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Dave Kopel

Dave Kopel is a lawyer who once served as an assistant attorney general for the state of Colorado and who has published articles in a wide array of law journals. He's also the author of numerous books, most recently Supreme Court Gun Cases. His commentary has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and a host of other publications. He's a regular contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy weblog and he's a sometime law-school professor and lecturer. But his official title is research director for the Independence Institute in Golden.

Recent stories

KOPEL: We'll lose more than a paper

February 27, 2009

Farewell, my Rocky. You've been part of my life ever since I was 8 years old, when I started reading you to follow the 1968 presidential election and campaign of my hero Robert Kennedy.

KOPEL: La Voz best of the bunch

February 21, 2009

Since you read the editorial pages, you probably think it's important that newspapers help the public be well-informed. But what about our fellow Coloradans who are Spanish-speaking? The Denver area has many weekly newspapers in Spanish, with large readerships. Are these papers doing a good job informing the public?

ON THE MEDIA: Dying newspapers, vanishing coverage

February 7, 2009

'I don't care if all the farmers and ranchers go out of business. I get my food from the grocery store." A silly comment, eh? Because, of course, the grocery stores don't produce their own food; they sell food that is grown by farmers and ranchers.

KOPEL: Rocky, Post go all out for inaugural

January 24, 2009

Has there ever been such a frenzy of Denver newspaper attention to a presidential inauguration?

KOPEL: ProPublica's shaky facts

January 10, 2009

Jason Salzman and I have different views, and write about different topics. So there has never been an instance in which Jason and I both screwed up on the very same topic.

KOPEL: Opinion pays its own way

December 27, 2008

Do you like reading Op-Eds? You may be reading more of them in the news sections of the papers, thanks to the changing economics of journalism.

KOPEL: The media-violence link

November 29, 2008

How are journalists like particle physicists? Because in the very act of doing their job, they change the world they are describing. The difference is that with particle physics, nobody gets hurt.

KOPEL: Evaluating Rocky, Post pre-election polling

November 15, 2008

How accurate were the pre-election polls in the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post? Pretty good on the presidential and Senate contests, but inconsistent on the statewide ballot issues.

KOPEL: Election chaos online

November 1, 2008

Want electoral chaos? You don't need to wait until Election Day. Just try using the online voter guides from the Rocky Mountain News or The Denver Post. It is commendably civic-minded for the papers to publish these guides, but in practice, they are useless for county and city votes. For the major races and the statewide ballot issues, the Post's online guide is pretty good.

KOPEL: Columnist has his own paranoid style

October 18, 2008

It's difficult to top the unintentional self-parody of Rocky Mountain News columnist Paul Campos last Wednesday citing Richard Hofstadter's famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The great historian Hofstadter explained that "the paranoid style," including "the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy," had at various times been found in both the left wing and the right wing of American politics.