Cato Institute - Associates in The News

Associates in The News

• Several Cato Institute-affiliated scholars have achieved academic distinction, including Nobel laureates F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, James M. Buchanan, and Vernon L. Smith.
• Cato senior fellow Randy Barnett argued the Gonzales v. Raich case before the Supreme Court in 2004.
• Mencken Fellow P. J. O'Rourke is the bestselling author of Parliament of Whores, All the Trouble in the World, and other books.
• Former Cato policy analyst Radley Balko was cited by Justice Breyer's dissent to the Supreme Court's 2006 Hudson v. Michigan decision, concerning "no knock" raids.
• Cato senior fellow Robert A. Levy personally funded the plaintiffs' successful Supreme Court challenge to the District of Columbia's gun ban (District of Columbia v. Heller), on the basis of the Second Amendment.
• In December 2005, Doug Bandow, a Cato fellow, admitted taking money from lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing columns for the Copley Press favorable to Abramoff clients. The columns did not, however, deviate from Bandow's own views. Copley suspended his column. Bandow subsequently resigned from Cato on December 15, 2005. He returned to Cato in early 2009.
• In 1999, David Rall, a prominent environmental scientist, died in a car accident. Steven Milloy, at the time a Cato adjunct scholar, celebrated Rall's death on his site junkscience.com, writing: "Scratch one junk scientist who promoted the bankrupt idea that poisoning rats with a chemical predicts cancer in humans exposed to much lower levels of the chemical – a notion that, at the very least, has wasted billions and billions of public and private dollars." Cato Institute President Edward Crane called Milloy's attack an "inexcusable lapse in judgment and civility," but Milloy refused to apologize. He retained his position with Cato until the end of 2005. Following renewed controversy over the financial support Milloy received from tobacco and oil companies while writing editorial pieces favorable to them, Milloy's name was removed from the list of Cato adjunct scholars.
• In January 2008, adjunct scholar Dominick Armentano separated from the Institute after writing an op-ed piece about UFO's in the Vero Beach Press-Journal. Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz wrote that "I won't deny that this latest op-ed played a role in our decision."