by Brian R. Merrick Cape Cod Times column, May 16, 2015 The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently heard oral arguments in a case arising out of Barnstable County that may have a major impact on the future of political speech in Massachusetts. Even casual readers of the Cape Cod Times will be aware that during…
Month: November 2015
Robert H. Quinn; An Appreciation
Cape Cod Times column, January 17, 2014 By Brian R. Merrick Robert H. Quinn died Sunday here on the Cape at his summer home in Falmouth at age 85. Obituaries in the Cape Cod Times and other newspapers in the commonwealth general led with his sponsorship of the eponymous Quinn Bill. That signal legislation provided…
Yale’s Little Robespierres
WSJ Letters, November 16, 2015 “Yale’s Little Robespierres” (Review & Outlook, Nov. 10) makes the Yale of William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” seem an academic paradise. Buckley bemoaned the academic freedom he saw undermining Yale’s traditional religious values. True academic freedom, like Western liberal democracy, in its tolerance of values inimical to…
Ted Cruz’s Not-So Flat Tax Plan
WSJ Letters, November 4, 2015 Ted Cruz’s tax plan is anything but flat. The deduction for charitable giving is a loophole the wealthy can and do drive a truck through. If they are truly generous, let the wealthy donate their own money, not mine, to their choice of charity. If this is truly to be…
The Clinton Plan to Distort Market Signals
WSJ Letters, August 30, 2015 The result of increasing taxes on investments held for a short period of time will not be to encourage wise, long-term decision-making by investors and managers. Rather, complicating record keeping and increasing taxes will, at the margin, keep investors out of the market. Brian R. Merrick West Barnstable, Mass.
Understanding the “Watchman” Atticus
WSJ Letters, July 30, 2015 “Go Set a Watchman” does not present a different Atticus Finch from the one we all admired in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (“Don’t Mourn Atticus Finch,” by Peggy Noonan, Declarations, July 25). The devotion of “Mockingbird” Atticus is to the law, not to equality of the races. His passionate argument…
Time to Abolish the Penny & Nickel
WSJ, Letters, July 27, 2015 It shouldn’t take a Centennial Monetary Commission (“Fifty Years of Debasing Money,” Review & Outlook, July 22) to propose the most obviously practical monetary reform: abolish the darn penny. It costs more than it’s worth to mint it and is nothing but a nuisance to everyone but the copper-mining interests….
Hard Bargaining Wins Negotiations
WSJ, Letters, July 13, 2013 Craig J. Richardson’s “An Econ Lesson in a Shanghai Market” (op-ed, July 7) is especially timely coming amid stories about high-stakes negotiations around Greek debt and the Iranian nuclear program. The upper hand in the negotiations should go to “the one who is most able to walk away from the…
Assuring Law School Grads are Competent Lawyers
WSJ Letters, March 2, 2015 Ben Bratman is wrong to state that “performance tests came on the bar-exam scene in the 1990s” (“Reforming the Bar Exam to Produce Better Lawyers,” op-ed, Feb. 26). When I took the Massachusetts bar exam 44 years ago, they were the norm. Candidates were presented with a complex fact situation…
The Innovation Act & Loser Pays
Wall Street Journal Letters, April 30, 2015 University Presidents Brown and Clements complain of “loser pays” provisions in the proposed Innovation Act, directed at “patent trolls” and shifting legal fees to the losing party in patent litigation. The legislation could require a plaintiff bringing a patent action to file a bond to cover the other…
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