The official announcement from the law school: Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg will join the George Mason law faculty as professor of law beginning in July of 2013. Judge Ginsburg, who is currently a professor of law at New York University School of Law, will continue also to serve as senior circuit judge of the United […]
Author Archive | David Bernstein
Since We’re Talking About Ideological Diversity in the Academy….
I had a relatively recent conversation about this with a very prominent member of the Yale Law School faculty. I mentioned that in my lifetime I don’t think that Yale has ever hired a “right of center” constitutional law scholar. (Note: not my career, my lifetime; please note that Bork was hired before my lifetime […]
Americans’ (Relative) Sympathy for Israel at a 22-Year High
Times of Israel: Americans’ sympathy for Israel is at a 22-year high, according to Gallup figures released on Friday, just five days ahead of Barack Obama’s first visit to Israel as president. In figures gleaned from the polling organization’s early February World Affairs poll, 64 percent of Americans say their sympathies “in the Middle East […]
Let’s Play Spot the Fallacies
From a review in the most recent issue of Reviews in American History: Like most conservatives, Shlaes assumes a perfectly competitive marketplace in which the government can only make an unwarranted and counterproductive intrusion. This perspective leads Shlaes to discount the role of jobs programs such as the CCC and the WPA that contributed to […]
Judge Tingling’s Ruling on the Bloomberg Soda Ban: An Example of Conservative Judicial Activism?
Let’s put aside the question of whether the ruling is in fact judicial activism, or whether it was simply a proper application of non-delegation principles. What about “conservative?” Emily Bazelon of Slate writes, Judge Tingling walked on by all of that in striking down the Department of Health order. And of course he’s not the […]
Comparing U.S. News Faculty Reputation Rank with “Scholarly Impact”
Below I’ve created a table listing the top fifty-five law schools according to their “peer” ranking on U.S. News, with the last column showing each school’s ranking according to the latest “scholarly impact” study conducted by folks at St. Thomas Law School. Two schools stand out as being wildly underranked by their peers compared to […]
Article on Buchanan v. Warley
In 1917, the Supreme Court decided Buchanan v. Warley, holding that it was unconstitutional to ban blacks from buying property on blocks where mostly whites resided, and vice versa. Buchanan was, in my opinion, a very important case, but it has mostly languished in obscurity. Last week, however, Senator Rand Paul talked about Buchanan on […]
The Daubert Counterrevolution
I’ve posted this paper on SSRN. It’s forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review. It’s become common for people to post papers on SSRN only when they are “done,” so as to show off their best work. But I’m actually really interested in comments on this one, and the final version isn’t due to the […]
Color Me Skeptical
Co-blogger Jonathan Adler quotes Professor Herbert Hovenkamp of the University of Iowa Law School, below, as stating: The overwhelming majority of my colleagues believe in diversity in faculty hiring, and I believe most would include ideological diversity of both right and left. Some would regard diversity more as a “tie breaker” for choosing among people […]
On the Lighter Side
In a week filled with news of threats of nuclear war from North Korea, the death of Latin American tyrants, scary assertions of executive power to execute Americans without due process, not to mention highly impertinent questions asked of prominent law professors, here is some lighter news–my son at four months with his evil twin.
Ian Millhiser of Think Progress on Paul and Lochner
Attorney Ian Millhiser of the “liberal” Center for American Progress is quite agitated by Sen Paul’s speech yesterday, and not because he is concerned about potential abuses of executive authority. Rather, it’s because Paul had the temerity to refer favorably to Lochner. This provoked Millhiser’s response (h/t Alex Tabarrok), which is full of disingenuous statements: […]
The Conservative Origins of Strict Scrutiny
That’s the name of my article, published last year in the George Mason Law Review for a symposium on judicial engagement, that I just posted to SSRN. Here’s the abstract: Debate over judicial engagement under the Fourteenth Amendment generally starts from the presumption that strict judicial scrutiny of laws that infringe on important rights is […]
Rand Paul on Lochner, Buchanan v. Warley, and Oliver Wendell Holmes
Embedding the video isn’t working, so here’s a link to the relevant remarks (courtesy of Breitbart.com). I haven’t had a chance to blog about this, but Sen. Paul and everyone else who complain that defining “due process” for a drone strike as review within the executive branch is completely contrary to what due process has […]
No, Arabs Living Under Israeli Control are Not Going to Outnumber Jews Any Time Soon
I often see lines like this in articles about Israel, this one from the AP: “… with Arabs living under Israeli control expected to outnumber Jews in the coming years.” Let’s do the numbers. There are approximately 6.4 million Jews (including “Jews” who are not recognized by the Israeli Interior ministry as such because they […]
A New Civility Standard
Prof. Brian Leiter is apparently grossly offended that an attorney sent him an email stating “You’re a ‘Law and ______’ Professor, not a lawyer. How would you know how to ‘think like a lawyer’?” Leiter not only sent his correspondent a pointed lengthy response criticizing his “impertinent,” “juvenile,” and “insolent” email, but added at the […]