Discriminations: Legal Commentary

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Legal Commentary

Discriminations

who? Discriminations is the joint production of John and Jessie Rosenberg. John is one of the world's older grad students, now completing a 30-year overdue dissertation at Stanford on discrimination. Jessie is a 16 year old junior at Bryn Mawr College majoring in physics.
\r\nwhat? John's focus, not surprisingly, will be on the theory and practice of discrimination, and how it is reported and analyzed.
\r\nJessie's will be discriminating thoughts on ... whatever catches her fancy or attracts her attention. (Email: jrosenbe@brynmawr.edu)

Post Frequency: 13.8/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 09:31:52

Burris And Blago, Race Cards And Cynical Race Cards

Posted on January 07, 2009
?There is little legal justification for the Democrats to stop Roland Burris from taking Barack Obama?s Senate seat,? writes Prof. John L. Jackson, the Chronicle of Higher Education?s designated anthropologist and ?diverse? commentator. ?But just because there?s nothing technically illegal about the nomination (and Burris isn?t one of the people invoked as part of that alleged ?pay-to-play? scheme),? he continues, doesn?t mean that Burris should have accepted it...

Change?

Posted on January 06, 2009
They told me that if I voted for John McCain we would have four more years of what candidate Obama decried, in a March 2 2008, interview with the Washington Post, as ?the politicization of intelligence in [the Bush] administration.? They were right...

Blaming The Victims (What Victims?)?

Posted on January 05, 2009
Madera, California, a city of about 55,000, is more than two-thirds Latino. The Madera Unified School District is 82% Latino. ?Yet just one Latino sits on its seven-member school board.? The predictable result? A lawsuit claiming that the at-large election system for school board members violates the California Voting Rights Act...

Taxing Good Behavior

Posted on January 04, 2009
Back in 2002 Charlottesville was afflicted with a severe drought. Faced with a dangerous water shortage, the city government and community leaders launched a vigorous campaign to promote water conservation, and the good citizens of Charlottesville, devoted environmentalists that they all are, complied with a vengeance...

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Shouldn?t Conservatives Emphasize Equal Rights?

Posted on January 02, 2009
I am always impressed by the writings of Peter Berkowitz (see here, here, here, and here for examples), and his OpEd piece today in the Wall Street Journal is no exception. He urges both libertarian and social conservatives to embrace moderation, to recognize that they need each other, and argues that a ?constitutional conservatism? provides a principled common ground...

Washington Post Article ?Rankles? Good Sense

Posted on January 02, 2009
Today?s Washington Post has an article by reporter Carol Leonnig, ?Obama's Team Rankles the Right: To Some Conservatives, Advisers Are Alarmingly Liberal,? that gives prominent and unchallenged voice to arguments that should rankle anyone who believes the news pages of the mainstream media have an obligation to be at least somewhat fair and balanced in their presentation of political disagreements...

A Burris Under The Saddle...

Posted on January 02, 2009
It?s almost as much fun watching the law professors disagree over whether the Senate has the right to refuse to seat Roland Burris (it does; it doesn?t; etc.) as it is to watch Senate Democrats try to balance appearing to oppose corruption with not appearing to exclude a black appointee...

Guns Abroad, Guns At Home

Posted on January 01, 2009
I?ve just been reading (HatTip to Andy McCarthy) an outstanding article on the laws of war (or lack thereof) by David Rivkin and Lee Casey. I highly recommend the whole (long) article, but, sucker for ironies, contradictions, hypocrisies that I am, I was especially struck by Rivkin?s and Casey?s discussion of one of the reasons the United States has steadfastly refused to sign on to the Protocol I Amendments (1977) to the Geneva Convention (1949)...

Blago?s Choice: Parallels Converging...

Posted on December 30, 2008
Illinois Gov. Rod (?Pay To Play?) Blagojevich has defiantly named Barack Obama?s Senate replacement, former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris, both of them no doubt believing that Burris?s blackness will blunt opposition from Democrats and others who have recently developed ethical sensitivities regarding the practice of politics in Chicago...

Kwanzaa?s True Believers

Posted on December 27, 2008
Michael Eric Dyson speaks for and to Kwanzaa?s true believers, whether they identify with ?pan-Africanist? or ?Diasporic? values: while the former voices common African values and a black homecoming, the latter speaks of lack, exile and migration ? in short, a loss of home and what it means to black identity and the rituals that sustain it...

If ?Preferential Treatment? Is Bad...

Posted on December 27, 2008
As has been widely reported, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd received ?preferential interest rates on two mortgages from Countrywide Financial Corp.? (HatTip to InstaPundit) Dodd acknowledged that Countrywide placed him in a ?VIP section,? but he denied he knew he was getting a special deal and said he was not friends with Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo...

Political Analysis, Washington Post Style

Posted on December 23, 2008
Chris Cillizza has been writing The Fix, a Washington Post political blog for several years. Back during the late and unlamented primaries he ran a series of ?Case For/Case Against? articles on the various candidates, and he has decided that ?now seems like the right time to dust off that oldie but goodie to make the argument for why Gov...

Affirmative Action As Quota-Based Race Norming

Posted on December 22, 2008
Affirmative action supporters generally insist that they do not support quotas and that affirmative action does not employ them. Nor, they nearly always assert, does it involve ?Race norming? ? putting applicants into racial pools where they compete only against others in their pool ? which has been illegal since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991...

