Murders And Shootings At Record Lows In NYC

New York City recorded the lowest number of shootings and homicides in its history in the first five months of 2025. From January to May 2025, there were 264 shootings and 112 homicides, the lowest since crime data tracking began.

The Case For Bills Of Attainder

Every issue has two sides. I find that argument in favor of allowing Bills of Attainder particularly weak. But here it is:

For half a millennium, bills of attainder were an accepted sovereign power, used by British and American governments to defend their people in times of emergency. Throughout the war for independence and its aftermath, the new American states repeatedly attainted loyalists and confiscated their lands, remaking much of the socioeconomic structure of the country. Then, in little over a year and with barely any reasoning, the ratifiers of the 1788 constitution stripped the state and federal governments alike of their power to attaint. Today, attainder bans are remembered as a just and inevitable part of Enlightenment reform. 

But in truth, these bans were anti-republican. Worse, they were a mistake. 

Eighteenth-century bills of attainders were not the arbitrary acts of tyranny that scholars today imagine. They were a narrow emergency power, passed only after debate and examination of evidence, with procedures guaranteeing due process and appeal written into the text of the laws. 

Moreover, although legislators occasionally passed abusive attainders, early Americans proposed reforms that would have prevented abuses without prohibiting attainder outright. In the right circumstances, bills of attainder are a valuable tool of republican government. The history and ideals of the Founding Era provide compelling reasons to embrace bills of attainder in exceptional times.

Nathan Ristuccia (Institute for Free Speech), In Praise of Attainder, SSRN (2025).

Middle Ground On Arbitration

One of the biggest problems with arbitration is that there is nothing but the arbitrator's conscience to insure that arbitration decisions conform to the law and the facts, even though they are, in principal, supposed to conform to both. Arbitration clauses with expanded judicial review could address this flaw that discourages parties from utilizing this forum.

This article argues that courts should enforce private contractual agreements for expanded judicial review in arbitration agreements. This article demonstrates that the court decisions enforcing such arbitral contractual provisions are consistent with the FAA’s purpose to ensure enforcement of parties’ arbitral agreements, whatever the form. Furthermore, this article argues that the FAA does not preclude courts from reviewing awards under expanded grounds where parties so agree, because the statutory structure provides default rather than mandatory grounds for award vacatur. Finally, this article concludes that permitting the parties to contract for expanded judicial review serves the public policy favoring arbitration, insofar as it encourages arbitration by giving parties who may be extraordinarily concerned with obtaining the legally correct outcome the ability to contract for expanded judicial review.

Richard A. Bales, Contracting Around the FAA: The Enforceability of Private Agreements to Expand Judicial Review of Arbitration Awards, SSRN (2025).