Author Archive | David Bernstein

I posted this in the comments, but I liked it enough to decide to make a post of it: I don’t have a blanket objection to affirmative action, but I do think it’s important to (a) have a theory as to which people you are giving preferences to, and why, rather than just give a […]

I can’t find a link right now, but I’ve seen several commentaries that expressed incredulity at Justice Thomas’s claim that he believed that he was admitted to Yale Law School not because he was black, but because of the obstacles he had overcome (which were, to understate things, rather substantial) while succeeding in every educational […]

Yesterday, I linked to a joke Justice Thomas made about not being invited to speak at Columbia unless he was a Middle East dictator with nuclear weapons. Keeping in mind that this was a joke and assumedly was not meant to be taken literally, it’s still worth noting in fairness that informed sources tell me […]

[Bernstein responds to Leiter here.] I keep getting emails asking what I think about DePaul University’s denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein. The short answer is that while I certainly haven’t tortured myself by reading everything Finkelstein has written, I’ve read enough to broadly agree with Cathy Young’s assessment, which you can find here. What […]

Thomas was talking about how he’s been well-received at law schools around the country. But, he added, there are some elite law schools from which he does not expect an invitation. “About the only way I would get invited to Columbia is if I was a Middle East dictator with nuclear weapons.”

Commenter WCB writes: “It would be nice if everyone who posts in the comments here could calm down, drop the name calling and have a civil discussion. It’s started to sound like a war between the Daily Kos and Little Green Footballs around here.” I agree, and have been contemplating closing down the comments to […]

You probably knew that already, but I still found this quote from the ABA president’s inaugural address in 1924 of interest: In these days of so-called progressivism and advanced political economy, we find men in every community who jeer at that [Constitutional] Convention and belittle its work. They say . . . that the Constitution […]

McCain: “the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” Number of times the Constitution actually mentions Christianity: 0. Number of times the Constitution forbids the establishment of religion by Congress: 1. Undoubtedly, given the demographics of the time, the Framers expected that the American population would be primarily Christian, and some […]

Taylor: “Loopy radicals dominate political discourse on many a campus, and they despise intellectual diversity.” Read the whole thing, which includes a couple of choice quotes from me.

With Clarence Thomas so much in the news these days, I was thinking about whether left-wing political activists made a terrible mistake (from their own perspective) regarding Clarence Thomas, pushing him, permanently, farther to the right then he would have ended up on his own. If one looks at Thomas’s biography, it’s clear that he […]

In 1925, the Supreme Court upheld a warrantless automobile search against a Fourth Amendment challenge. The dissent argued that Fourth Amendment protections should apply to cars as well to homes: And it is argued that the words and history of this section indicate the intent of Congress to distinguish between the necessity for warrants in […]

Recall that at Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at Columbia, he responded to a question about Iran’s oppression of homosexuals by claiming that “in Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.” His statement was met with a chorus of boos and catcalls, the only thing he said that really riled up the politically correct crowd […]

I just read a very interesting article by Thomas C. Leonard, Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women’s Work, which appeared in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in July 2005. If you’re at all interested in Progressive Era economists’ and reformers’ attitudes toward working women, this article is a must […]

It would be too tiresome to reply to Brian’s Leiter’s rant about me point-by-point. So let’s just focus on one statement: “But how many times in the last 50 years have ‘liberal’ politicians and interest groups outside universities successfully mobilized to get someone fired or even threatened that person’s tenure because of ‘conservative’ views?” Well, […]

Leslie Gelb, in the NY Times, says the following about The Israel Lobby: But as my mother often said, “They [M & W] asked for trouble” — by the way they make their arguments, by their puzzlingly shoddy scholarship, by what they emphasize and de-emphasize, by what they leave out and by writing on this […]