Did Obama Hold A Black Senate Seat?

Posted on December 22, 2008
Did Barack Obama?s election to the Senate from Illinois mean that his seat thus became black, and must be occupied by a black from now on? Laura Washington, whose argument suggests that she occupies a black journalist?s seat at the Chicago Sun Times, thinks so...

Are Constitutions Unamendable?

Posted on December 21, 2008
Usually liberals believe that constitutions are easily amendable, and without going through such troublesome and difficult procedures as the U.S. Constitution?s Article V process. Many judges, to judge by their practices, believe they have the authority to ?construe? certain rights right out of the text, or others (think ?emanations and penumbra?) into it...

The Bill Of Rights? Not Applicable In Chicago & Illinois...

Posted on December 19, 2008
Whatever one may think of the recent Heller decision holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual, not a collective, right to own and bear arms, and thus that Washington D.C.?s sweeping gun ban was unconstitutional (I like it, even if George Will and Judge J...

Card Check, Early Virginia Style

Posted on December 19, 2008
One of the Democrats? most controversial proposals (a writer in Forbes calls it ?the most radical revision of labor law since 1935?) is to do away with the secret ballot in union elections, known as ?card check.? Since the debate over this proposal is likely to be heated, it is worth pointing out that the secret ballot is a more recent invention than is commonly recognized...

Cultural (In)Competence

Posted on December 16, 2008
Jennifer Kabbany, a columnist for the North County Times, caustically observes that ?cultural competency training? is coming to Chaparal High School in Temecula (Calif.). Last week, the Temecula school board approved a $15,000 contract for a consultant to come to the campus for five days next semester and teach educators how to better understand where their students are coming from ---- on a cultural level ---- in an attempt to improve their grades...

Can We COPE?

Posted on December 16, 2008
In South Africa the ruling African National Congress is facing growing discontent with the former liberation movement, prompting party leaders to breakaway and form a new political party that many think will be the ANC?s first serious challenge at the polls...

Shocked! Shocked!

Posted on December 10, 2008
Last spring, after beginning this post on ?The Real Barack Obama?? by quoting E.J. Dionne?s observation ? The result of the 2008 election may come down to how voters decide to define Barack Obama. Is he Adlai Stevenson or John F. Kennedy? ? I continued: Note well that this formulation of the central question of the election does not deign to ask who Obama really is, emphasizing instead that ?almost all of the turns in this contest have been driven by how Obama presented himself and how voters perceived him...

UPDATE!

Posted on December 09, 2008
This recent post, criticizing Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson?s critique of the Heller decision, which held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own and bear arms, has been UPDATED with a link to an article that offers a far more substantial critique.

Jobs For Whom?

Posted on December 07, 2008
Bloomberg reports that in his Saturday radio address President-elect Barack Obama said he?ll make the ?single largest new investment? in roads, bridges and public buildings since the Eisenhower Administration to lift the sagging economy and create jobs...

Parting Shot Or Crime Prevention?

Posted on December 07, 2008
?Campers may now pack heat along with their sleeping bags when they travel to national parks,? the San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday in a clever imitation of a news story. By ?heat? the reporter/comic, Peter Fimrite, did not mean electric socks...

The New Identity Politics

Posted on December 07, 2008
Many blacks voted for Obama because he looks like them. Many liberal (or if you prefer, progressive) whites voted for Obama because he doesn?t look like them. Intellectuals are above that sort of crass, superficial identity politics. They voted for Obama because he talks like them...

Minority Faculty Dissatisfaction

Posted on December 05, 2008
?Minority professors on the tenure track aren't as satisfied with their academic workplace as their white counterparts are,? the Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning, based on a new study published by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at the Harvard School of Education...

Rue II

Posted on December 04, 2008
In the immediately preceding post I discussed higher education officials ruing the lack of ?diversity? in science and engineering. ?Diversity,? of course, is lacking all over, at least enough of it to satisfy the diversifiers. For example, both men and minorities (presumably of both genders) are woefully ?underrepresented? in study abroad...

Why Rue?

Posted on December 04, 2008
In ?What Universities Can Do to Graduate More Minority Ph.D.?s? the Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning that Universities have long rued the stark disparity between minority students? share of the population and their share of Ph.D.?s, especially in engineering and the sciences...

Just Words III

Posted on December 01, 2008
When Hillary Clinton criticized Obama during the primaries for having a campaign built on little more than speechifying, for a candidacy that is ?about words? (often not his own) and little else, Obama replied, either feeling or feigning anger: ?Don?t tell me that words don?t matter!? Now that he?s going to be president, apparently they?re going to matter more than ever ? not because of speeches, but because they may represent the core of our new national security policy...

Revising Obama

Posted on November 30, 2008
Revisionist interpretations of the Obama phenomenon are already appearing ... even before there is an Obama administration. �berBlogger Glenn Reynolds points to a Washington Post article today proclaiming that Obama?s ?Not Black,? and observes: Hmm...

Will/Wilkinson Wrong

Posted on November 28, 2008
Yes, even George Will can be wrong, even when he is agreeing with someone who is as seldom wrong as Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the Fourth Circuit. In a recent column Will praises Wilkinson for damning ? in a Virginia Law Review article ? the Supreme Court?s Heller decision of last June, which held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own and bear arms...

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