Author Archive | David Bernstein

Every four years, I have to hear far, far more about the Olympics than I care to. It’s even worse when the Olympics are held in the U.S., so I’m glad they will be held in Rio and not Chicago in 2016.

According to Brooks, [the influence of] talk radio hosts [is] to blame for the Republican Party’s decline; and not, say, the Iraq War and the GOP’s Bush era Big Government agenda. I wonder if this assignment of blame has anything to do with the fact that Brooks was one of the leading cheerleaders for just […]

During the Bush years, we constantly heard the refrain, pushed especially by Paul Krugman, that the government was doing incompetent and corrupt things because conservative Republicans “don’t believe in” government. Put the government in the hands of true-believing liberal Democrats, and incompetence and corruption will virtually disappear. This always struck me as foolish, in part […]

Boston Globe: A large military spending bill moving through Congress contains a little-noticed outlay for Boston that has nothing to do with national defense: $20 million for an educational institute honoring late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. It’s not like the U.S. isn’t broke or anything, and it’s not like the Kennedys aren’t filthy […]

Here’s the announcement, from the NYU Federalist Society. TOMORROW (Wednesday) @ 4:30 in Vanderbilt 204 David Bernstein Law Professor at GMU and Blogger at the Volokh Conspiracy Speaking about his forthcoming book Rehabilitating Lochner — Lochner v. New York is a famous Supreme Court case from 1905 that invalidated a maximum hours law under an […]

My small contribution is that the Supreme Court would be much more likely to invalidate elements of Obamacare on which there is no firm, direct precedent if the Republicans sweep the 2010 midterm elections than if they don’t. In my view, it’s no coincidence that Lopez, the first case to invalidate the a federal law […]

‘Gay’ vulture couple split up at Jerusalem zoo, then become fathers

A couple of years ago, I blogged about a group of Palestinian Arabs I encountered in the Galilee who were obviously of African descent. I’ve stumbled across an academic article (original source unclear) published since then that discusses the history of some of the Palestinians whose recent ancestors were from Africa: Most contemporary members of […]

President Obama gave advice via conference call to one thousand liberal rabbis regarding how to push for his health care reform efforts at high holiday services (which have by far the largest synagogue attendance of the Jewish year) without seeming partisan: “I am going to need your help,” the president told a telephone audience of […]

I’ve been experimenting with my Comments policy for the last few months. Comments are a blessing and a burden. The burden is that we have moderated comments on this blog, moderation takes time and effort, and there is no way with our current setup to effectively ban any given abusive commenter, so one is left […]

There is no doubt that Justice Holmes was a powerful rhetorician: “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics“; “It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account”; “Three generations of imbeciles […]

There are several prominent left-leaning blogs by Jewish authors that write a lot about anti-Semitism, or, more precisely, are very quick to denounce what their authors see as exaggerated or false claims of anti-Semitism made against critics of Israel. So I find it interesting to notice how these blogs have covered, or more precisely, not […]

My colleague David Schleicher referred to this amazing takedown of Holmes, and the bizarre affection “liberals” had for him, by H.L. Mencken. A taste: “If what he said in some of those opinions were accepted literally, there would be scarcely any brake at all upon lawmaking, and the Bill of Rights would have no more […]