Author Archive | David Bernstein

The mortgage crisis is moving into the mainstream. According to this and other stories, “everyone” is surprised at the crisis. Of course, Volokh Conspiracy readers learned back in June 2005 that mortgage companies had “gone out of their collective minds” (and beyond) and that I felt “sorry for whoever owns these loans, because some decent […]

Professor Alvin Rosenfeld, as readers may recall, is the author of the AJC study identifying and criticizing “Progressive” Jews who express hatred of Israel. The study caused a stir after being completely mischaracterized by the New York Times as a study from a “conservative” organization attacking “liberal” Jews [email correspondence with the author of the […]

I’ve started reading Jan Greenburg’s much praised Supreme Conflict. As she describes the nomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court, President Bush didn’t decide to nominate him until just before he announced the decision publicly. This conflicts with the little inside knowledge I have. At the time, I was acutely interested in who the […]

I’ve heard this refrain over and over, with regard to FEMA, the V.A., and other examples of government incompetence that happen to occur in the Bush Administration. Via commenter Justin, here’s an example from “Balloon Juice”: “people who don’t believe in government do a crappy job when they try to run it. You can look […]

If private companies had mismanaged outpatient care for veterans the way the V.A. system has, there would be strong calls from all the usual quarters for a government takeover, and proclamations of how we can’t trust “greedy” for-profit companies to take care of veterans. Funny how this thought process doesn’t seem to work in reverse, […]

Ha’aretz carries a very interesting interview with Amnon Rubinstein, who is the very model of a liberal (in the broad sense) Zionist, and whose worldview, I discovered years ago, is rather close to mine in many ways. The interview might go over the heads of readers with little background in Israeli politics and society, but […]

Professor Theodore Seto: Indeed, as I began playing with a spreadsheet I had written to replicate the 2006 U.S. News computations, I discovered that even if Harvard had reported a perfect median LSAT of 180, it still would have been ranked third. And even if Yale had reported a median LSAT of just 153 (placing […]

The recent implosion in the subprime mortgage market (a very big story barely being covered outside the financial pages) is going to have some drastic consequences: “Freddie Mac said Tuesday that it would stop buying those mortgages that have ‘a high likelihood of excessive payment shock and possible foreclosure.’ Freddie Mac also said it would […]

A few weeks back, I noted that Richard Cohen was unfairly lumped in with a group of hard-core Israel-hating leftist Jews. I also noted in that post that critics of Israel are too quick to imply or assert that friends of Israel are hysterics who leap to condemn any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, and […]

I’ve posted on SSRN (and sent to law reviews) my paper, “Expert Witnesses, Adversarial Bias, and the (Partial) Failure of the Daubert Revolution.” It’s already received some attention from Blog 702 and Law.com Here’s the abstract: This manuscript raises two questions that have been surprisingly missing from the voluminous law review literature on expert evidence […]

Let’s say that an editorial board “turns over” on March 15th. Do the incoming articles editors actually wait until 3/15 to read manuscripts, or do they start a few days early so they can be ready to recommend articles at the first board meeting?

Does the recent Supreme Court opinion on punitive damages have implications for the constitutionality of class action lawsuits involving thousands of plaintiffs? Mark Moller of the Cato Institute says “yes.”

From a NY Times story about sour frozen yogurt success story Pinkberry’s: In November, a shop called Berri Good opened in Fairfax, with kosher certification and a chartreuse-and-pink logo that is barely distinguishable from Pinkberry’s. “I don’t think we’re the same,” said Uzi Moses, the owner of Berri Good. “We use different fonts.” On top […]

Condoflip.com, featured on these “pages” in June 2005 as a sign of bubbledom, is no more. The website has this explanation: How Did The Market Change in 2004 and Beyond? We saw a dramatic shift in how preconstruction condos were bought and sold. The condo boom was driven by overly-ambitious speculators, [editor: ya think?] many […]

My alma mater, Brandeis University, fresh from controversy over Jimmy Carter’s talk there, has apparently established a closed student-faculty committee to monitor speakers on the Middle East. And, oddly enough, a talk by Daniel Pipes on the “Islamization of Europe,” which is, by its title, not a talk on the Middle East, is being held […]