Author Archive | David Bernstein

Conservative voices dominate AM talk radio. Is this a good thing for conservatives? John Derbyshire makes a strong case that talk radio has contributed to the dumbing down of the American Right. With reasons for gratitude duly noted, are there some downsides to conservative talk radio? Taking the conservative project as a whole

In response to my post below, David Repass comments: Jonathan Adler asks me (rhetorically)

It’s a fellow named Chas. Freeman who, among other things, is the former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and the president of a Saudi government-funded “public relations” organization, the Middle East Policy Council. Surely, the “no blood for oil crowd” is outraged by the appointment of someone with close ties to the Saudis to such […]

I caught some flack from commenters a couple of days ago after wondering aloud how purportedly “rich” Obama supporters who have a family income in the 250 to 380K range and who live in expensive, high-tax urban areas, especially those with hefty mortgages and large child-care expenses, feel about his tax plans. Some commenters suggested […]

This, new short play opened in London recently, and it’s hard to articulate how depraved it is without suggesting you first read the full dialogue. The essential “plot,” if you can call it that, is to show how Israeli Jews, deranged by their suffering in the Holocaust, gradually turn into alter-egos of the Nazis. Not […]

Obama, in the third debate, on the video below within the first minute: “what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut…. What I want to emphasize … is that I have been a strong proponent of pay-as-you-go. Every dollar that I’ve proposed, I’ve proposed an additional cut so that it […]

In The Tempting of America, Robert Bork claims that Justice Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott marked the “first appearance of in American constitutional law of the concept of ‘substantive due process.’” In fact, as Mark Graber, Jim Ely, and others have pointed out, by the time Dred Scott came around, there was a substantial body […]

I’m been playing around with GENI, creating an extensive family tree, and today discovered that the new FCC chairman (and friend of Obama from Harvard Law), Julius Genachowski, is my fourth cousin. We have common ancestry in the Tetenbaum family of Szczuczyn, Poland. I believe that all Tetenbaum descendants in the U.S. descend from the […]

“For many of those who voiced fear of the New Deal’s threats to liberty, including the conservative Liberty League, the concern about personal freedoms was a mere facade for greed. Not so for [Learned] Hand.” Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand 436 (1994). I get it! When “conservatives” expressed concern about the growth of government threatening liberty, […]

Brian Leiter has posted a new study of the “scholarly impact” of top law school faculties in the U.S. Using the same methodology as Brian Leiter’s recent survey, and including regular VC bloggers except for Ilya and Sasha, who are not yet tenured (and therefore would be excluded under the Leiter methodology), David Kopel, who […]

As long-time readers of this blog know, Randy, Orin, and I have spent many a post (e.g.) debunking the notion that there is a right-wing self-styled “Constitution in Exile” movement plotting to return the Supreme Court to its pre-New Deal constitutional jurisprudence. Last time I blogged about this, a commenter asked a pertinent question: given […]

UCLA Law Prof (and co-author, with Bernstein and Kaye, of The New Wigmore: Expert Evidence) Jennifer Mnookin: The National Academy of Sciences released a long-anticipated report Wednesday on the real world of forensic science — and the news is disturbing and downright ugly. Laboratories are woefully underfunded, and much of what passes for forensic “science” […]

At noon today, I’ll be speaking at the University of Michigan Law School about my book-in-progress, “Rehabilitating Lochner.” The talk is sponsored by the U. Mich. Federalist Society, and is open to the public.

Ha’artez: Shockingly, the Israeli public may have voted for the right not because it rejects the idea of peace deals, partition, and a two-state solution, but because it believes the right is better qualified to find a way to carry out that undeniably painful process. “The outcome of the elections indicates that Israelis view the […]

This Judith Warner piece about Obamacentric dreams, desires, and resentments, is among the oddest things I’ve ever read. Like her correspondents, I’m arguably a “peer” of Obama–he graduated Harvard Law in 1991, I graduated Yale Law the same year–but it has never occurred me to compare my life, professional and personal, to his, and I […]