Montana’s current governor, Republican Judy Martz, as well as four Republican gubernatorial candidates favor a return of cyanide leach mining. (One, Ken Miller, flippantly told an audience, “You had some cyanide for lunch” because there were almonds on their chicken.) I object to cyanide on ethical, economic, and ecological grounds. This process violates the most […]

Lava Lake in the Madison Range just south of Bozeman is a favorite destination for participants in our summer programs for federal judges and law professors. Most years the lake trail is clogged with snow until early July. But that’s changing. Shorter, warmer winters and drier summers are here. Warmer spring temperatures cause our rivers […]

Both the Jeffersonian Democrat and the libertarian have an interest in fostering a moral society. The late liberal Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan lamented in a 1993 essay: “[O]ver the past generation…we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is […]

Here’s a neat summer project: Let’s fix the snowmobile controversy in Yellowstone. It illustrates how a distorted market and bureaucratic pathologies constrain creative thinking. The solution lies in going outside the traditional business practices of the snowmobile renters and the vested interests of local, regional, and national political groups. West Yellowstone describes itself as the […]