The first big win from SCOTUS’s “honest services” ruling. According to an AP story: “Former Westar chief executive David Wittig and his top strategy officer, Douglas Lake, were charged with conspiring to inflate their compensation from the Topeka-based company and taking steps to hide their actions. A third trial date for the men, who were forced out of Westar in late 2002, was pending.

Aug 22, 2010

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On August 16, Judge Ellen S. Huvelle of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the SEC’s proposal to settle charges that Citigroup misled investors about certain investments in its portfolio. Gary L. Crittenden, Citigroup’s former CFO, and Arthur Tildesley Jr., former head of investor relations, were also charged. The firm agreed to pay $75 million, without admitting or denying charges. But Judge Huvelle asked why only the two named executives were included and, more generally, why current shareholders should have to bear the cost of the fine.

Aug 22, 2010

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I would like to start by asking you all to secure yourselves in your seats. If you have any pointy objects, make sure they are facing away

Aug 22, 2010

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Sam Kazman

10 Mins

I first encountered Ayn Rand 's ideas in 1964. But it was five years later, after graduating from college, when I really immersed myself in her novels and philosophy.don hauptman ayn rand This was the Vietnam War period, and conscription had not yet ended. I wound up in the U.S. Navy for the next four years. Wherever I was stationed, I searched for fellow Objectivists. They weren't always easy to find. I often experienced a sense of intellectual isolation. I identified with writer Eric Hoffer, who read Nietzsche and Montaigne while toiling as a longshoreman and migrant field worker. I was assigned, not to a ship, but to a U.S. Air Force base in Bremerhaven, Germany. The accommodations were modest but comfortable, resembling a college dorm. But there was no laundry room. For that amenity, we had to traipse to another building.

Aug 20, 2010

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Don Hauptman

December 2004 -- I was thirteen when I was first introduced to Ayn Rand . I was blessed with an English teacher who saw in me the core of an emerging philosophical mind. "Write a two-page essay on your philosophy of life," Miss Price said. I responded: "My philosophy of life is that everyone has the right to their own happiness, as long as their happiness doesn't interfere with my own," and I went on for a page and a half, expanding on that premise, then turned the paper in the next day.

Aug 20, 2010

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October 2004 -- There are two major cases pending before the United States Supreme Court, to be considered in the current term, which bear heavily upon sentencing in this country by challenging the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The cases are United States v. Booker and United States v. Fanfan. These cases are consolidated for appeal, and the Supreme Court held oral arguments on them on October 4, 2004.

Aug 20, 2010

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December 2004 -- Ayn Rand 's ideas inspired many people; one of them was me. When I began reading Atlas Shrugged in the summer of 1964, I had no idea that doing so would change not only my understanding of the world but also my choice of career. Rand's powerful vision of rationality and liberty hit me at an opportune time. Previously inspired by Barry Goldwater's libertarian-oriented The Conscience of a Conservative, I was in the thick of the student "Goldwater for President" movement. And thanks to MIT's required courses in modern Western ideas and values, I'd been introduced to Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Smith, and Mill (along with many others), and on my own had discovered Friedman, Hayek, and Mises. I was ready for an integrated worldview that explained why I'd never been comfortable being labeled a conservative.

Aug 20, 2010

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Robert Poole

December 2004 -- Ayn Rand was an advocate of both egoism and rights. As an advocate of egoism, she held that the individual ought not to

Aug 20, 2010

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Eric Mack

3 Mins

December 2004 -- Ayn Rand was no academic, and people sometimes point to that fact to explain the lack of scholarly consideration given

Aug 20, 2010

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Tibor R. Machan

4 Mins

December 2004 -- There is much to celebrate on the occasion of the Ayn Rand centenary. Books on Rand and Rand citations in the scholarly

Aug 20, 2010

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Chris Matthew Sciabarra

2 Mins

December 2004 -- Ayn Rand acknowledged Aristotle as the only philosopher to whom she was indebted, the father of logic who defined "the bas

Aug 20, 2010

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Michelle Fram-Cohen

2 Mins

A few years ago, a colleague whose intelligence I respect invited me to attend a lecture he was going to give. "This will not be one of.....

Aug 20, 2010

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Stephen Cox

3 Mins

Part of the frustration we feel at these shortages is caused by the very price-gouging laws that our elected officials assure us are for...

Aug 20, 2010

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Frank Bubb

4 Mins

Consider the following situation. It is 1963. You are a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Tuskegee University, rooming in Washington, D.C....

Aug 20, 2010

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Anne Wortham

4 Mins

I have written about the evolving seigneurial view in American politics and law--that common people ought to be able to act as though the world has been made a place safe for them, in matters of finance, food, drugs, toys, consumer prodcuts, and so on. On Monday, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Philadelphia, provided a slight check to that idea. According to the court, the case Malack v. BDO Seidman turned on the following view of the investor’s situation: “(1) ‘the existence of the security in the marketplace resulted from the successful perpetration of a fraud on the investment community’ and (2) that [he (correction by RD)] ‘purchased in reliance on the market.’ Critical to the theory’s coherency is the assumption that it is reasonable for an investor to rely “on [a] [security’s] availability on the market as an indication of [its] apparent genuineness[.]”

Aug 19, 2010

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September 2004 -- As John Enright notes , there is a wealth of poetry about political and personal freedom. I thought Navigator's readers

Aug 19, 2010

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4 Mins

I've gathered for you some poems that celebrate political and personal freedom. I like them, and I hope you will like them, too. This is onl

Aug 19, 2010

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John Enright

6 Mins

June 2004 -- London Bridge—the London Bridge of nursery-rhyme fame—was completed in 1209 and began falling down a mere 60 years later. That was because Eleanor of Provence, who was queen consort to Henry III and was also the "fair lady" of the nursery rhyme, had been given the bridge tolls as a gift from her husband and was spending the revenue on herself rather than on bridge repairs. Fast-forward 600 years, and London Bridge was again falling down. The city of London, which now had control of the structure, decided it had to undertake major repairs. To find out what needed to be done, the city hired John Rennie. Rennie was one of the Industrial Revolution's leading engineers, along with John Smeaton and Thomas Telford. Today, sadly, these men who created so much of Great Britain's infrastructure during the Industrial Revolution are far less well known than the era's inventors, such as Richard Arkwright and James Watt.

Aug 18, 2010

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Conrad Black. Jeffrey Skilling. Government and defense lawyers submitted their briefs in the Conrad Black case today . Said the prosecutors: “The erroneous honest services instruction was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.” Lawyers for Black said the prosecution’s use of the honest-services theory required the court to throw out the verdict.

Aug 18, 2010

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