Judge David Levi of the Eastern District of California has been named the next dean of the law school at Duke. He is the son of Ed Levi, University of Chicago Law School dean and Attorney General extraordinaire. (For ex-President Ford's thoughts on his decision to appoint Ed Levi, see here). (Links via Peter Lattman and Orin Kerr).

So far as I can tell, Judge Levi has not held an academic appointment before, which is not typical for a law school dean.

In The New Republic, Damon Linker (formerly of First Things) asks a lot of critical questions about Mitt Romney's mormonism and its relationship to his presidential campaign. Russell Arben Fox provides a lot of smart and deep answers.

When I read that Starbucks had eliminated trans fats in its baked goods in urban areas, I assumed that this was mostly a false change. After all, except for the occasional donut, Starbucks doesn't sell all that many things that have much to do with cheap frying oil, which is the prime application of trans fats (my reading suggests it is in frying that people like McDonald's and Dunkin Donuts are having real trouble finding good alternatives. In both cases, the proper alternative, lard, has been destroyed by a previous generation of health enthusiasts).

Anyway, it turns out that I was quite wrong. Some of Starbucks's muffins, scones, and bars used to contain trans fat. Most distressingly, so did its "butter" croissant. Distressing, of course, because butter has no trans fat at all, and therefore it must have either been butter flavored, or a mix of butter and hydrogenated oil.

By the way, my view is that trans fat is the closest call on banning a food ingredient I personally have ever seen. On one hand, it adds little in the way of flavor (except in pie crusts and the like, where it does have positive effects), and on the other, the doctors tell us that it verges on being poisonous. This latter would not bother me if it were easier to ferret out. If you have cholesterol, it's easy to control your intake of butter cookies. It's less easy to stop eating fries because these particular fries might be cooked in trans fats. In that sense, trans fats are insiduous pests, appearing in places where they really have no right to be.

Nonetheless, I think trans fats ought to be avoided rather than banned, as they have been in New York. Or, at worst, you ought to be allowed to use them if you disclose on some publicly available piece of paper or web site that your food contains them. Neither of those alternatives are on the table here anymore, but other cities still have a chance. As to Starbucks's decision to eliminate them voluntarily, well, that's their business.

John Holbo says yes:

James Madison said standing armies were the greatest threat to liberty—were standing
invitations to tyranny, you see. It sounds strange, but a standing army of literary critics—that
would be us; the MLA—are a threat to intellectual liberty, in that we are a standing invitation
to the tyranny of the monograph.