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23 Oct 2023, 6:29 am
Long-time readers will recall that I am a vociferous critic of Human Rights Watch. HRW purports to be a neutral human rights organization, but consistently hires staffers with a history of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian activism to write and report on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. So how did HRW do after the Oct. 7 massacre and brutalization of Israelis? Perhaps even HRW would find it necessary to issue an immediate, strong condemnation? After all, everything about Hamas murderous rampage violated… [read post]
22 Oct 2023, 6:04 am
[It's not just antisemitism, it's a Manichean worldview that assigns moral worth based on whether a group is identified as "oppressors" or the "oppressed"] Recent events have been clarifying for many of us. While many left-wing Jews have grasped that they wound up political bedfellows with people who at best downplay and at worst celebrate massacring, torturing, raping, and kidnapping several thousand innocent civilians, from babies to the elderly, even those… [read post]
5 Dec 2025, 8:59 am
This past week, I was in Israel with a group of lawyers from the US, Canada, Bulgaria, and Latvia on a trip sponsored by the nonpartisan Center for Jewish Impact. CJI's general goal is to serve as a conduit between the Israeli private sector and domestic and foreign governments, but it has also run this trip and one before it to give interested "legal elites" more insight into the post-10/7 political and military landscape in Israel. I will probably have more to say about the trip… [read post]
2 Nov 2025, 11:50 am
Originally posted at Balkinization for a symposium on John Witt, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon and Schuster, 2025). John Fabian Witt's The Radical Fund masterfully reconstructs the history of the American Fund for Public Service, better known as the Garland Fund. The Fund embodied both the promise and the peril of radical philanthropy in the United States between World War I and World War II. Conceived by Roger Baldwin… [read post]
21 Mar 2014, 2:52 pm
Speakers will include Brian Landsberg, David Bernstein, Phil Duran, and Chad Quaintance, and they will [read post]
12 Mar 2025, 5:48 am
[In his recent book and an oped column, he channels Nazi and other antisemitic propaganda about the Purim Holiday] The basic story of the holiday of Purim, which starts Thursday night, is this. The King of the Persian empire takes a Jewish bride, Esther, who conceals her Jewish identity. Meanwhile, the king's evil vizier, Haman, plots a genocide of Jews throughout the empire, and wins the king's blessing to undertake the massacre on the 14th day of the month of Adar. Esther's uncle… [read post]
15 Aug 2024, 12:31 pm
I have a new paper out critiquing the "Law and Political Economy" Project. The Hewlett Foundation funds the project, based at the Yale Law School, as part of its nine-figure war on "neoliberalism." As I describe in the paper, LPE's website announces that the Project "brings together a network of scholars, practitioners, and students working to develop innovative intellectual, pedagogical, and political interventions to advance the study of political economy and… [read post]
7 Jun 2024, 7:51 am
My forthcoming article, Three Bad Ideas about Race in America, has been posted on SSRN. Here is the abstract: In this Essay, prepared for a symposium honoring Brown v. Board of Education's eightieth anniversary, I examine and critique three influential propositions regarding race promoted by some academic theorists and pundits. Part I discusses and rejects the notion that differences in socioeconomic status among different American subgroups are best explained by the power… [read post]
26 May 2024, 7:30 am
[It's probably not who you think.] I happened across this very interesting and provocative paper by Fordham political scientist Jeffrey Cohen. Cohen starts by noting the two dominant theories of antisemitism and poltiical ideology in the United States. One theory holds that antisemitism can be found on the extreme right and the extreme left. A second holds that people on the left are least antisemitic, and are more likely to be antisemitic the further right one goes. Cohen has a third theory.… [read post]
3 May 2024, 11:33 am
I have a piece up at National Review Online about the Antisemitism Awareness Act. As described in my article, the most important feature of the act is that it codifies administrative guidance that began in the Bush Administration holding that Jews are protecting from ethnic discrimination by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Before 2003, the Department of Education treated Jews an exclusively religious group not covered by the Act. The controversial part of the Act is that it codifies the… [read post]
31 Oct 2023, 5:04 am
