Author Archive | David Bernstein

I’ve mostly given up blogging about the (now-deflating) housing bubble, because the housing bubble blog and its commenters do such a fantastic job that there isn’t much left to say. But every once in a while I come across something interesting enough to share. 22201 has perhaps been the hottest zip code in Northern Virginia, […]

On a recent trip I read the second volume in Daniel Gordis’s account of his life as a liberal American Jewish immigrant to Israel, Coming Together, Coming Apart. I read it reluctantly, because I found the first volume, Home to Stay, only mildly interesting. But my mom really enjoyed the latter book, so I bought […]

New York magazine’s August 28th issue has a short piece discussing how upset various fashion poobahs are that they won’t be able to groom themselves properly on the plane on the way to European Fashion Week (whatever that is). Here is the choicest comment: “Everybody is bummed because it’s a really long flight and looking […]

Courtesy of Brad Pitt: “I’m sorry honey, I love you and I want to marry you, but it just wouldn’t be right for us to get married when gay couples are denied that right.” Not only can you weasel out of marriage, but you can claim points for being a sensitive social activist at the […]

Ha’aretz publishes an example of a very typical article in Jewish publications these days, accusing the American Jewish establishment of being too conservative, and too supportive of Israel, and therefore turning off young (which is for some reason used as a synonym for leftist) Jews. I want to raise the opposite issue, which I’ve never […]

The New York Times tries to make a story out of nonstory: free-market groups that quite naturally defend the largest, most successful business in the U.S., Wal-Mart, from government regulation, get a tiny fraction of their funding from the Walton Family Foundation (not even from Wal-Mart itself). At least from what can be discerned from […]

My home computer setup has a Samsung SyncMaster 213T LCD monitor. For no reason that I can discern, a couple of days ago I started to get pretty major “wavy” interference on the monitor. I unplugged it and hooked it up to my wife’s computer, on a desk a few feet away, and it worked […]

The Washington Post had a fantastic article [update: Howard Kurtz calls it “the best reporting I’ve ever seen on a very difficult subject”] a few days ago on Israel’s policy of assassinating terrorist leaders. In contrast to the all-too-typical portrait of Israel as an “Old Testament society” exacting an “eye for an eye”,* or worse, […]

As someone who has been highly critical of Mearsheimer and Walt (authors of the infamous “Israel Lobby”) paper, but who gave them more of the benefit of the doubt than some of their critics (you can find some of my previous posts on them here), my eyebrows were raised when I saw that they had […]

Via Taxprof, I learn that William Rakes, the new chairperson of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, has charged an 11-person task force to recommend changes to the ABA accreditation process. Rakes letter to the members of the task force, bolded in appropriate places, follows: You are asked to consider […]

Madeleine Albright, John Kerry, Barry Goldwater, Wesley Clark, Casper Weinberger, William Cohen, and, apparently, George Allen. All prominent non-Jewish politicians with recent Jewish heritage. This makes me wonder about how many Americans there are who have at least one Jewish grandparent, but who aren’t Jewish, and about how many of these Jewish parents or grandparents […]

How about this one, from Plessy v. Ferguson: “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts, or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation.” Here you have three incorrect, and quite damaging, “scientific” propositions: (1) That there are “racial […]

I need to know rather quickly if there have been any recent (last several years) developments with regard to diversity jurisdiction, specifically with regard to the issue of complete diversity, other than the provisions of the Class Action Fairness Act. Has there been proposed legislation to further relax the complete diversity requirement? Thanks.

In case you missed my VC post, “Does Japan Have the Right to Exist as a Japanese State?”, it’s available today on the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal website as the OpinionJournal Federation Feature Article of the day. The piece discusses theh fact many countries have an explicit ethnic basis, including some sort of “law of […]

A reader writes: “How about offering some advice for second year law students–not making a journal, with mediocre grades, at a respected but not elite law school? I am somewhat amazed by my grades coming out of this year and little concerned that I made a poor decision.” My advice is, first, don’t despair. I […]