The past few days I've been attending a fascinating conference on antidiscrimination law held in Chengdu sponsored by Sichuan University School of Law and the Yale China Law Center.

Despite the abstract ideology of equality in Communist China, antidiscrimination law in China is still at its earliest stages. Moreover, the key categories of concern in public discussion are quite different than we are used to in the American context.

As in America, sex equality has been a major focus, but the other two most often mentioned forms of discrimination were discrimination against people with Hepatitis B (roughly 100 million people) and discrimination against rural Chinese who have migrated to the large cities.

Orin Kerr found that law review citations to our friends at the Volokh Conspiracy have been increasing significantly over the years. Using the same methodology (citations to balkin.blogspot.com in Westlaw JLR database limited to each year) I discovered the same thing is true of Balkinization.

In 2003 we received 1 cite; in 2004 3 cites; in 2005 14 cites; in 2006 36 cites; and in 2007 49 cites. As Orin reminds us, some law journals have not yet published all their 2007 issues, so the final number for 2007 may be slightly higher.

I was surprised to walk down 4th Street in San Rafael and find that China Dynasty had closed.

But it was quite papered up.

Paul Caron did a study of law blog traffic rankings for the last year. Brian Leiter, who lands in the top fifteen twice for his two blogs, notes:
Curious that four of the top five have almost nothing to do with law; four of the top five are right-wing blogs; and three of the top five have almost no intellectual content. Welcome to the blogosphere!I think, in fact, that this is pretty much what we should expect. Blogs directed at popular audiences generally get the largest traffic. Specialty blogs, including blogs that specialize in delivering legal expertise, are usually niches, generating relatively low traffic that is nevertheless useful to the communities that read them.

Henry Paulsen was in Beijing this week, discussing the U.S.’s usual range of demands for China—currency reform, access to China’s domestic market and product safety. China is giving as good as it gets, complaining about U.S. protectionism and looking for some recognition for the economic reforms they have made thus far.

China has long gone to great lengths to attract foreign investment, and has been acutely aware of its economic position internationally since Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening hit its stride. The country applied for contracting party status of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), in 1986 and was positioning itself for a spot among WTO countries long before it was accepted in 2001.

Fallon strategic planner Avin Narasimhan presents the latest helping of Brainfood, giving us his perspective on the meteoric rise of China and what it could mean for us (as a global business, as advertisers, as...people).

| View | Upload your own

Alan Dershowitz has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal, available through the Harvard Law School web site. I have no doubt that most Balkinization contributors will disagree strongly with the thesis of the piece, which is that there are indeed circumstances where "we" would want the President to authorize torture. He also argues that Mukasey was correct to say that he would need to know specific circumstances before offering a definitive opinion on whether waterboarding, or any other form of interrogation, was unconstitutional because, Dershowitz says, existing case law indicates that the Supreme Court offers quite ambiguous doctrine on the point, that what "shocks the conscience" may involve taking into account the purposes for which any given method is used.

Over at Law Librarian Blog, Joe Hodnicki has some statistical evidence about the assimilation of blogs into legal literature, as I discussed previously:

According to this estimate, blog citations in law reviews and court opinions have grown from about 70 in 2004 to over 500 in 2007 (and still counting since many law reviews have not completed their 2007 publishing cycle). I believe it is fair to say that for 2005 and 2006 blog citations probably grew exponentially on a document count basis, doubling every year.
Hodnicki speculates that the rates of increased citations will level off fairly soon, reflecting a maturation of the system.

Meanwhile, Matt Berns, a 2L at Georgetown, writes that we can't understand this phenomenon without taking into account law students, who are from a younger generation and more accepting of blogs as sources of information:

Jack is too dignified to engage in blatant blog-self-promotion, so I'll step up. Balkinization is on the list of ten finalists for best law blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards. You can vote here. It's a nice way to thank Jack, Marty, Sandy and the rest of the group for all the hours they have expended in producing high quality commentary on legal issues of the day.

First, we hear almost everyday about toxic toys coming from China being added to the recall list, but the Chinese toy horrors don't end there. Disney is also violating Chinese labour laws, which are not the best to begin with in the first place. The Chinese toy problems go beyond lead in paints to the rights of workers.

