The Justice Department has decided to drop charges against two former AIPAC officials accused of sharing classified information given to them by a government official with various individuals, including an Israeli government official. I expressed my skepticism regarding the case here and here. Given that anything about AIPAC tends to bring out the loons, and […]
Author Archive | David Bernstein
Alleged Anti-Semitic Incident at UC Santa Barbara:
L.A. Times: Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor’s decision to send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel’s recent Gaza offensive. The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has triggered a campus investigation […]
Doctor Shortage:
N.Y. Times: Obama administration officials, alarmed at doctor shortages, are looking for ways to increase the supply of physicians to meet the needs of an aging population and millions of uninsured people who would gain coverage under legislation championed by the president. The officials said they were particularly concerned about shortages of primary care providers […]
Part-Time and Full-Time Students:
I mentioned offhandedly the other day that George Mason’s part-time students are “a bit weaker” than our full-time students. Allow me to clarify that my comment was meant only in the very specific context of the criteria utilized by U.S. News: U.S. News considers only LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs in judging a school’s students. […]
Law School Rankings and the Wisdom of Crowds:
As Orin notes below, the U.S. News rankings are out, and, as usual, many students will pay too much attention to them. The rankings themselves are methodologically silly for a variety of reasons, with ample demonstration from this year’s rankings. Does anyone think that G.W. has really gotten significantly worse in the last year? Or […]
Holocaust Remembrance Day:
Tonight marks Holocaust Remembrance Day, so I thought I’d recount the little I know about the closest relative I know of who was murdered, my great-grandmother’s sister, Chana Basia (Anna) (Tetenbaum) Bogusz. Chana Basia was the daughter of Hersk (Gersk, Herschel) Tetenbaum and Ester Malka Rubensztejn Tetenbaum of Szczuczyn, Poland. (Ester’s brother joined the Russian […]
The World Without A Constitution:
Featuring a (funny) joke about the most obscure of the rights protected by the Bill of Rights.
David Brooks on Israeli Culture:
Brooks: Israel is a country held together by argument. Public culture is one long cacophony of criticism. The politicians go at each other with a fury we can’t even fathom in the U.S. At news conferences, Israeli journalists ridicule and abuse their national leaders. Subordinates in companies feel free to correct their superiors. People who […]
A Lot More Generous With Other People’s Money Than With His Own:
Between 1998 and 2006, Joe Biden contributed between $120 and $380 a year to charity, according to his tax returns, on AGIs of $210,000 to $321,100. Imagine if he hadn’t been thinking of running for president. [Comments are now closed]
Ginsburg on Citing Foreign Legal Decisions:
The New York Times has an account of a speech by Justice Ginsburg defending the practice of citing foreign legal decisions: Justice Ginsburg said the controversy was based on the misunderstanding that citing a foreign precedent means the court considers itself bound by foreign law as opposed to merely being influenced by such power as […]
Joseph Massad Update:
Word comes from Martin Kramer that Prof. Joseph Massad of Columbia may have been granted tenure, though nothing has been formally announced. I’ve tangled with Massad before (you can read the posts at this link), and I don’t see any reason to repeat myself. However, I did come across something today that calls into question […]
The Obvious Doesn’t Occur to Roger Cohen:
Roger Cohen says that Israel is “crying wolf” about Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons. He notes that Israeli leaders previously predicted that Iran would acquire such weapons by 1999, and then by 2004. It doesn’t seem to occur to Cohen that it’s entirely possible that if Israel and its allies had not been engaging […]
Two Questionable Expert Evidence Rulings:
In Gass v. Marriott Hotel Services, Inc., 558 F.3d 419 (6th Cir. 2009), the plaintiffs claimed that after exposure to a “cloud” of pesticides in their hotel room, they suffered from “multiple chemical sensitivity” resulting in a variety of symptoms. The district court held that the plaintiffs’ experts were not qualified to determine what pesticides […]
Bloggers Urge That Organizations To Which They Give “Free Publicity” Advertise on Their Sites:
The Plum Line, Greg Sargent’s blog on the Washington Post‘s whorunsgov.com, reports: Some of the leading liberal bloggers are privately furious with the major progressive groups — and in some cases, the Democratic Party committees — for failing to spend money advertising on their sites, even as these groups constantly ask the bloggers for free […]
Getting (Nearly) Naked for God:
Prof. Howard Friedman’s Religion Clause — the best news source I’ve seen for religion-and-the-law matters (both American and foreign) writes: Passover begins tonight, and in Israel the dispute continues over how to interpret its Festival of Matzot (Prohibition of Leaven) Law, 5746-1986, (also known as the “Hametz Law”). Last year, a court held that its […]