Author Archive | David Bernstein

Bill Henderson and Jeff Stake discuss (in the comments). Dan Filler follows up. When I was a law student at Yale, I initially did not put my LSAT score on my resume. However, as a first-year student, with all our grades pass/fail first semester, it quickly became apparent that the students who went to Yale, […]

Should we boycott all Israeli goods, products, services, and people, or should we exempt academics?

I’m working on a project about phony experts, which I loosely define as purported experts who can’t do what they claim to be able to do, or whose claimed expertise is nonsensical or non-credible. I would welcome reader suggestions regarding categories of experts to look into. Here are some examples I’ve been toying with: (1) […]

By one Igor Charkovsky, of Russia. The details are almost too ridiculous, and frightening to believe. E.g., “Charkovsky arrived at the pool accompanied by a crew of female assistants or fans, some of whom held their infants only by the wrists as they swung them in every direction. Afterward a boy of five at the […]

UM has been doing a tremendous amount of lateral hiring lately, and excellent laterals at that. According to the lists compiled by Dan Filler at Concurring Opinions, last year Minnesota recruited Alexandra Klass from William Mitchell College of Law; Heidi Kitrosser from Brooklyn Law School; Claire Hill from Chicago-Kent; Thomas Kotter from Washington & Lee; […]

I’ve just come upon a rather remarkable essay by Prof. Harry Mairson of Brandeis University. Mairson was the primary force in pushing for Jimmy Carter to visit Brandeis, an event covered previously on this blog. The Carter visit created great controversy at Brandeis, and, along with more general controversy over the relationship between the Jewish […]

Posner’s views are generally consistent with mine: (1) it’s hard to judge the efficiency of government salaries because they are not market-based; (2) there is no reason to believe that, as a rule, federal judges are underpaid; and (3) paying judges the same amount regardless of local cost of living makes little sense. UPDATE: Whoops, […]

I blogged this last year, but “The 30 Minute Seder” now comes in a new and improved edition. It’s an excellent text, I think, for those who want a short Seder service with all the traditional elements of the Seder, but don’t want to go through the whole Haggadah (which is full of tangentially relevant […]

From Dr. Matthias Kuentzel, whose talk on anti-Semitism in the Muslim world was canceled abruptly, for “security” reasons, courtesy of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East:

The Tikkun piece by Kenneth Roth referenced in my previous post provides some interesting insight into the mind of a leading modern NGO/human rights advocate, to wit: My father had the good fortune to escape Nazi Germany in July of 1938. Among the lessons that I drew from his stories was that military force alone […]

here. The Fisking does not, however, include my favorite example of Human Rights Watch’s [at best] willful blindness to what was going on in Lebanon.

Brooklyn (and soon Cardozo) law professor Tony Sebok has a very interesting column on a recent German Constitutional Court decision holding Germany’s absolute ban on contingency fees unconstitutional.

From Scholars for Peace in the Middle East: On Wednesday morning March 14, just hours before an invited academic talk and two-day academic workshop series by SPME Board member, Matthias Kuentzel, German scholar, the University of Leeds cancelled this invited, university- sponsored, two-day workshop on “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East.” Dr Kuentzel’s […]

I’m very pleased to announce that Professor Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell University, an authority on international law (and the dangers of the imposition of international law on the United States), and author of, most recently, Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States (Princeton University Press, 2005), has agreed to join the George Mason […]

Lithwick: Well, Justice Anthony Kennedy is, for one. As he testified just last month before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “Something is wrong when a judge’s law clerk, just one or two years out of law school, has a salary greater than that of the judge or justice he or she served the year before.” The […]