Author Archive | David Bernstein

I’m sure the legal blogosphere will be abuzz with discussions of Jeff Rosen’s N.Y. Times magazine piece on the purported “Constitution in Exile” movement. Jeff was a Yale Law classmate of mine, and I’m generally a great admirer of his work. But I do want to take issue with a couple of things in this […]

Most readers have apparently heard about the woman who tried to sue Wendy’s after allegedly finding a finger in her chili. (I was skeptical from the start: chili has ground beef in it; how would a finger make it through processing intact? Besides, I told my Torts class this semester that foreign-object-in-fast-food cases turn out […]

Very interesting article in Ha’aretz about the power of the Internet and small publishing companies to challenge idiotic dogma(e.g., the world is less than 6,000 years old) enforced by ignorant religious leaders. My father tells me that when he was in heder in Brooklyn, he showed the rabbi a book with pictures of dinosaurs, which […]

About half of all law students, including at top schools, are women. But most applicants for academic jobs, and most hires, are men. Why? Prawfsblawg is having a discussion. UPDATE: Christine Hurt of the Conglomerate suggests that married women are on the average the “second earners in households” and therefore are less geographically mobile than […]

Next Friday, I, along with (fellow Yale Law ’91 alum) Jeff Rosen of G.W. and Ted White of U. Va., will be participating in an AEI panel discussion (register here) on Lochner v. New York: Still Crazy After All These Years? Here are the details: In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme Court—discovering a […]

Why did Larry Summers issue such an abject and, frankly, embarrassing apology for the controversial remarks he made regarding women in the sciences? I don’t think he really had to. My theory is that he thinks of himself as a man of the left, and was very uncomfortable with the praise and defense he was […]

I’m chair this year of the George Mason Law School appointments committee, and find that we have room in our budget for one or more Visiting Assitant Professors. We’re looking for people who are planning to go on the tenure-track job market in the next year or two, and would like a year of teaching […]

As long-time VC readers know, one of my academic interests in the admissibility of expert testimony. In general, I am sympathetic to the trend in American courts to have much stricter exclusionary rules for expert testimony. Ever since Peter Huber published the manifesto of the anti “junk science” movement, Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science in the […]

Heard on local NPR station WAMU: “Most murders in DC are caused by ‘loosely-knit neighborhood groups.’” You mean, ummh, gangs?

From a Columbia “teach-in” on “academic freedom” (which somehow involves “the plight of Palestinian refugees” and the “corporatization of America): “There is a nationwide campaign against the autonomy of universities in the broadest sense … based on the utterly spurious assumption that universities are stronghold of radical and liberal beliefs,” charged Khalidi, the Edward Said […]

Over at Balkinization, Ian Ayres argues (and I agree) that Richard Sander’s work on affirmative action in law schools has focused attention on the wrong issue: the problem with the current system of racial preferences is not that it leads to fewer black lawyers [or at least, I’m not confident Sander’s proven that], but that […]

The Columbia report on the controversy over its Middle Eastern Studies Department is out. Apparently, Columbia gave an exclusive to the New York Times to report on the document, but on condition that the Times publish the story without asking the activist students who had prompted the report for comments, and, indeed, before students had […]

Congratulations to Professor Michael Klarman of U. Va. Law School, who has been awarded the Bancroft Prize in history, one the profession’s highest honors, for his excellent book From Jim Crow to Civil Rights. According to a U. Va. press release, the Bancroft jurors noted that “Klarman’s examination of this classic problem in American constitutional […]

The new U.S. News rankings of law schools are out. Yes, these are authentic. Please use them wisely.

I have been criticized in the past for suggesting that modern liberalism often seems to support government spending, as such, without much regard to the need for and efficacy of any particular program. Thanks to Leonard Fein for unintentionally supporting my point. In essay in the April Moment magazine, Fein, in the course of explaining […]