Author Archive | David Bernstein

With Barack Obama’s Trinity Church and its recenlty retired minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright very much in the news lately, I came across an interesting, and generally very sympathetic, article on the church published in the Christian Century last May. Of particular interest: TRINITY’S CRITICS SPEAK as though it is a political organization constantly advocating for […]

Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Autumn 2004 Kenneth Mack: Barack had already made an impression on both the second- and third-year student editors. If I remember properly, he had already participated in a committee that would plan the annual issue devoted to some new development in law, and was also holding forth in the […]

David Horowitz eulogizes his daughter Sarah here. Thanks to Manny Klausner for the link.

Ilya’s post below on Spitzer reminds me that being of Jewish background myself (no, really!), I have found it very interesting that Obama has been receiving such overwhelming support from African Americans in this election. It’s one thing to support Jesse Jackson or even Al Sharpton for symbolic reasons, but Obama actually has a good […]

No, says Georgetown law prof Mike Seidman, in this interesting (and brief, as law professor writings go) paper.

I’m hoping VC readers can provide an answer to these questions: is it common for law reviews outside the top 20 to have policies banning professors at their own school from publishing in their law review (outside of symposia and the like) to avoid potential undue pressure by the faculty? At schools where this is […]

My parents are visiting this weekend. My father tells me that my great-grandmother (his father’s mother), a simple, uneducated woman who had a very hard life, used to say, in her native Yiddish, “If I ever get to meet God, I’ll grab him by the neck and tear his beard out one hair at a […]

To follow up on Eugene’s Thursday post, here is what I wrote about the issue in Chapter 11 of You Can’t Say That!: Approximately two million American women belong to women-only health clubs. Some women, such as those with religious objections to wearing revealing clothes in front of men, and abuse survivors who find it […]

Celebrations in Gaza of the murder of eight yeshiva students at prayer. Thanks to reader N. Hecht for the pointer.

Name the Supreme Court Justice who made the following remark to counsel during oral argument: “Are you sure? I have smoked them, and I am sure I am not a dude.”   For the answer, click here.   Answer: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. This comment was made during oral argument in an antitrust case, in response to […]

the blog Southern Appeal is back.

A remarkable column from Stephen Henderson, the deputy editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press, who used to cover the Supreme Court. A few gems: “[T]he vacancies could be plentiful, particularly if a President Clinton or Obama serves two terms…. On the outside chance that the next president gets four or five appointments, we […]

This is the Yale Law Journal Note cited in the New York Times article on the subject; the Journal has just put the Note on its Web site.

A Presidential election theory from Jeff Greenfield in Slate. My question, though: If Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy in the general, then didn’t Daffy have to beat some candidates (including some Bugses) in the primary? Or is Daffy always the least Daffy of the primary lot (doesn’t seem likely to me)?

In October 2004, I reported that Columbia University was planning to start a new Israel Studies Department, in a rather transparent attempt to deflect criticism of its extremely anti-Israel Middle East Studies Department [home of the infamous Joseph Massad, for example], an attitude that had allegedly caused some of the faculty to behave unpleasantly to […]