Author Archive | David Bernstein

First, read Steve Bainbridge’s devastating critique of the Miers nomination. You back? Good! New York Times: To persuade the right to embrace Ms. Miers’s selection despite her lack of a clear record on social issues, representatives of the White House put Justice Hecht on at least one conference call with influential social conservative organizers on […]

to our Jewish readers (and to my Jewish co-conspirators!)

Perhaps no Supreme Court Justice has been caricatured as unfairly as Justice Rufus Peckham, author of Lochner v. New York, among other opinions. Consider the closing lines of the Peckham biography on oyez.org: Peckham took as his mission the separation of state powers from national powers and the separation of all government from individual rights. […]

White House counsel Harriett Miers will be nominated to the Supreme Court. I know absolutely nothing about Ms. Miers, beyond the basics from the media. But my initial reaction is that it’s unfortunate (but not surprising) that for both Supreme Court nominations, the president has chosen well-connected insiders with ties to the executive branch, rather […]

Laissez Faire Books, home of the “World’s Best Selection of Books on Liberty,” is currently running a sale offering 15% off all items, including books by some of your friendly neighborhood Volokh Conspirators. LFB has an excellent reputation for customer service, which comports with my experience.

Fourth Circuit Judge Michael Luttig has taken a sudden jump and lead (by the time you read this link , the betting may have substantially changed) in the Tradesports Supreme Court nomination betting. Still, he’s only at a bit over 18%, so there is no dominant favorite. We shall see.

Anyone else find it strange that the government would offer Larry Franklin, a government official who actually leaked classified information, a plea agreement so that he would testify against two lobbyists who are accused of what would seem to be the lesser offense of knowingly receiving the classified information (something, I understand from media reports, […]

Yossi Klein Halevi, one of my favorite writers (his Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: An American Story, is a wonderful autobiography, and must reading for anyone who wants to understand the roots of the Jewish Defense League and other extremist American Jewish organizations that took root primarily among Orthodox Jews in the 1960s and 70s), […]

Confirmthem adds Judge Danny Boggs of the Sixth Circuit to the mix of candidates the Bush Administration is rumored to be considering. Boggs’ scathing dissent in Grutter might be enough to disqualify him politically, but it would be hard to come up with a nominee who has a similar desireable combination of Boggs’ very considerable […]

Ira Katznelson had a piece in the Washington Post yesterday discussing the discriminatory effects of New Deal and Fair Deal economic legislation. As previously noted by Jacob Levy in the comments section of the VC last week, Katznelson’s book on the subject seems to complement my own discussion of the discriminatory effects of New Deal […]

From the Havard Crimson, commenting on a brief in the Solomon Amendment case by my friend Prof. John Eastman: Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law Richard H. Fallon said that Eastman’s brief presents “an argument with no foundation whatsoever in the decisions of the Supreme Court, going back to the 1930s.” But, Fallon said, the prospect […]

Whomever is nominated to replace Justice O’Connor, attention will once again be focused on whether the nominee has been a member of, or otherwise affiliated with, the Federalist Society. As has been noted several times on this blog, membership in the Federalist Society tells you nothing about a nominee’s political or legal ideology, except that […]

The moderate wing of the liberal blogosphere is abuzz over President’s Bush’s suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act in the Katrina zone. In essence, Davis-Bacon requires federally subsidized construction contractors to pay union wages and follow union work rules. Some moderate Democrats, now represented by Mickey Kaus in the blogosphere, have opposed Davis-Bacon for years because […]

Boston Globe and Reason Magazine columnist Cathy Young, a link-to favorite of mine and Eugene’s, has started a blog. Check it out!

An excellent editorial in the Post, which includes this gem: Unfortunately for Merck, scientific facts didn’t play much of a role in the first Vioxx trial, which ended on Aug. 19. The Texas jury in that case awarded $253.4 million to the widow of a man who died of a heart attack triggered by arrhythmia, […]