The Volokh Conspiracy

David E. Bernstein is a Professor at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia, where he has been teaching since 1995. He was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center for Spring 2003 semester, and is a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan School of Law for the 2005-06 academic year.

Professor Bernstein is a graduate of the Yale Law School, where he was senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and a John M. Olin Fellow in Law, Economics, and Public Policy. He is the author of over sixty frequently cited scholarly articles, book chapters, and think tank studies, including recent or forthcoming articles and review essays in the Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review (2), Northwestern University Law Review, Texas Law Review (2), Georgetown Law Journal (2), Vanderbilt Law Review, and California Law Review.

Professor Bernstein is the author of You Can't Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws (Cato Institute 2003). He is also the co-author of The New Wigmore: Expert Evidence (Aspen Law and Business 2003), author of Only One Place of Redress: African-Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Duke 2001), and co-editor of Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law (MIT 1993). He a past chairperson of the Association of American Law Schools Evidence section.

My presentation, mind you, was an empirical piece about the status of the Daubert case, and had no ideological content.

A few years ago, when my son was applying to colleges, one school's menu of essay questions amounted to this: "Tell us how liberal you are."

A few years ago, when my son was applying to colleges, one school's menu of essay questions amounted to this: "Tell us how liberal you are."

I'm sorry, but I am calling BS on this story. I would love to see the actual text of the question. This is the type of claim that makes conservatives seem utterly unhinged when it comes playing the victim in the marketplace of campus ideology.

Just as there may be no single objective "truth," there is no single explanation that might thoroughly account for a particular event. Human motivation, as ever, is multi-determined. As we noted earlier in this report, it is unlikely that Boag, Carlos, or Kenney would admit that they acted out of animus toward Mitchell’s conservative political and religious beliefs, or necessarily be aware that they harbor such a bias. It is similarly unlikely that Gleeson or Peterson would publicly acknowledge that they fired Mitchell because they considered his speaking out to be “extremely detrimental” to the University, though the available evidence clearly points in that direction. Still, it is notable that of all the actors critical of Mitchell, only Anderson voiced the possibility that in faulting Mitchell's pedagogy he might be "reaching into questions of academic freedom." We doubt that Carlos, Kenney, Boag, Zeiler or Gleeson are unappreciative of academic freedom, unaware of the central role academic freedom plays in the survival of democracy, or that they otherwise consider it an outmoded abstraction. It is certainly difficult to fathom that Kenney, for example, as a student of Eastern European history, or Boag, as a scholar in the field of gay and lesbian studies, are indifferent to the primacy of academic freedom.

First, the no one is claiming bias in physics is telling, because the research shows that departments such as physics are full of political liberals. Which suggests that something more than bias is going on here.

In general I think economists are much more "pro-market" than the public at large (or the public in jail).

educators must recognize ways in which taken-for-granted notions regarding the legitimacy of the social order are flawed, see change agency as a moral imperative, and have skills to act as agents of change

Somehow, I have a hard time imagining that Socrates would disagree with that.

Try the lower case: http://volokh.com/?exclude=davidb

One of the pernicious aspects of the blogosphere--a consequence, obviously, of the fact that contributions to it are not subject to any screening for qualifications or content--is that those who are basically ignorant, or inane, or trivial, can adopt all the forms and poses and mannerisms of those who aren't.
A civility norm helps sustain the charade. The demand for civility is tantamount to the demand to accord a legitimacy to that which lacks it, to treat the "less they know, the less they know it" blather as though it were "thoughtful," "well-reasoned," and "an interesting perspective."

But there is clearly a significant (and at the current time in particular, very influential) strain of conservative that is very anti-science. So if sceince professors react against that, that seems very logical to me.

In the summer of 2005, three faculty members at ISU drafted a statement against the use of intelligent design in science. One of those authors, Hector Avalos, told The Tribune at the time he was concerned the growing prominence of Gonzalez's work was beginning to market ISU as an "intelligent design school."

The statement collected signatures of support from more than 120 ISU faculty members before similar statements surfaced at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa.

If you think the most numerous and staunchly anti-evolution constituency in the U.S. is conservative white Republicans, you are wrong. American blacks, who are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats, are also overwhelmingly adherents of Christian sects that reject evolution.

Leftists can come up w/ plenty of anecdotes about professors who dismiss their views -- say downgrading an essay in an international politics course because it mentions Chomsky, not because what Chomsky says about that topic is wrong. That doesn't mean that most political scientists are conservative.