My book Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform is due out in the Spring, and I’m available to talk about the book next semester. If you are an officer of a student or lawyer Fed Soc chapter and are interested in inviting me to speak, please email me at dbernste at gmu dot […]
Author Archive | David Bernstein
The Cantor Contoversy
Congressman Eric Cantor, soon to be the highest-ranking Jewish Congressman in history, recently met with Israeli P.M. Binyamin Netanyahu. Following the meeting, Cantor’s office issued a press release summarizing it: Eric has a long standing friendship with Prime Minister Netanyahu and appreciated the opportunity to catch up last evening. The discussion lasted over an hour […]
Greenwald: Israel has a “Higher Standard of Living” than the U.S.
Glenn Greenwald, in the midst of a typically ridiculous, over-the-top [update: and false in its underlying premise] screed about American policy toward Israel, writes (emphases mine): In other words, Cantor wants American citizens to sacrifice in the extreme, to lose all sorts of benefits and security in the name of austerity, but wants to shield […]
Best E-Reader?
With holiday gift-giving time arriving, I thought I’d open a thread on which e-reader gives you the most bang for your buck.
Good News and Bad News
The good news is that the Democrats lost the House. The bad news is that the Republicans won it. I’ll focus on the good news for now, because it will be portrayed as a victory for a small government agenda (thought I wonder how many seats turned because of senior anger over Medicare cuts). But […]
Judge Requires Racial, Gender “Diversity” in Class Counsel
New York Law Journal: A stir recently erupted in the securities class action bar after Baer issued an order in a case against Gildan Activewear Inc., directing two of the largest firms in the field, Labaton Sucharow and Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, to “make every effort” to put at least one woman and one […]
Predictions
How many House and Senate seats will the GOP pick up? I’m going with 68 House seats, and 9 Senate seats. Tiebreaker: To the nearest decimal point, and excluding minor party candidates, what percentage of the House vote will the GOP get? I’ll say 54.8%. Winner gets bragging rights, and will be announced in this […]
Podcast Interview on Rehabilitating Lochner
Kosmos Online, a project of the Institute for Humane Studies, interviewed me about my forthcoming Rehabilitating Lochner. If you’d like a preview of the book, or are just curious what I sound like, you can find the interview here. And speaking of Rehabilitating Lochner, Amazon has reduced the preorder price from $40 to $30.
Alternatives to Woodrow Wilson
David Greenberg of Slate, at the end of a lengthy apologia for the worst president of the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson, writes, “We might ask whom today’s Wilson haters would have preferred.” Okay, Grover Cleveland, three administrations prior to Wilson’s, and Calvin Coolidge, two administrations later, were far better on most relevant metrics. The administration […]
So You Want to Go to Law School?
A very funny video, with some truths that idealistic pre-law students should be aware of (e.g., the odds that you will get to practice constitutional law are very, very slim). H/T Jim Chen at Moneylaw.
Justice Thomas’s Wife Asks Anita Hill for an Apology
And she did so in what strikes me as a really bizarre way, by leaving a voicemail for Hill at her Brandeis University office over the weekend: “Good morning Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas,” it said. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would […]
Does George Mason Have the Most Conservative Law Students?
The new Princeton Review rankings state that George Mason has the “most conservative students” “based on student assessment of the political bent of the student body at large”. My impression over the years has been that the student body at GMU is more or less evenly split between liberals and conservatives, which I’m pretty sure […]
The First U.S. Supreme Court Case
By David Bernstein on October 13, 2010 10:02 pm in Constitutional History, Constitutional Law, Rehabilitating Lochner
to endorse what we would now call a “substantive” interpretation of the Due Process Clause was not, as is commonly held, Dred Scott v. Sanford, but rather Bloomer v. McQuewan several years earlier. Here’s the key language: it can hardly be maintained that Congress could lawfully deprive a citizen of the use of his property […]
Yale Talk Tomorrow Evening
I’ll be speaking at Yale Law School for the Federalist Society tomorrow night at 6:10. The topic is my forthcoming book, Rehabilitating Lochner. Jack Balkin of Balkinization (and, incidentally, the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale) will provide comments. It should be a lively evening.
David Nelson’s Passing
The judge I clerked for, David A. Nelson of the Sixth Circuit, who retired several years ago, died recently. His funeral is tomorrow in Cincinnati. Judge Nelson was a very honorable man, always kind and considerate to his clerks, polite but exacting with attorneys at oral argument, an excellent writer, and an all-around great judge. […]