[Why didn't university president Gregory Washington speak up?] The Hamas massacre in Israel has revealed that the the DEI norms embraced by most American universities don't include protecting Jewish students from intimidation. Every day I hear new stories from friends about their college kids being threatened, ostracized, and bullied, because they object to the glorification of Hamas terrorists by other students. A good friend of mine, for example, has had to hire a civil rights attorney… [read post]
10 Oct 2023, 4:25 pm
[Moral clarity from Scalia Dean Ken Randall, and lack thereof from NYU Dean Troy McKenzie] Some other time, I will express my views on when and if university administrators should express opinions about the issues of the day. For now, it's sufficient to note that they do all the time, and in that context should be judged by what they say, when they say it, and how they say it. Here is Dean Ken Randall, Scalia Law (my law school) in an email I received this morning: Dear Students, Faculty, and… [read post]
9 Oct 2023, 7:20 am
(Two background notes. (1)Nick Riemer is a very prominent Australian "progressive" "antizionist" and his views expressed here are relatively moderate compared to those who are celebrated Hamas' "act of resistance" though less moderate than those engaging in "both sideism"; (2) Everyone knows that the slaughter, rape, kidnapping, and so on of hundreds of Israelis is precisely what Hamas would do to the entire Jewish population of Israel if it had the power… [read post]
18 Sep 2023, 1:45 pm
[The Jewish world was once ruled by a religious lawyerocracy; the Zionist left wants a secular version.] After the fall of the Second Temple in the first century, Judaism gradually became a lawyerocracy, a society ruled by lawyers. Jews call these lawyers "rabbis," but think about the training rabbis traditionally receive–it's primarily many years of law school, learning the Talmud and other sources of Jewish law until one becomes sufficiently expert to be a legal advisor and… [read post]
6 Jul 2023, 4:27 am
[Justice Sotomayor decides who is a person of color based on whether it supports her views regarding structural racism.] As I've noted before, Justice Sotomayor likes to play fast and loose with statistics regarding race in the United States. In particular, she decides which groups she describes as relevant "racial minorities" based on whether it suits her political agenda. To wit, along with African Americans she designates Latino Americans as a racial group. It's true that many… [read post]
2 Nov 2025, 12:12 pm
[UPDATE: In retrospect I buried the lede here. On motion to dismiss, the court found that social media postings regarding a synagogue event did not violate the FACE act because they do not constitute a "true threat," because using the phrase "no Justice no peace" was not alleged to lead to violence. As I point out at end of the post, the operative question under the FACE act at the motion to dismiss stage, at least arguably, is whether the posting in question sufficiently… [read post]
22 Jul 2025, 6:09 am
[For those of a certain ideological bent, Hamas atrocities show just how evil *Israel* is.] A couple of weeks ago, I attended the traveling Nova exhibit in DC, memorializing the torture, rape, murders and kidnappings of hundreds of peaceful young Israelis by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023. The exhibit brought back the emotions I felt in July 2024, visiting the site of Nova, Kibbutz Nir Oz, and other sites where Hamas gleefully committed the worst imaginable atrocities… [read post]
7 Feb 2023, 2:25 pm
Scene 1: One day on Twitter Glenn Greenwald: Republicans criticizing Rep. Omar for saying Israel has hypnotized the world shows that members of Congress prefer Israel's interests to Americans' right to free speech. Rep. Omar: It's all about the Benjamins. Scene 2, later on Twitter< The crowd: That's antisemitic! You are repeating the classic trope that nefarious Jews buy off domestic political leaders to serve their own interests while being disloyal to their home country.… [read post]
11 Dec 2022, 11:19 am
Simkovic, over at Leiter's Law School Reports, defends the LSAT from those who would eliminate it in an effort to enhance law school "diversity" (see the original for hyperlinks supporting various assertions): If standardized test scores were removed from the rankings, or their weight reduced, law schools probably would spend less money on merit scholarships. But there is no guarantee that this money would be spent to help students from poor families. Indeed, affirmative action, as… [read post]
17 Oct 2022, 7:10 am
[The case falls short on several grounds.] I am reprinting a post from 2012, again pertinent given that the Supreme Court is about to hear arguments in the Harvard and UNC affirmative action cases. (Harvard is a private university, but under precedent it's held to the same anti-discrimination standards as public universities via Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act). The Constitutional Accountability Center has filed an interesting amicus brief in the Fisher affirmative action case on behalf… [read post]
