From the Times of Israel comes the inspiring story of Judy Feld Carr: “For nearly three decades, Feld Carr [a musicologist and mother of six] single-handedly arranged the smuggling of more than 3,000 Jews out of Damascus, Aleppo and Qamishli to safety in Israel and America.” UPDATE: I wonder if this article might be exaggerating […]
Author Archive | David Bernstein
The Trespass Fallacy in Patent Law
An interesting essay by my colleague Adam Mossoff. The PatentlyO blog discusses it here.
A Contrast from 2008
As voters in a swing state, in 2008 my wife and I got lots of letters, phone calls, and visits to our home–but they were all from the Obama campaign. Not a peep was hurt from the under-funded and poorly managed McCain campaign. So far this Summer, though, we’ve already had a Romney volunteer at […]
George Mason Seeks Law Professors
I’m posting this on behalf of my colleague Ross Davies. George Mason University School of Law may have one or more tenure-track or visiting positions available starting in the fall of 2013. Both beginning and experienced professors will be considered. Candidates should have a distinguished academic record and a demonstrated commitment to scholarship. At senior […]
Annals of Poor Customer Service Policy: Verzion FIOS
I’ve sang the praises of Verizon, especially relative to Comcast, but now I’m peeved. My two-year service contract for Verizon Triple Play has expired and now I need/want a month-to-month contract. However, I’ve been told that because I’m an existing customer, I’m only eligible for a two year contract. If I were a new customer, I […]
Question about U.S. Educational Performance
I often read in right-of-center sources about how despite the huge increase in real terms in U.S. spending on public schooling since the early 1980s, test scores haven’t gotten any better. This strikes me as the types of static analysis that free-market types often criticize in other contexts. For example, real wages (putting aside the […]
St. Paul Cops Shoot Dog in Wrong-Door Raid, Force Handcuffed Kids to Sit Near the Corpse
Mike Riggs has the details at Reason’s Hit and Run blog. The family has filed a $30 million lawsuit, but tar and feathers would be more appropriate.
Study of Genetic Origins of Middle Eastern and North African Jews
Ha’aretz has the details. Reading this and other accounts of this and other studies, it now seems well-established that: (1) The mainstream Ashkenazic and Mizrahi (“Eastern”) Jewish communities share a genetic heritage tracing back about 2,500 years. (2) These communities maintained sufficient separation from the local non-Jewish populations that despite vast geographic distances, to this […]
American Jewish Voting Behavior, 1972-2008
Here’s a very interesting report from “The Solomon Project.” The main conclusion is that based on election year exit polls, Jewish support for Democrats and liberalism has remained pretty constant since 1972. If one digs a bit deeper into the report, one learns that current trends suggest that the American Jewish electorate will grow less […]
Tom Smith on “You Didn’t Build That!”
Smith: But here’s the question to ask — how many more successful businesses, inventions, products, services, toys, tools, insights, and just plain fun would there be, if government did not in the first place make it so ridiculously difficult to start a business and keep it going? I don’t see our young president taking credit […]
The Volokh Conspiracy “Faculty”
As Orin notes below, a new study of law school faculty “impact” has been released. Just for fun, I ran the numbers for the Volokh Conspiracy “faculty” who blog at least somewhat regularly. I used the same criterion as the study, limiting things to tenured professors. The result is a weighted score of 1566, below […]
Rosen on Roberts as Statesman
Jeff Rosen not surprisingly praises Chief Justice Roberts’s statesmanship in upholding the Affordable Care Act and protecting the Supreme Court’s reputations and legitimacy from accusations of partisan decisionmaking. Here’s what Rosen says about Roberts: All of these instincts converged in the health care case, in which Roberts set aside his ideological preference to protect the […]
Washington Post Article on Obama’s Israel-Palestinian Policy
An interesting piece. Key line: “According to former administration officials and outside advisers briefed on some White House meetings, Emanuel, in particular, thought Netanyahu could be pressured to make concessions, just as he had in the 1990s.” The article suggests that this wasn’t true because Netanyahu had learned in 1999 that if he made concessions […]
Outrage over Citizens United?
The Citizens United case spurred much outrage on the political left, including claims that the Roberts Court was sacrificing its legitimacy to aid Republicans by allowing corporate money to flow freely into political campaigns. Recently, many commentators have defended Chief Justice Roberts from speculation that he capitulated to political pressure in NFIB v. Sebelius by […]
Arab Citizen National Service in Israel
This article in the New York Times leaves out one significant reason that many Arab citizens of Israel oppose voluntary national service: Arab women in Israel typically are either discouraged or forbidden from working outside the home, very few are employed for wages, and many rarely leave their villages. Of the small percentage of Arabs […]