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Many hoped that President Obama could go to Copenhagen armed with signed legislation. That prospect now seems remote, but the new administration has been so vigorous in using its existing authorities to regulate greenhouse gases that he will be far from empty handed. The U.N. conference in Copenhagen was more a symbolic deadline than a real one. Climate negotiators from around the world seem to be in almost continuous session. Many things seem to be marching forward, though perhaps not on the calendar originally envisioned. Of particular importance are the bilateral talks quietly going on between the U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters; each emits about 20 percent of the world's greenhouse gases.

Ohio's botched attempt to execute Romell Broom last month by lethal injection once again dashed our hopes for sanitary and painless executions. For decades, we have sought—and failed—to find a dignified way for the state to take the life of a condemned prisoner, part of our “evolving norms of decency” and the mark of a civilizing society. The nonviolence and medical precision of lethal injection was a welcome remedy for the disfigurement and bloody messes of earlier methods including disembowelment, the guillotine, hanging, firing squads, the gas chamber, and electrocution. Yet Romell Brown’s experience, like the gruesome execution of Angel Diaz in Florida and many others before them, show that the risk of torture during execution remains real. Brown's botched execution threatens to undo the narrow and fragile foundations of Baze v. Rees, the June 2008 opinion upholding Kentucky’s execution procedures that immersed the Court in the business of regulating the states' execution procedures. As Brown’s case works its way through the appellate courts, one or more of the Justices surely must be thinking “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

There’s no question that, in the wake of the Department of Justice’s brief and the parties’ motion to adjourn the October 7 hearing on the fairness of the Google books settlement, the parties have gone back to the drawing board. The opposition to the settlement didn’t arise suddenly, so the parties have had some time to think about how the settlement might be changed. Still, negotiating all of the various aspects of a new agreement may take some time. Any new agreement is likely to be less ambitious than the original, and it is reasonable to assume that the court will require that rights holders be given notice of the new settlement and an opportunity to opt out.

It’s an old lawyer’s cliché to say a lawyer who has himself for a client is a fool. But Karl Rove shows us that sometimes a series of sharp attacks can be the best defense. That’s certainly true for the American media. By lashing out at the coverage of his involvement in the U.S. attorney’s scandal, Rove is trying to make that coverage—and not his role—the subject of discussion. But Rove has a small problem: The facts that the House Judiciary Committee’s probe turned up can’t be squared with his claims that he played a “minor role.” In fact if one conclusion can be drawn from the 6,000 pages of documents disclosed last week, it is this: When Republicans wanted to influence some decision that was pending inside the Justice Department, they picked up the phone and called Karl Rove. Now why might that be?

It’s like ping-pong. [The IRS] is using investors to scare banks and using banks to scare investors.

—Professor Alex Raskolnikov, as reported by The Deal