For a project I’m working on, I’m collecting examples of statements made by high-level Democratic officials (especially, but not exclusively, Barack Obama) before January 2009 that such and such is unconstitutional (e.g., using military force without congressional approval, use of executive signing statements) that those Democrats either flipped-flopped on publicly (in the case of the […]
Author Archive | David Bernstein
George Mason Law School Freezes Tuition
Here’s the press release: Visitors Freeze George Mason Law Tuition Fairfax, VA – December 11, 2013: The Board of Visitors of George Mason University voted today at its quarterly meeting to freeze the tuition of the law school for the upcoming year, for current and incoming students, and it declared its intention not to increase […]
The Misbegotten Judicial Resistance to the Daubert Revolution
I posted a link to a draft of this paper (when it had a different title). It’s now been published in the Notre Dame Law Review, and here’s the final version.
BDS Opponent Claire Potter Suffers Social Media Harassment for Her Views
then changes her mind on the American Studies Association boycott resolution, perhaps for other reasons. But the entire situation is worth reviewing, given that BDS supporters are constantly claiming that pro-Israel forces are the ones doing the harassing, vilification, etc. Via Legal Insurrection, here are a couple of quotes from Potter about the reaction to […]
Taranto on a Kangaroo Court at Auburn University
If you missed this great column by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal, here’s your chance to read it. I had my own run-in with university kangaroo justice, fortunately much less serious than what Taranto describes. Just before I was going to graduate college, a friend with whom I had a falling out chose […]
Dalek Potatohead
Want!
BDS Advocate Roger Waters Holds Some Strange Views about Jews
Last week I wrote about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel and the tenuous foothold it is getting in the American academy. I also happened to read an article that led me to think about how some individuals are so convinced that Israel is obviously evil that he believes that something must be […]
Interesting Essay on Jews who Oppose Israel
Shlomo Fischer in the Times of Israel: I suggest that in fact, they [ultra-Orthodox and leftists who are hostile to the existence of Israel] do share a common Jewish theme. This theme was articulated by the great Israeli scholar of the Jewish religion, Gershom Scholem, who argued that the price that the Jewish people paid […]
The American Studies Association and the Pending, Watered Down, Israel Boycott
I wrote this for the Manhattan Institute’s excellent Minding the Campus site, and figured I’d repost it here. From the bowels of academia comes news that the National Council of the American Studies Association has voted in favor of boycotting Israeli institutions. The boycott resolution goes to the full membership for an up or down […]
New Book: Toward an American Conservatism: Constitutional Conservatism during the Progressive Era
I contributed one chapter to this collection of essays. Not surprisingly, I wrote about Lochner and liberty of contract jurisprudence, and its uneasy relationship to constitutional conservatism. It’s an excellent book on an understudied topic. The one major impression I get from studying this general topic is that while the Progressives knew to a large […]
Lisa Duggan, NYU and Curtis Marez, UC San Diego: Deserve to be Boycotted?
Duggan is the president-elect of the American Studies Association and Marez is the president. According to this Inside Higher Ed piece, they both support a pending motion to have the ASA endorse a boycott of Israeli universities. If the IHE piece is correct, I think they should be treated by all academics (and others) of […]
Speaking of the Kennedy Assassination
While fifty years later, much of the MSM still refuses to acknowledge that JFK’s assassin was a Communist loser, somehow it’s also apparently not cricket to point out that his brother RFK was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist. So let’s review. Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian refugee with Jordanian citizenship. He murdered Kennedy because the […]
Remarkable Take on JFK’s Assassination
This is really amazing to me. The New York Times and the Washington Post each manages to publish a piece on the Kennedy assassination, by two different authors, focusing on what they see as the right-wing extremist environment in Dallas in 1963, and while never saying so directly, implicitly blaming Kennedy’s assassination on that environment. […]
Talk at the University of Chicago Law School Tomorrow
I’ll be speaking at noon on Rehabilitating Lochner for the Federalist Society, with comments from Prof. Laura Weinrib. Weinrib, I should mention, is doing some really interesting work on how left-leaning jurisprudence, which had been largely indifferent to civil liberties in the Progressive era, came to embrace them soon thereafter. Come by if you’re in […]
Ian Millhiser on Conservatism and the Judiciary
Over at ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser has a piece on conservative and the judiciary that ranges over many decades and many topics. Unfortunately, much of it is very tendentious and sometimes just wrong. It’s too much to do a detailed critique, so I’ll be brief and limit myself to his general historical perspective. [DB: Sentences in […]