According to Breitbart.com,

After more than ten years of political wrangling and seven readings in the National People’s Congress, a new property law took effect this October. The law was considered revolutionary by many in China. Scholars and legislators have protested it throughout its development, arguing that the new law overturns the basic tenants of socialism to which China, despite its booming cities and rampant exports, still cleaves.

The property rights law has been heralded for giving Chinese property owners greater security. While land-use rights are still separate from actual ownership of land, which technically belongs to the government, the new property law ensures that, for residential buildings, land-use rights are automatically renewed without charge. A registration system for establishing and transferring real property rights was also created to help enable the buying and selling of land-use rights, a practice legalized in 1988.

You may not know about, or you may know and may not agree with, the conclusions drawn by the data presented in the recently released book, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health. On the other hand, maybe you've already embraced them.

Today, January 13th, marks the fifth anniversary of this blog, which began in January 2003. Although Balkinization started as a solo effort, it soon became a group blog, with a group of writers I think are second to none in the legal blogosphere. I am grateful to all of the wonderful people who have contributed to the blog over the years, as well as our many regular readers and commenters, who have helped created an intellectual community. In the past five years, we have had over 3 million visitors, and 4.5 million page views.

Blogging as a medium can be used for many different kinds of writing. Most blogging still remains highly personal, with only a small part of the blogosphere devoted to politics, and an even smaller part devoted to law.

'The Illustration of The Great European War No.16
- A humoros Atlas of the World'

China’s new Labor Law is expected to come into effect on January 1st next year and both domestic and international companies are responding with mass layoffs and general panic.

The law promises to expand worker’s rights and limit employer freedom when it comes to hiring, firing and changing the workplace environment. Rumors are flying that Chinese lawyers are lining up clients in advance, targeting foreign companies. Olympus, the camera-manufacturer, is moving half its China business to Vietnam and miners recently laid off in attempt to preempt the law’s requirements are reportedly taking to the streets to protest their treatment. The new law is, I suspect, the first of many that could raise the cost of doing business in China.

[Type the first couple of paragraphs of your post here.]
For me, weathering the snowstorm in Shanghai for the past two weeks has meant blowing out my aged fuses three times with excessive use of a wall-mounted heater. For many in Southern China, however, the freak storms have taken a much higher toll. Small cities went more than a week without electricity and, with the available rail lines occupied with emergency shipments of coal, hundreds of thousands of hopeful migrant workers crowded railway stations trying to get home for the annual Spring Festival.

The fall of certain cities into darkness, however, isn’t just a failure of infrastructure in the face of the unusual storm; it is the result of a web of energy laws and policies that have failed to integrate China’s energy network into a workable whole. China has been trying for months to ease the pinch of rising energy costs on its residents by implementing price caps and forcing power generators and oil refiners to run in the red. As a result, generators have been reluctant to keep stockpiles of coal on hand, leading to shortages when the storm hit.

[Type the rest of your post here.]

I got a belated Christmas/early Birthday gift from the UPS man...well actually, from my husband.

I have wanted to own the series "Christy" since I first saw that it was on VHS but it was expensive and who wants VHS anymore? It was released to DVD in March but I only found out about it when I was thumbing through a Christmas catalog. I have read the book it was based on and I used to watch this show with my grandma, who passed away last month, so it holds special memories. I can't wait to watch it with my daughter, who has also read the book.

In a series of posts, I have raised various points Judge Richard Posner makes in his fascinating new book, How Judges Think. To put it with a bit of exaggeration, Posner skewers (with great style) just about everyone who says anything about judging, with the exception of pragmatic judges and advocates of pragmatic judging. A main theme of the book is his attack on the many delusions of "legalists." His prime example of a legalist is Justice Scalia (he identifies me as a legalist as well, so it's a broad category). Here is one of his more interesting arguments about legalists:

My post a couple of days ago raising doubts about whether non-elite law schools should "go interdisciplinary" provoked a series of heated responses on Leiter, Concurring Opinions, and Prawfsblawg. In opposition to my post, various law professors objected that law is more than rules and doctrine, that we should not bar the door to the intellectually curious, that we should not drop jurisprudence from the curriculum, that, indeed (shock and dismay), according to my argument we must abolish all academic orientation and interest from law schools (!).

I'm not much of one to blog about blogs - it seems self-serving and hopelessly redundant - but this is an exception.

