Author Archive | David Bernstein

We’ve hired eight candidates this year–two laterals and six entry-levels, with one more offer still outstanding. Meanwhile, no one is leaving, so this is a net gain of at last eight new faculty members on a faculty of about thirty. Some of the highlights: We only extended eight offers to yield our six entry-level acceptances, […]

Two George Mason Law School student organizations, the ACLU and the International Law Society, are sponsoring a lecture tomorrow by one Mazin Qumsiyeh, entitled, “Terrorism, the US, and the Centrality of the Israel/Palestine Question: Can Peace be Based on Human Rights and International Law?” I saw a flyer for this event, and the name sounded […]

Inside Higher Ed (via Instapundit): One of the key arguments made by David Horowitz and his supporters in recent years is that a left-wing orientation among faculty members results in a lack of curricular balance, which in turn leads to students being indoctrinated rather than educated. The argument is probably made most directly in a […]

Yet another in a series of posts quoting sellers who think that their home has a higher objective value than what they can get from potential purchasers: Greg and Barbara Abbott have already cut the price twice on the two-bedroom condominium they are trying to sell on the Las Vegas strip. They’re asking $669,900 now […]

While going through some of my clothes, I happened upon a t-shirt I bought almost eighteen years ago, which I nominate as the best t-shirt ever. Not because it’s comfortable or well-made, or even lawful (the designs are “bootlegged”). The back story is that I was living and working in Manhattan (at Fried, Frank, fwiw) […]

Times: JPMorgan and Bear were prompted to renegotiate after shareholders began threatening to block the deal and it emerged that several “mistakes” were included in the original, hastily written contract, according to people involved in the talks. One sentence was “inadvertently included,” according to a person briefed on the talks, which requires JPMorgan to guarantee […]

A day late, but the Jewish equivalent of April Fools headlines. Very funny.

Paul Caron has a very useful list here. Interestingly, almost none of these programs existing when I was on the teaching market 13 years ago, though I somehow managed to procure a one-year grant to be a research fellow at Columbia. FWIW, of the five entry-level professors George Mason has hired so far this year, […]

I find the following quote, from the article on vaccines linked to by Jonathan, below, horrifying: In the wake of last month

Dahlia Lithwik writes that the case is (potentially) about “the abandonment of every principle of strict construction, federalism, and judicial modesty in which the Roberts Court ever purported to believe.” Except, of course, that there is no federalism issue in Heller, because the gun law at issue is D.C. law, which for constitutional purposes is […]

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to tax and spend only for the “general welfare.” The Supreme Court has essentially left it up to Congress to determine what constitutes the general welfare. [“The line must still be drawn between one welfare and another, between particular and general . . . . The discretion, however, […]

Here. Informative and amusing.

JP Morgan is buying the company, recently valued at well over $100 a share, and selling for over $50 as recently as last Thursday, for $2 a share. Bear Stearns is a victim of the subprime debacle. What’s next? Perhaps the collapse of large hedge funds that leveraged their investments in mortgage-backed securities? A similar […]

Matthew Yglesias: Obama’s going to have a hard time explaining that I take to be the truth, namely that his relationship with Trinity has been a bit cynical from the beginning. After all, before Obama was a half-black guy running in a mostly white country he was a half-white guy running in a mostly black […]

N.Y Times (This is old news, but it was new to me): Funny: In the satirical issue of the Harvard Law Review, the editors wrote in Obama’s voice “I was born in Oslo, Norway, the son of a Volvo factory worker and part-time ice fisherman,” a mock self-tribute begins. “My mother was a backup singer […]