I think your post on Condoleeza Rice's remarks at Stanford is based on a misreading of her remarks (which admittedly are a little hard to parse, but of course they were impromptu). She did not make the Nixon-to-Frost claim that presidential command means legality. Instead, she made these points:
1. President Bush instructed everyone in the administration to obey all of our legal obligations.
2. The Justice Dept. lawyers authorized the proposed interrogation program, telling us it was not "torture."
3. Based on that legal advice, the President authorized the program.
4. All I did was communicate that presidential authorization, of what DOJ said was legal, to the CIA.

In other words, it was, she is saying, the lawyers' fault, not the President's or mine.

Much as the Founding Fathers had structured a Constitution whose promises of freedom and democracy sought to pull skilled European immigrants across the ocean, so their pioneer grandsons in the West evidently aimed to draw American women through the plains and over the mountains.

Data from the 1890 census provide some support for this admittedly crude theory. For every hundred native-born Wyoming males, there were only 58 native-born females. No other state had so pronounced a gender imbalance. Colorado and Idaho were the fifth and sixth most imbalanced states overall in 1890. The other early woman-suffrage state, Utah, had a somewhat higher percentage of women (thanks to its early experience with polygamy), but even Utah had only 88 native-born females for every hundred native-born males, ranking it 11th among the 45 states in the mid-1890’s. Also, the second, third, fourth, and seventh most imbalanced states — Montana, Washington, Nevada, and Oregon — would all embrace woman suffrage in the early 1910’s, several years ahead of most sister states. In all these places, men voting to extend the suffrage to women had little reason to fear that males might anytime soon be outvoted en masse by females (Amar, America’s Constitution, pp. 419-25).

You can read his entire narrative on the evolution of women’s suffrage here. Interestingly, Amar — who is not an empirical economist — was able to see a couple of additional legal/political wrinkles that others might miss:

Above and beyond any individualistic desire to woo women that may have motivated the men of Wyoming and other Western regions, federal territorial policy provided a modest if unintended spur to woman suffrage. In general, Congress in the 19th century waited for each territory to achieve a certain critical population mass before admitting that territory to statehood. Although Congress followed no single formula applicable to all places and all times, each western territory understood that rapid population growth would enhance its prospects for early statehood. Each new woman in the West would not only bring to a territory her own person but might also help produce future growth through childbearing. And if Congress ever decided to focus not on a given territory’s total number of inhabitants but rather on the size of its voting base, then woman suffrage would almost double the key number. …

Another aspect of the endgame: If and when women did get the vote, woe unto the diehard anti-suffrage politician who had held out until the bitter end! Each state legislator or Congressman from a non-suffrage state had to heed not just the men who had elected him, but also the men and women who could refuse to reelect him once the franchise was extended. (After ratification of the Direct Senate Election Amendment, every U.S. senator had to focus on the statewide voters rather than a tiny clump of political chums in the state capital.) The experience in Ohio, where male voters had refused to enfranchise women in 1912 and again in 1914, nicely illustrated the underlying electoral math. Senator Warren Harding voted for the Woman Suffrage Amendment and went on to capture the White House in 1920. Conversely, Senator Atlee Pomerene opposed the amendment and was voted out of office in 1922.

But the bigger picture is one of consilience: Two very different methodologies came to similar conclusions on a central question of how men democratically agreed to dilute their franchise.

By delegation, the Office of Legal Counsel exercises the Attorney General’s authority under the Judiciary Act of 1789 to advise the President and executive agencies on questions of law….

Our Office is frequently called upon to address issues of central importance to the functioning of the federal Government, and, subject to the President’s authority under the Constitution, OLC opinions are controlling on questions of law within the Executive Branch. Accordingly, it is imperative that our opinions be clear, accurate, thoroughly researched, and soundly reasoned….

Over the years, OLC has earned a reputation for giving candid, independent, and principled advice—even when that advice may be inconsistent with the desires of policymakers. This memorandum reaffirms the longstanding principles that have guided and will continue to guide OLC attorneys in preparing the formal opinions of the Office.

OLC’s interest is simply to provide the correct answer on the law....

Yes! also indulges the Freakonomics fascination with the impact of baby names. Chapter 30 argues that your name might impact your vocation. Chapter 30 quotes a scene from the NBC comedy The Office, in which Dwight Schrute is caught in a lie about going to the dentist. Dwight’s boss, Michael Scott, asks Dwight for his dentist’s name and “after a long, awkward pause, Dwight replies, ‘Crentist.’”

