The immediate connection is that they were borm on the same day – within hours of one another. The further connection is of course that each changed the course of history in an irreversible way. Adam Gopnick of the New Yorker magazine did a brilliant book on the subject, and here he is in a program from 2009.

The great poet said “The world is too much with us” and if living at this moment he might well add, “and it all might be breaking down right now.” All this is examined in a contentious and extended exchange by our discussants: Chris Robling and Charles Lipson of our A-Team and our Democratic strategist friend David Lundy.

The famously rejected nominee takes on the Supreme Courts of the U.S., Canada and Israel and finds them representative of a great failing in western jurisprudence: i.e. seeking to make new law and, thus, to “legislate” instead of “adjudicate.” He had just published in 2003 a book laying out the argument that he presents quite forcefully in this discussion. And speaking of counter-factuals, how might our history have been different if he had been allowed onto the Supreme Court?

Sam Peltzman speaks of Friedman as his professor and colleague. Another such colleague was Leo Melamed. Here in a 2007 program they recall Friedman as friend, as innovative contributor to the transformation of American economics and, basically, as the “guy who got it right.”

But economics is probably the most important, or most influential, of the academic social disciplines One practitioner, who is widely expected to become a Nobel Laureate, is Sam Peltzman of the University of Chicago. He joins us to explain the “Peltzman Effect” and, among many other things, how and where the present administration went wrong.