Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman

“Legal rules affect behavior on many margins. They affect incentives to commit offenses, incentives to prosecute them, incentives to prevent them. For some offenses tort law may provide better incentives than criminal law on one of those margins and worse on another. If so, the question of what ought to be a tort and what ought to be a crime will be ambiguous, at least until we develop a theory good enough to predict not only the sign but also the size of such effects. In this post I will argue that, judged by the incentive for potential victims to prevent offenses, our rules are backwards. Things we treat as crimes, such as burglary, ought to be torts; things we treat as torts, such as auto accidents, ought to be crimes.” (10/08/26)

https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/why-burglary-should-be-a-tort-and

Source: Jonathan Turley
by Jonathan Turley

“This week, Judge Mark Cohen’s long, checkered judicial career came to an ignoble end. The Supreme Court denied his petition for certiorari to challenge the 2024 ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that he was properly suspended over a litany of partisan social media posts while a sitting judge. Cohen is a former Democratic politician who ran unsuccessfully for Congress, but served for many years in the state House until defeated in 2016. In 2018, Cohen successfully ran for the Court of Common Pleas. After receiving a ‘Not Recommended’ rating from the Philadelphia Bar Association, he barely won the seat with the second-lowest vote total among the victors. During this time on the bench, Cohen continued to maintain his political public persona with social media posts that many found injudicious and unethical. In October 2024, the Pennsylvania Court of Judicial Discipline took the rare step of ejecting him from the bench and suspending him without pay over his Facebook posts.” (10/08/26)

https://jonathanturley.org/2026/10/08/supreme-court-ends-appeals-of-former-pennsylvania-judge-suspended-over-social-media-posts/

Source: Common Dreams
by Maxime Valbrune

“Over the summer, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration free rein to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, along with hundreds of thousands of TPS holders from other countries, limiting the accountability any administration will have for making determinations about TPS for the foreseeable future. Last month, a young pre-med college student named Pierre Damas Bel from Springfield, Ohio was found dead, by an apparent suicide. He was suffering depression brought on by the termination of TPS and being forced to wear an Immigration and Custom Enforcement-issued ankle bracelet. What happened to Damas Bel represents the real human cost of these inhumane policies. But sadly, I don’t believe we have reached the nadir of this administration’s cruelty.” (10/08/26)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/tps-haitians-trump

Source: Reason
by CJ Ciaramella

“Researchers argue that a profound generational shift by millennials and Gen Zers away from criminal behavior is ending mass incarceration and will ultimately reduce the prison population by 50 percent over the next two decades, with or without accompanying policy reforms. … As older generations such as baby boomers and Gen Xers have aged out of criminal behavior, which typically peaks between the late teens and mid-twenties, far fewer millennial and Gen Z offenders have arrived to replace them.” (10/07/26)

https://reason.com/2026/10/07/is-our-age-of-mass-incarceration-collapsing/

Source: Fox News
by Jon Hage & Ed Pozzuoli

“For years, social media platforms expanded with few meaningful protections for child safety, transparency, age-appropriate design, parental visibility or independent oversight. Only after mounting evidence of harm did policymakers begin responding in earnest. By then, millions of children had already been shaped by systems designed to maximize engagement. Artificial intelligence (AI) gives us a rare chance to do better.” (10/08/26)

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/ai-education-chance-use-best-tech-fix-broken-schools

Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal

“Without government protection, irresponsible people would be on their own, facing those they violate: the property owners they cause harm to with their vandalism, trash, and theft. There are better ways of handling this than relying on a gang funded through theft and obsessed with making sure it faces no consequences of its own.” (10/07/26)

https://www.easternnewmexiconews.com/story/2026/10/07/voices/opinion-dont-believe-government-necessary/234330.html