And that's because it's a blog about an exceptional person.

David Monroe was my friend and he passed away very suddenly on Sunday. A number of us have contributed our memories to a blog about him and how we feel. (Thanks to Greg Brooks from West-Third for pulling the site

Now, following the Burmese cyclone, we have the Sichuan earthquake. I fear the death toll announced as of this post, 5,000 or so, will turn out to be far lower than the reality. People can't stop earthquakes any more than they can stop cyclones, but are these really "natural" disasters?

The only reason earthquakes are dangerous to humans is because of our built environment. People sitting out in the open will enjoy the ride, that's all. Even living in huts made of sticks and wattle, or teepees, people are perfectly safe from earthquakes. Earthquakes are catastrophes of civilization. They kill and injure us because they make our buildings fall down on top of us.

As I discussed regarding the Kashmiri earthquake two winters ago, the catastrophe was ultimately traceable to deforestation. Buildings in that region used to be wood framed, and would have been at little risk from even the most severe earthquake. But people cut down all the trees, and started to make unframed masonry structures. Then the earthquake came, and they died by the tens of thousands, and the rest were left homeless.

I'm happy to announce that the 18th annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference will be held in New Haven from May 20-23, 2008. The theme this year is U.S. technology policy for the next administration. Here is the call for proposals:

COMPUTERS, FREEDOM, AND PRIVACY: TECHNOLOGY POLICY '08
http://cfp2008.org/
18th Annual CFP conference
May 20-23, 2008
Omni Hotel
New Haven, CT

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

This election year will be the first to address US technology policy in the information age as part of our national debate. Candidates have put forth positions about technology policy and have recognized that it has its own set of economic, political, and social concerns. In the areas of privacy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, telecommunications, and freedom of speech, an increasing number of issues once confined to experts now penetrate public conversation. Our decisions about technology policy are being made at a time when the architectures of our information and communication technologies are still being built. Debate about these issues needs to be better-informed in order for us to make policy choices in the public interest.

Voting on whether or not to lift the restraining order (legal jargon for calling off the strike) will take place in person at two meetings, one in NYC and one in LA.

If you cannot attend the meetings, you may vote by proxy. Today, there has been some confusion on what "voting by proxy" means. Faxing in a proxy vote form is NOT the same as voting. You are designating a fellow WGA member to vote

If you read a bunch of blogs, you know that there are about a gazillion out there and no easy way to figure out which ones are good and which ones stink. Part of the reason I started this blog was that, after a thorough search of the blogosphere, I just couldn't find a blog that reviewed Rachael Ray's recipes and provided news on what she was up to.

So how are you supposed to find the good ones? You can use Technorati or Google's blog search, but you'll have no idea if the blog is any good or if it's just a splog (spam blog).

Here's a toast to Jack Balkin who 5 years ago had the foresight to create Balkinization and who has nurtured it with such loving care all these years.

I drafted this post (about "The Long Black Veil") a while back, but never quite had the nerve to put up... what better way than with a reinterpretation of a song to celebrate Jack's contribution to our worlds.

I’ve always loved the song, “The Long Black Veil.” But I’ve also been troubled by the chorus’s claim: “Nobody knows, nobody sees, Nobody knows but me.” Is it a claim that “nobody knows that she cries over my bones,” or a claim that “nobody knows that I remained silent to protect her”? The latter can’t literally be true. She also knows. It also can’t be a claim “nobody knows that they hung an innocent man.” Because the guilty party would probably know that they tagged someone else for the crime.

It has recently been suggested, in the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor, that Barack Obama would have profound difficulties in dealing with the Islamic world if he is elected president because he was born to a Muslim father and then raised as a Christian, making him an apostate. This, the stories claimed, make him eligible for the death penalty or assassination under Islamic law.

The spectacular ignorance of Islam in these stories has now been documented and refuted here by Abdullahi Ahmed an’Naim, one of the smartest Moslem intellectuals working today. He notes:

I went to a discussion on the internet use in China since I missed the Brainfood presentation from Avin. I found it very interesting, but since y'all (I am in Texas) probably attended Avin's thing, I won't ramble on about it. However, they spoke of the popularity of widgets and referenced this one in particular. It is for a new Steven Chan (director of Kung Fu Hustle) movie, CJ7.