One of my favorite blogs is Gary Leff’s travel blog, View from the Wing. I used to read it occasionally, but once I started to notice unusually rich credit card signup offers a little over a year ago, like 100,000 British Airways Avios points, I started to read it religiously. Since then, I’ve accumulated around […]
Author Archive | David Bernstein
An Especially Odd Invocation of Lochner
“Armando,” a featured writer at the Daily Kos, takes issue with David Brooks’s column suggesting that the federal government is guilty of overreach. Brooks’s column never mentions the Supreme Court, constitutional law, labor regulations, Oliver Wendell Holmes, baking, or anything else that would bring Lochner v. New York to mind. Nevertheless, Armando, who apparently mistakes […]
Annals of the One Percent
I understand that Elizabeth Warren claims to have inspired the Occupy movement. In that spirit, it’s worth noting that when the 99% living in the Boston area claim minority status for employment purposes based on family lore, an old photograph, and other dubious bases, they get fired. When the 1% do it, they get a […]
How Four Jewish Butchers Brought Down the New Deal
An interesting article by Steve Horwitz, written for laypeople, on the Schechter Poultry case.
Elizabeth Warren and Fisher v. University of Texas
At least one point of interest having nothing to do with Warren herself has arisen from the controversy over Massachusetts Senate candidate’s Elizabeth Warren’s dubious self-identification as “Native American”, and whether she so self-identified to position herself to be a beneficiary of affirmative action. One of Warren’s defenders, a law professor at the University of […]
No, the Supreme Court is Not Poised to Adopt a Radical Libertarian Agenda, and Certain Commentators Should be Embarrassed for Suggesting Otherwise
Consider each of the following arguments in its historical context: (1) It’s the 1930s. The Scottsboro Boys are represented by a known Communist Party front, beholden to the agenda Josef Stalin and his minions have dictated to the the C.P., including the creation of a separate country for American blacks in the “Black Belt.” The […]
Rehabilitating Lochner Paperback and Kindle Price Drop
Rehabilitating Lochner is now available for pre-order at Amazon for $15.30–quite a discount relative to the $37.00 the hardcover is going for (Cato sells it for $10 less). Amazon has meanwhile reduced the price of the Kindle edition to $15.07. Interested readers can check out a recent LibertyLaw blog symposium on the book, with reviews […]
Julia and the Community Garden
The Obama campaign is plugging “The Life of Julia,” designed to show how the government in general, and this administration’s policies in particular, help a hypothetical woman throughout her life. The last entry, showing Julia at 67, really annoyed me: Under President Obama: Julia retires. After years of contributing to Social Security, she receives monthly […]
Seventy Years after the New Deal Revolution, Child Labor is Still Legal
In some previous posts, I’ve made two basic points about child labor and the Constitution in response to liberal commentators who can’t resist raising the issue of child labor any time anyone hints that there may be some constitutional limits to government regulatory authority. First, no one has ever seriously questioned the constitutionality of state […]
Responding to Orin on Warren
Orin quotes Leiter as follows, in suggesting that Elizabeth Warren would not have listed herself as a Native American to benefit from affirmative action: “For affirmative action purposes, all law schools care about are African-Americans and Latinos.” But he also quotes Leiter as follows: “[B]ecause the AALS aggressively polices the racial and ethnic diversity of […]
Elizabeth Warren Update
Plenty of other bloggers are following the story of Warren’s claim of minority status, and I’ll leave it to them. But I did want to reprint the reporting below by Professor Jacobson, because it’s salient to many of the comments to my original post (and kudos to Jacobson for gathering more information than reporters from […]
AEI’s Greve to George Mason Law School
I’m pleased to announced that Michael Greve, currently the John G. Searle Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has accepted an offer to join the George Mason law faculty starting this Fall. His interests include federalism (on which he has written a brilliant new book), business regulation, environmental law, and more. I’ve known Mike and […]
Elizabeth Warren Herself Claimed “Minority” Status
A controversy has broken out in Massachusetts over the fact that Harvard Law School has claimed professor and current senatorial candidate Elizabeth as a minority member of the faculty based on apparent (but as yet unconfirmed) Native American ancestry. The Brown camp seems to think this is big news [update: the campaign has called on […]
Free Market Conference in Jerusalem in May
Some of our readers may be interested in this conference, to be held in Jerusalem May 20-24, sponsored by the free market-oriented Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Among the distinguished group of speakers is the VC’s own Randy Barnett, Cato’s Tom Palmer, and University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman. I’m planning to attend at least […]
Child Labor and the Supreme Court, One More Time
It seems that liberal commenters on constitutional law just can’t resist bringing of the issue of child labor, regardless of whether what they’re saying is historically accurate. The latest offender is Dahlia Lithwick. In criticizing Judge Janice Brown’s call for a return to pre-New Deal, Lochnerish concern for economic rights Lithwick writes, “Let’s put aside […]