I hosted a small dinner last weekend. My basic sense with these things, even for few people, is to keep them simple. Therefore, I started the meal with a freshly made ciabatta, some cheesey souffle-like breads, and some salami. You can see that spread here. The main course was some very simple beef bourgignon - just a wine stew with small pearl onions, mushrooms, and cheap beef, cooked on the stove for six or seven hours with herbs. I served that with a heterodox couscous - I like rice and all, but since couscous is correctly cooked by washing the grains three times, then steaming over a stew, it seemed like a perfect combination to me. Dessert was a very simple apple tart made with pre-made puff pastry. The picture is here, but it came out poorly. Rest assured, taste was a-okay.

Comments open if anyone wants to ask questions or whatever.

EDIT: By the way, making even two simple breads, an incredibly easy dessert, and one stew for a few people is hard work. I'm surprised subordinate restaurant chefs don't get paid better.

Part III: Where to Find Friends, the European Right

So, we've established that the European left is extreme from our perspective, and not to be compromised with. Many American conservatives abroad therefore turn to their local conservative party. It might be the British tories, or the German Christian Democrats, or the French Gaullistes. Surely, these must be the people you should throw your lot in with, right? These must be your ideological friends. Unfortunately not. The European right is often no more sympathetic for the American rightist than the left.

There are three problems, chiefly. The first is that right wingery in Europe is often associated with some pretty unpleasant forms of racism, or at least strong racial nationalism. Though the Christian Democrats have done an admirable job expelling their most extreme supporters, the right fringe of that party is almost certainly neo-Nazi. Similarly, a lot of right wingers in France, though they'd almost never admit it, have voted for a man in Jean-Marie le Pen who makes the modern Ku Klux Klan look moderate. In the last French general election, the National Front finished second, ahead of the mainline leftists. That's like a racist version of the reform party beating Kerry in a three way race.

The British right wing has similar problems - inevitably, when the Tories feel desperate for votes, the bizarre messages about immigrants start flowing. Even on this basis alone, throwing your lot in with the main right wing parties in Europe is often a dangerous trap.

Second, European right wing parties often also have aristocratic tendencies. For example, a considerable portion of the British conservative base seems to consist of jilted noblemen ,finally robbed of meaning by the exclusion of their fathers from the House of Lords. This kind of thing is often accompanied by an implicit, but very unpleasant, attitude towards people striving to make something of themselves. The CDU in Germany is similarly associated with aristocracy - the fraternities in German universities, for example, are just as famous for being Christian Democrat basions as for the scars they receive when they're initiated. If you're the kind of conservative or libertarian who believes in meritocracy, striving, and the leveling effect of wealth, these parties aren't great homes.

Third, European rightist parties tend to be not particularly right wing in the good sense, even on substantive grounds. British Tories, for example, constantly argue that people should vote for them because they'll protect the UK's flatly Stalinist free health service (a position not even French socialists support). The Christian Democrat Union was among the architects of Germany's bizarre codetermination corporate governance regime, where half of a company's board has to be made up of labor representatives. The French conservative parties are often just as statist as the left. In the recent Sanofi-Aventis merger battle, for example, it was the rightist prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin who stopped a potential merger between French Aventis and Swiss Novartis, explicitly in order to create a French "national champion". Bush may not be ideal in terms of taxes and spending, but these rightists aren't even playing the same game.

So in what sense are these parties called right wing, aside from the aristocratic and nationalistic points above? Well, to some extent, the European right wing parties were much more obviously rightist when the Soviet Union provided a clear litmus test. The CDU, and the Tories, and even the French right were usually much stronger opponents of Soviet policy than their leftist counterparts. Second, the British tories at least do contain legitimate conservative and libertarian wings. Maggie Thatcher had flaws, even from our perspective, but if you can find a strongly Thatcherite conservative group in the UK, you're usually going to be ok.

In other countries, however, you really need to look for alternative parties. Thankfully, they do exist, usually under the label "liberal". Alain Madelin's liberals in France, for example, are a centrist pro-business grouping of pretty reliable sentiments. They're joined by the German Frei Democrat, who are also reliably on the side of business and deregulation. Furthermore, many countries do have legitimately right wing think tanks, and other generally marginalized institutions. The Adam Smith Institute in the UK, for example, is perfectly acceptable.

Tomorrow, I discuss the chief procedural problem in arguing with the European left.

In class the other day a professor, quoting a past law school dean,* said something like: Law is about picking competing analogies and arguing over which one is best.

