Author Archive | Randy Barnett

GMU Law School dean Dan Polsby on a request from the Provost that professors take into account student exuberance over GMU’s Final Four appearance: “In law school we’re taught to respect the activities that go on in court, and that includes the basketball court.” (Dean Polsby added, however, that at the law school “we’re not […]

Some commentators seem to have misinterpreted my rather clear (I think) post below as suggesting that I was looking for suggestions of colleges where conservatives and libertarians find themselves immune from criticism. Nothing of the sort; I said “where students and faculty will generally treat them respectfully,” and that’s what I meant. For example, I […]

The international media, of course, is focusing on the implications of the election for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but there is bad news for those of us who believe that Israel’s inept and corrupt version of social democracy has been stifling economic growth there for years. The new “Pensioners Party” won 7 out of the 120 […]

Where America is heading, if the First Amendment is found to have a “hostile environment” exception: A UNIVERSITY lecturer who claimed that black people were less intelligent than whites was suspended from his post yesterday. Frank Ellis, a lecturer in Russian and Slavonic Studies, was sent home on full pay by the University of Leeds, […]

I generally completely ignore “March Madness,” and have no interest in college basketball. But we here in the Bernstein household (GMU professor, GMU graduate school alum, and baby) are very excited by George Mason’s success. If nothing else, we are going to be a lot less likely to hear “where?” when we say we teach […]

Via Mark Kleiman: “The founding fathers didn’t trust George Washington with unlimited power. Why should we trust George Bush?” Whatever you think of the underlying sentiment, that’s an excellent one-liner!

My sentiments exactly: Even more startling, given who they are, is the flimsiness of their work. Countless facts are simply wrong. Long stretches of argument are implausible, at times almost comically so. Much of their research is oddly amateurish, drawn not from credible documents or primary source interviews but from newspaper clippings, including dozens from […]

Tomorrow I am speaking at what looks like an excellent conference on “A New Constitutional Order?” being held on Friday and Saturday at Fordham University School of Law. You can find details of the program here. My panel (from 3:45pm-5:00pm) is entitled, “Calls for Restoration of the Lost Libertarian Constitution: Is the Constitution a Charter […]

Crossing the Rubicon2 has gathered blogospheric reaction to the Walt-Mearsheimer paper I briefly criticized last week. Various commentators, especially James Taranto at OpinionJournal (see posts Monday and Tuesday, and a related one today) and Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky at The American Thinker, have really eviscerated this paper. In times past, a paper like this […]

Mayor Ken Livingstone is in trouble again, this time for saying of two Londoners (the Reuben brothers), who have lived in London since the 1950s when they immigrated as teenagers, “if they’re not happy, perhaps they could always go back to Iran and see if they do better under the Ayatollahs.” The Reubens are not, […]

Very interesting (but mercifully brief) piece by David Engstrom in the Winter 2006 Green Bag (not yet internet accessible but available on Westlaw at 9 Green Bag 2d 181): few know that the history of American fair employment law reached an equally critical juncture more than 20 years earlier, in 1946. It was in May […]

My friend David Boaz of the Cato Institute has a new blog at the Guardian, and it’s off to a great start. David’s first post attempts to explain why conservatives love Bush so much, even though his economic policies are anything but conservative: As a nominating speech for President Grover Cleveland once put it, “They […]

Sorry for the last minute posting, but things have been rather hectic the past few days. I am speaking later today about Scalia’s Infidelity: A Critique of Faint-Hearted Originalism, at two Federalist Society sponsored talks: The first is at noon at the University of San Francisco School of Law at 2130 Fulton Street, room 103. […]

THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY’S CIVIL RIGHTS PRACTICE GROUP & GEORGETOWN STUDENT CHAPTER PRESENT A PANEL DISCUSSION ON: Mandated Racial Admissions in Hiring at Law Schools? An Examination of the Newly Proposed ABA Standard At its midyear meeting, the American Bar Association proposed a new standard that would purportedly require law schools to consider race and ethnicity […]

Federalist Society mission statement: “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.” Rabbi Kenneth Cohen, on Conservative Judaism and Jewish law: “the role of the rabbi is not to decide what the law should be, but rather what the law is.”