Author Archive | David Bernstein

Via Matthew Yglesias, this interesting N.Y. Times story discussing the fact that a disproportionately large percentage of “African American” students at Harvard (and other elite colleges) are actually of recent African or West Indian heritage, or are of mixed race. One interesting aspect of the article is that those who argue that Harvard should be […]

Regarding Eugene’s question as to why some consider it impolite to called Jews “Jews” instead of “Jewish people,” I can contribute a little history. By the 19th century, the word “Jew” was thought by enlightened folks to have derogatory connotations. The leadership of the Reform movement led an effort to abandon the word “Jew” in […]

I will soon be sending out reprints of my 2003 trilogy of articles about Lochner v. New York, its origins, and consequences: (1) Lochner’s Legacy’s Legacy, from the Texas Law Review; (2) Lochner Era Revisionism, Revised: Lochner and the Origins of Fundamental Rights Constitutionalism, from the Georgetown Law Journal; and (3) Lochner’s Feminist Legacy, from […]

The Federalist Society/Wall Street Journal book ranking the presidents via a survey of liberal and conservative scholars is doing quite well on Amazon.com. Too bad, then, that this survey, while far more balanced than most, ranks Warren Harding at the bottom. Forever tarred by the Teapot Dome scandal (though it’s not clear he was complicit […]

Historian David Beito has been blogging about Blacks’ reaction to the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act. Editorials in the nation’s leading Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, were generally hostile to the Act, which exacerbated unemployment among African Americans. When I did my own research on the Act, I looked at more “official” African American […]

Almost every reference to the Al Aksa Martyrs’ Brigade in the mainstream media has been accompanied by caveats that the while the group is an offshoot of Fatah, the main Palestinian party run by Arafat, the group acts autonomously and neither Arafat nor the PA have any control over it. However, PA prime minister Qurei […]

who was recently Undersecretary of Defense. Among his assertions in the interview: (1) Israel is squandering an opportunity to withdraw from the territories while it has a very friendly president in office; (2) the situation in Iraq is far better than most people think; and (3)claims that a cabal of Jewish neoconservatives are running American […]

This essay, attributed to Israeli scientist Haim Harari, is well worth reading. For example, Harari writes: Is the solution a democratic Arab world? If by democracy we mean free elections but also free press, free speech, a functioning judicial system, civil liberties, equality to women, free international travel, exposure to international media and ideas, laws […]

The more I travel, the more I am amazed at how little hotel design seems to take into account the obvious goal of helping guests get a good night’s sleep by keeping noise levels down. Forget soundproof windows; how about just designing room doors so they don’t slam shut so loudly as to wake guests […]

Heard on NPR: Montgomery County, Maryland, is considering a measure that would ban very large retail stores, a measure intended to prohibit WalMart supercenters in the county. The measure is being push by Giant Food (a local supermarket chain). A spokesperson for Giant says that the company is not worried about competition, but rather “is […]

A further indication that Israel is exercising the “Jordanian option” to stabilize the West Bank, and that Jordan is going along.

With thanks to reader Alex Corvino, here is a detailed update [UPDATE: and another here] to the story about the “smuggling” of Yemenite Jews from Monsey, NY, to Israel, that I blogged about last week. Basically, the Jewish Agency claims that the family in question was being held against its will, while the Satmar Hasidim […]

I’ve noticed that real estate agents here in Arlington, Virginia, are increasingly moving from typical puffery in their listings to outright misrepresentation. A house around the corner from me was listed as “two blocks from metro.” I count five and a half long blocks, a ten minute walk (the house, an old bungalow without much […]

From Ha’aretz: “Na’ama Al-Nahari, a woman of Yemenite origin, and five of her 12 children were smuggled out of the ultra-Orthodox township of Monsey, N.Y., on Tuesday and flown to Israel on El Al, in a Jewish Agency covert operation that had been in the works for a few months. According to the plan, a […]

Walter Olson’s Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens America’s Rule of Law is out in paperback. If you didn’t catch the hardback, you have a second,cheaper, chance to The buy the book. I highly recommend it, both for its comprehensive tour of the litigation fiascoes of our time–such as breast implants, tobacco, […]