Author Archive | David Bernstein

If you want to be dean of Columbia’s SIPA, you should (a) invite Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to campus and announce that you would “certainly” have invited Adolf Hitler as well, resulting in a public relations debacle for your university; (b) sign a petition calling for divestment from Israel. (c) apologize for a high-level Communist […]

Responding to an NGO Monitor Report accusing Human Rights Watch of anti-Israel bias (a topic that has been covered here before), HRW’s Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson replies, “It’s hard to comprehend how NGO Monitor thinks that merely devoting an alleged 9% of Human Rights Watch’s energies in the Middle East to Israel constitutes […]

Professor Levitt, coauthor of the highly recommended Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science, has the following thoughts on the Abu el Haj controversy, reprinted with the permission of Prof. Levitt: My take on the Nadia Abu el Haj affair at Columbia, after much thought, differs both from that of Abu el […]

Guest-blogger Kathy G. at Crooked Timber, protesting Washington University’s plan to award an honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly, manages to express a certain academic mindset (all emphases added): Nor do I believe that conservatives should never receive honorary degrees. There are conservative scholars who do work that is respected within academia—many economists, for example—and they […]

Hezbollah’s power grab in Beirut has once more plunged that city into violence and chaos. This effort to undermine Lebanon’s elected government needs to stop, and all those who have influence with Hezbollah must press them to stand down immediately. It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that […]

Andy Koppleman writes over at Balkinization: One of the more depressing results of the decision was the rush of conservative law professors, many of whom are self-styled originalists and advocates of restraint, to defend the decision. One can easily imagine what they would have said had the Court engaged in such contortions on behalf of […]

Back in February, I suggested that McCain would start with a base of 25-30% of the Jewish vote (or slightly more than Bush received in 2004) and, if Obama was the nominee, that it’s feasible he could get 40% or more. A recent Gallup survey (analyzed here by Shmuel Rosner of Ha’aretz) shows Obama getting […]

Ha’aretz explains how the Jewish state came to be called “Israel,” something I’ve wondered about. I still think “Judea” or “Zion” would have been a better name. Ever (state of the Hebrews) was among the other names considered. The objection that “Judea” was an actual historic state, much of whose territory was not included in […]

It has a bunch of law professors, including the VC’s own Orin and Eugene. Here’s a riddle: There are more law professors on this committee from George ___ Law School than from any other law school. Fill in the blank. Answer after the jump. Hat tip: Overlawyered. (show) George Mason? No! George Washington. GMU has […]

I came across an interesting post by Professor Kenneth Dauber on a list to which I subscribe. I am reprinting it below with his permission. Professor Dauber’s comments were prompted by the recent tenure controversy involving Barnard anthropology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, and an obviously one-sided article in the New Yorker on that controversy, but […]

Before becoming a senator and then running for president, Barack Obama spent several years as a part-time lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. I haven’t read anything about what he was like as a professor. A uniter (open-minded, encouraging critical questions) or a divider (not)? Overtly ideological or dispassionate and […]

Carter on Charlie Rose (Transcript from Nexis): “I think any time any powerhouse takes military action when it’s a high danger or almost an inevitability that women and children are going to be killed, I think that can be considered an act of terrorism, yes.” Note that Carter’s definition of “terrorism” means that no “powerhouse” […]

Given an opportunity to disavow her violent criminal past as a member of the Weather Underground via a challenge in The Daily Northwestern, she instead appears to justify her actions based on the fact that she believes that she was engaged in a fight against “the illegal, immoral war against Vietnam and the organized terrorism […]

The judge has decided to allow infants to remain with their mothers, but otherwise has not modified the order removing all of the children from their homes, despite no individualized showings of child abuse or neglect. In the previous thread, some commenters seem to assert that the CPS may take all of the FLDS’s children […]

Two snippets from the FLDS “child protection” case in Texas, in which 437 children have been forcibly removed from parental care while the state investigations allegations that adolescent girls were sexually abused by being coerced or “brainwashed” into “marriages” (religiously but not legally recognized) with much older men. (The raid was apparently prompted by a […]