providing a road map of how they should be shut down). It requires some "skin in the game" for securitization (certainly a controversial requirement). It also modifies compensation arrangements to require banks to have the right to clawback executive compensation if it was based on inaccurate financial accounting statements (broader clawback rights might also be justified for such activity as excessive risk-taking, but these might also be effectively required by changes to the Basel capital adequacy guidelines--at least for the entities covered by Basel).

Much of the public focus--and political debate--will be on the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, but the systemic risks addressed elsewhere in the proposal are likely more important in terms of avoiding a future systemic financial collapse. 

I have coauthored a paper with Randall Costa of Citadel Investment Group on the virtues of central counterparty clearing for credit default swaps, a key step in Senator Dodd's financial reform. The paper, Clearing Credit Default Swaps: A Case Study in Global Legal Convergence, has just been published in the Chicago Journal of International Law.

The BBC reports that the Internet has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Some, such as the Italian version of Wired magazine, have championed the Internet's nomination for helping advance "dialogue, debate and consensus."

It may seem laughable to give a Peace Prize to a communications medium, but there is reason to take the nomination seriously. 

Alfred Nobel, in his will, announced that one prize should be awarded to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses."

The Nobel Prize Committee has long awarded the Prize to associations, not just natural "persons"--including recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Selecting the Internet would extend the prize further to an even more abstract entity, but it would still go to a human endeavor.

Has the Internet advanced the cause of peace?  That still remains unclear, but there is reason to be hopeful. The Web makes possible an increasing sense of common membership in the world. The very nature of the "World Wide" Web, with its focus on interconnectedness and its disrespect for political borders or geographical distance, promotes this. The Internet, in this sense, promotes "fraternity between the nations."

The Internet also allows dissidents to escape local controls on speech. I explore this further in a forthcoming California Law Review article, Googling Freedom, which I will post soon. This may be the reason that Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi is cited as a supporter of the nomination of the Internet for the Peace Prize.

There is of course the dark side of the Internet. Through this medium, terrorists have plotted their terror and arms merchants have found buyers. Nationalists have promoted jingoism.

Indeed, the Internet might permit individuals to limit themselves to a narrow informational universe, accessing only sites and information that confirm (and perhaps strengthen) our prior views.  This is Cass Sunstein's argument, which I have critiqued in my paper, Whose Republic?, published in the University of Chicago Law Review. Where Sunstein worries about the "Daily Me" made possible by electronic intermediaries that deliver news tailored to a reader's tastes, I observe that, for minorities, the traditional media offer the "Daily Them" -- a vision of society focused on its dominant members.

The BBC story notes that "[i]t is unclear who would accept the prize if the internet were to win."  I would nominate Tim Berners-Lee, the man who gave the world the "World-Wide-Web," a visionary communications protocol that made the Internet popular beyond the relatively narrow confines of technologists. 

By raising the possibility of the Internet as a Nobel Laureate, I should not be misunderstood as endorsing such a choice. There are many worthy candidates, including Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who languishes under arrest. Indeed, it is likely the case that these other candidates are more worthy of the prize--and that choosing them might have a greater likelihood of promoting the cause of peace.  

In April 1969, dedicating the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall, the Honorable Earl Warren observed that "in the naming of the building, one can sense the high purpose to which its facilities are to be dedicated." In the last four decades, the Law School has striven to live up to King's name. The faculty has sought to use this facility with a noble name to advance scholarship and teaching in the service of improving the lives of people in California, the United States, and beyond. From water law, to scientific evidence, to expert commissions, to the rights of children, to racial and economic justice for men and women--to take but a few examples--our faculty have sought to engage, and contribute to the understanding of, important legal issues.

Today, the University of California, Davis School of Law launches a new forum in which we can pursue this ambition. The UC Davis School of Law Faculty Blog will allow the law faculty to offer scholarship and commentary directly to the public. We will post our latest scholarship, including drafts of papers not yet in print, and we will re-post op-eds and columns from other fora (or at least tantalizing snippets thereof). We will also engage the latest legal developments--such as the enormously important Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC. (Once in a while, we may even post more light hearted material--maybe even a review of the latest Hollywood or Bollywood or Nollywood blockbuster.)

But we do not expect readers to consume our supposed wisdom passively. The Faculty Blog will allow the public to comment, critique, and improve upon our scholarship. We welcome your participation in this new forum.

By their very nature, the ideas essayed in a blog entry will often not be as fully-worked-through as those in a published academic project. Yet, the form offers the advantage of allowing us to explore new ground or introduce new ideas quickly and in an accessible form. The University of Chicago Law Faculty Blog helped pioneer and develop the law faculty blog form, and continues to set a high bar for the medium.

Despite the apparent simplicity of the page we launch today, there is a lot of work behind the scenes to design and program this spare offering. Jason Aller, Jamie Butler, Ed Henn, Peter Lee, Sam Sellers, and Pamela Wu deserve our gratitude for their hard work behind the scenes.  Peter Lee and I will serve as the founding editors of the Faculty Blog. 

In his remarks at the inauguration of the brick and mortar King Hall, Chief Justice Warren hoped that the new edifice would become a "temple of justice." Today, we hope to carry that mandate further into the frontier of cyberspace.