Michael: Your dentist’s name is Crentist?

Dwight: Yeah.

Michael: Huh … sounds a lot like dentist.

Dwight: Maybe that’s why he became a dentist.

Crentist sounds silly, but researchers have found that people named Dennis are more likely to become dentists. An article, “Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore,” finds that in the U.S. population the names Jerry, Dennis, and Walter rank 39th, 40th, and 41st among male first names. But in the national directory of the American Dental Association there are close to twice as many Dennises (482) as Walters (252) and Jerrys (270). “Similarly, people whose names begin with ‘Geo’ (e.g., George, Geoffrey) are disproportionately likely to do research in the geosciences (e.g., geology).”

To be honest, I’m not fully persuaded that either of these results is true. Perhaps I was particularly on guard because the book is explicitly about persuasion. But at least 20 of the “50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive” got me thinking about possible follow-ups. If you’re looking for an easy entry point into the empirical psychology literature on persuasion, this book might be the ticket.

This possibility [that sleep deprivation reduces pain tolerance] suggests that use of extended sleep deprivation in combination with other techniques might be more likely than the separate use of the techniques to place the detainee in a state of severe physical distress and, therefore, that the detainee might be more likely to experience severe physical suffering. However, you [CIA] have informed us that the interrogation techniques at issue would not be used during a course of extended sleep deprivation with such frequency and intensity as to induce in the detainee a persistent condition of extreme physical distress such as may constitute ‘severe physical suffering’ within the meaning of sections 2340-2340A.

One of my favorite examples of the powerful urge to conform with the majority comes from an experiment he ran at Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Conformity theory suggests the park service was sending exactly the wrong message when it posted signs saying:

Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.

Here’s how his paper describes the experiment:

We gained permission from Petrified Forest National Park officials to place secretly marked pieces of petrified wood along visitor pathways.

Over five consecutive weekends, Cialdini and coauthors varied the signs seen at the entrance to each path. Some weekends, visitors saw a sign that, like the original park-service sign, emphasized the wrong norm:

Many past visitors have removed petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest.

This wording was accompanied by pictures of three visitors taking wood.

Other weekends, visitors saw:

Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest.

This wording was accompanied by a picture of a lone visitor stealing a piece of wood, with a red circle-and-bar symbol superimposed over his hand.

Sure enough the “many past visitors” framing lead to more than four times the amount of pilfering of petrified wood (7.92 percent vs. 1.67 percent). But what’s truly amazing is that putting up no sign at all did a better job than putting up a sign suggesting that “everybody does it”:

In a finding that should petrify the National Park’s management, compared with a no-sign control condition in which 2.92 percent of the pieces were stolen, the social-proof message resulted in more theft (7.92 percent). In essence, it almost tripled theft. Thus, theirs was not a crime prevention strategy; it was a crime promotion strategy. (Yes!, p. 22)

I’m not calling for the writers of Friday Night Lights to change the story arc. But Cialdini’s simple idea is that public service messages would do well to implicitly tell high-schoolers: “Be like most of your peers — don’t have sex while you’re in high school.”

Indeed, Cialdini has me thinking that all those “Above the Influence” commercials are seriously off base:

These commercials implicitly suggest that most of your peers are going to be using drugs and that you have to gird yourself to be above their influence. They are too close to the signs in the Petrified Forest. Instead of saying “Don’t do what most kids your age do,” they might say “Do what most kids your age do: just say no.”

We might want to start by finding out what high-schoolers think and correct misperceptions. These spots might be a lot more effective if they change their message to implicitly say: Most high-schoolers don’t use meth. Most high-schoolers don’t binge drink. In fact, most high-schoolers don’t use drugs at all.

This possibility [that sleep deprivation reduces pain tolerance] suggests that use of extended sleep deprivation in combination with other techniques might be more likely than the separate use of the techniques to place the detainee in a state of severe physical distress and, therefore, that the detainee might be more likely to experience severe physical suffering. However, you [CIA] have informed us that the interrogation techniques at issue would not be used during a course of extended sleep deprivation with such frequency and intensity as to induce in the detainee a persistent condition of extreme physical distress such as may constitute ‘severe physical suffering’ within the meaning of sections 2340-2340A.