Now, people are always fawning over the cleverest this-and-that said by so-and-so about this Amendment / Article / Clause, but there are important bodies of law, in this author's opinion, that are relatively under-appreciated by The Masses. The general dearth of excitement over interesting securities law literature makes a cool analogy in that arena all the more exciting. "Doesn't sound exciting," you say -- but you are wrong. (Or, to be fair, you're probably exactly right, but I'm going to make my point anyway.)

As part of an advanced securities class I took last quarter we read "A New Approach to the Regulation of Trading Across Securities Markets," (71 NYU L Rev 1411) by Yakov Amihud and Haim Mendelson. The basic premise of the paper is that issuers of securities (like, say, IBM) should be able to decide where their securities trade (e.g., in the NY Stock Exchange, but not the Philadelphia Exchange) because of trade-offs between liquidity and competition. As it stands now, issuers have no control over where their securities trade, which creates sub-optimal trading venue selection -- sometimes securities are traded on too many exchanges (so that they're spread too thinly; i.e., aren't liquid enough on a given exchange) and sometimes too few (so that purchasers miss out on price competition for execution of orders). That may or may not make much sense, but I'll press on because it really doesn't matter all that much. Amihud and Mendelson argue that issuers should have a property right in their securities and derivatives (options, single stock futures, etc.) because, with the best incentives and information, they're best able to determine how many places a security and its derivative products should trade.

Now comes the interesting part (if anyone is still reading): How do you determine if a derivative product duplicates the underlying security? That is, how broad is the property right in the security? The authors rely on the fair use doctrine in copyright law, asking whether the derivative product is "transformative" or whether the derivative just duplicates the original security. If it's duplicative, then the issuer's property right controls; if it's transformative, then derivative product falls under fair use. Clever, right? Here I am, reading about securities law when all of a sudden the authors detour into the classic fair use case law! It was surprising to read, but the analogy makes a lot of sense. That was a long post to get to that modest point, but I think the analogy deserves it (this is probably one of my Top 10 favorite law school analogies).

* Ten points to anyone who knows the exact quote.

There's a trend among some people, especially on more emotive subjects, of argumentation by photo. A perfect example of it popped up yesterday. Eugene Volokh said that he supported Iran's admittedly cruel execution of a nasty murderer. Dan Glick answered by pointing to a gruesome photo. Talk about torture in Iraq, and people point to photos. War? Critics want photos of dead US troops.

But I've never really understood why photos of anything should be taken into account when you're trying to decide if something is acceptable or not. Would a homicidal round-up of an insular US minority really be less horrifying if the victims were killed by some sort of laser-beam that made them good-looking and happy? And if, for some bizarre reason, we had been forced to dismember each dead member of the Wehrmacht in WWII, and taken photos, would that have discredited the war? Of course not.

Obviously, photos can be useful evidence to alert us to problems. The US clearly tortured people in Iraq, and that is undeniably gruesome. But wars, and prisons, and executions are all gruesome things. And yet, some of them are ok, and some aren't. If you want people to agree with you that the particular thing we're seeing is gruesome, I'd much prefer some argument. But maybe photos are determinative for some people. I'm curious.

On Tuesday, the United States won a big, though obscure, victory against Europe in the WTO. A dispute resolution panel held that all WTO members are required to have access to European geographical indication protection. If we want Idaho potatoes to be a protected mark in Europe, like the great cheese Roquefort, now we can do it. Given American complaints about European unfairness, this is a big deal, and the US Trade Representative's office should go ahead and celebrate.

But we should also take the opportunity to negotiate a settlement with the Europeans on geographical indications generally. Ever since Europe adopted their current regulations in 1992, we've completely refused to consider adopting them in the WTO treaty. If Parmesan gets protected, the argument goes, what'll happen to Kraft's famous green canister of cheese? And who knows what the law might do to provolone? But honestly, the number of products that could be affected are small. And since America already protects Kona coffee, and sweet onions, and wild rice, by almost identical (but ad hoc) state laws, there's really nothing in the substance that should bother us. Basically, my sense is that we're really refusing to negotiate to pique the Europeans, and because a few of our companies have issued extremely vague warnings about what would happen to their flagship products if they had to slightly change their names. But are people really going to stop buying Kraft Parmesan because it's now called Kraft Pamesello? (the actual name in Italy). No way.

This is a big deal for Europe. No one here cares. Let's extract some grandfathering concessions from the Europeans, and cut a deal. It'll make them happy, and the cost to us is pretty low.