Author Archive | David Bernstein

The winning lottery ticket in the Mega Millions jackpot has been turned in, and not by the woman who claimed to have lost it. The apparent real winner told the media: ”One thing I want to make clear: Luck had nothing to do with it. It was truly a blessing, truly a blessing,” she said. […]

Hate to kick a rival when it’s down (Ed: Yeah, right!), but if you are a pre-law student trying to decide between William & Mary and GMU law school, you should read this. For that matter, so should anyone considering attending W & M in another department, or who is considering an academic position there. […]

You Can’t Say That! News: The Washington Times carried a nice review last week, and the book’s ideas received their first discussion in Abkhazia (a Russian-speaking breakaway region of Georgia). UPDATE: Reader Jonathan Kulick informs me that most Abkhazians are ethnic Abkhazes and their first language is Abkhaz, though they speak Russian as well.

I just found an incredible resource for fans of The Simpsons. Check out the episode guide for one of my favorite episodes, “Like Father, Like Clown” (in which Krusty is reunited with his estranged rabbi father). The detail is incredible (though a few of the Yiddish translations are questionable). Also incredible is the site’s “freeze […]

Google will have its IPO shortly, and just in time arch-rival-for-advertising-dollars Yahoo leaks word that it plans to dump Google technology for its own search engine technology. I used to love Google; it was a vast improvement over other search engines when it appeared, and, for my purposes, it’s still the best around. But it […]

Last night I attended a talk by Northwestern Law School professor John McGinnis detailing, based on political contribution data, the overwhelming Democrat-leaning orientation of law professors. The talk was cosponsored by the Federalist Society and the National Association of Scholars, and had an attendance of about fifty, which included a substantial percentage of the law […]

I had dinner and drinks last night in Atlanta, site of the annual AALS law professors’ conference (and the concurrent one-day Federalist Society faculty conference) with co-Conspirator Jacob Levy, whom I’d only met once before, Right Coast blogger Michael Rappaport, Glenn Reynolds the Instapundit, co-Conspirator Randy Barnett, The Corner contributor Jonathan Adler, and some like-minded […]

2004, of course, is a Senate election year. As in past election years, there will likely be a few very close Senate races in which the vote totals of the Libertarian candidate will threaten to be greater than the difference between the Republican and Democratic candidates. Republican strategists will call on the Libertarians to drop […]

It is unlikely you saw this headline, but you could have. This past week, however, the Bush Administration announced that it would consider imposing additional regulations on the use of sewage sludge as fertilizer based upon a National Research Council study that found the scientific basis for the EPA’s 1993 regulations lacking. While sludge has […]

No more blogging for me for several weeks. I need to first finish planning and then actually go on my honeymoon. So Happy Hanukah, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to all Volokh Conspiracy readers. And speaking of Hanukah and Christmas, don’t forget that your friendly neighborhood Volokh Conspirators would be most grateful if you […]

Brad DeLong has not only failed to apologize for writing a bogus, inaccurate post about me and this website, he hasn’t even corrected the original post, even though his own readers corrected him in his comments section, and I forwarded him via email the correction I posted on this blog. So much for (at least […]

Meryl Yourish sends this link, which casts considerable doubt on the original story, especially given that the “eyewitness” didn’t understand Arabic, the language in which the conversation between the soldier and the violinist took place. UPDATE: Various readers have written in to tell me that it’s standard practice at airports throughout the world to ask […]

My publisher, the Cato Institute, has collected a nice group of blurbs about You Can’t Say That!, mostly from reviews: “Bernstein superbly navigates the rough waters of the statutory and case law that attempt to curb discriminatory practices by both public and private organizations. . . . Bernstein carefully leads readers through specific problem areas […]

Details here. Donor nations, including the U.S. [a reader points out that the official U.S. rationale is that it won’t fund projects in the West Bank if the Palestinian Authority objects], are denying funds to Israel to build roads for Palestinians in the West Bank on the ground that the ICJ has declared Israel’s fence […]

A friend sent me a link, which I can’t find right now, to a story about Israeli soldiers forcing an Arab man at a West Bank checkpoint to play his violin. Given the history of terrorists hiding bombs in ambulances and other seemingly innocent locations, it’s not surprising that the soldiers wanted to check on […]