Author Archive | David Bernstein

Ron Bailey flunks Ben Stein. He find’s Stein’s movie Expelled “free of scientific content: It gives no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for “intelligent design.” Instead, host Ben Stein spends most of the movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory for their religious views.” But it gets even worse: The most egregious part […]

A reader who follows judicial nominations quite closely sends along the follwing comment on my recent judicial nominations post: In some respects, your numbers are technically correct, in that you have the number of confirmed divided by the number of nominations. But using nominations [as the CRS report did], instead of nominees, as the denominator […]

Lawyers at the Center for Biological Diversity spent years looking for “an animal to save the world.” Their criteria: A charismatic animal dependent upon arctic ice habitat threatened by global warming that could be listed under the Endangered Species Act. The Kittlitz’s murrelet didn’t cut it, nor did an arctic spider or Carribean coral species. […]

Representative Ed Markey wants to know — and so do I (though I suspect he has just a bit more pull). Last month, while the American people were becoming the personal ATMs of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Saudi Arabia signing away an even more valuable […]

Even those of us who don’t share his political views can revel for the moment in his historic achievement, and in the dramatic, positive changes in American society that opened his path to the nomination.

Jason Mazzone, The Bill of Rights in the Early State Courts, 92 Minn. L. Rev. 1 (2007). Here’s the gist: The Bill of Rights originated as a constraint only on the federal government. As every law student learns, therefore, in the 1833 case of Barron v. Baltimore, the Supreme Court dismissed a Fifth Amendment takings […]

In my Iowa Law Review article, discussed in my previous post, I point out that Daubert/amended Rule 702 haven’t done much as yet to improve the state of forensic science, and are unlikely to do so in the future. One reason that forensic science (itself a misnomer, as there is little science involved, for the […]

My article, “Expert Witnesses, Adversarial Bias, and the (Partial) Failure of the Daubert Revolution,” has just been published in the Iowa Law Review. You can find an on-line version here. Here is the abstract: This article raises two questions that have been surprisingly missing from the voluminous law review literature on expert evidence since the […]

Not for the first time of late, the HLR has published a student piece that doesn’t quite fit the genre, called NEVER AGAIN SHOULD A PEOPLE STARVE IN A WORLD OF PLENTY. To give you the gist, the author writes: You have now read this Note and you are equipped with the knowledge that $200 […]

Readers may recall the following from a post of mine last year: I called Comcast to set up cable installation. They sent a complete moron, who wanted to run a cable from the third floor to the first floor, by way of staircases and hallways. I called Comcast, and they offered to send a new […]

Hagee explains his remarks on the Holocaust: What has been disappointing has been to see my life’s work – the great passion of my life – mischaracterized and attacked. I have dedicated my life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the State of Israel. In taking a stand for Israel I have received death threats from […]

According to Brian Leiter, Phyllis Schlafly is a bigot, parochial, and an ignoramus, so much so that the fact that Rick Hills is perplexed that Leiter is so angry about her receipt of an honorary degree at Wash. U. reflects Hills’s “silly prejudices.” But while Schlafly is beyond the pale because of the bigotry Leiter […]

Sen. McCain has rejected the endorsement of Rev. John Hagee, whose controversial, inflammatory statements on a variety of matters have caused him to be a liability to the McCain campaign. The final straw was a sermon from the late 1990s in which Hagee said, interpreted biblical prophecy about the return of the Jews to the […]

I’ve blogged before about various federal courts ignoring the language of the 2000 amendments to Federal Rule of Evidence 702, dealing with expert testimony, and instead relying on pre-2000 circuit precedents that conflict with that language. I just came across an example of the same phenomenon with regard to Rule 701, dealing with lay opinion […]

There have been a spate of articles recently about Obama and the Jewish vote, the most recent by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal. Without exception, these articles have focused on whether Obama is or is perceived to be sufficiently pro-Israel to retain Jewish voters. The answer is, “yes,” as these articles consistently conclude. […]