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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

O'smobile?

Posted on March 30, 2009
Since Oldsmobile died an untimely death in 2004, perhaps the name can be revived and applied (in slightly modified form), O?smobile, to the new General Motors. Or perhaps it will be sufficient simply to refer to GM from now on as BM (Barack Motors). UPDATE In his statement this morning President Obama said: ...

Blue-Eyed, Brown-Eyed Bunkum

Posted on March 30, 2009
Corina Knoll is a young Korean-American journalist at the Los Angeles Times who recently interviewed and wrote a revealing appreciation of Jane Elliott, an Iowa teacher who made, first, headlines and then, fame and at least some fortune, with a controversial method she developed of teaching whites how racist they are...

Another ?Diversity? Loyalty Oath In Virginia

Posted on March 26, 2009
Last month I discussed (here) the Student Bar Association at the University of Virginia encouraging students to sign a pledge of allegiance to ?diversity.? Now comes news, from the Chronicle of Higher Education today, of a new set of guidelines at Virginia Tech that, critics say, ?appear to require faculty members to show a commitment to diversity as part of their bids for tenure and promotion...

Post-Partisanship? I Finally Figured It Out!

Posted on March 25, 2009
One of the most prominent planks in Obama?s campaign platform was his promise to move beyond (or above) partisanship.Many observers have thus been confused or disappointed by the currently unfolding reality of President Obama?s economic agenda for the nation, consisting as it does of the conversion of one liberal wish list after another into government policy with little, often no, input from Republicans...

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?Massey Resistance?: Wrong In Theory And Practice, Part II

Posted on March 24, 2009
The first part of my discussion of Princeton Prof. Douglas Massey?s most recent defense of affirmative action appears immediately below, or, if you somehow stumbled on this continuation first, here. Part I dealt with the first of what are claimed to be only ?three basic charges? we critics level against affirmative action, that it ?constitutes reverse discrimination, lowering the chance of admission for better-qualified white students? and, further, that ?affirmative action generally has had only small and insignificant effects on the admission prospects of white students...

Racial Bean-Counting Gets Harder...

Posted on March 23, 2009
... in part because there are too many multicolored beans. Thus, the Washington Post reports today, Public schools in the Washington region and elsewhere are abandoning their check-one-box approach to gathering information about race and ethnicity in an effort to develop a more accurate portrait of classrooms transformed by immigration and interracial marriage...

?Massey Resistance?: Wrong In Theory And Practice, Part I

Posted on March 23, 2009
[NOTE! This post has been UPDATED] Virginia under the Byrd Machine engaged in ?massive resistance? to attacks on state-supported racial discrimination. For a while now Prof. Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, has been engaged in scholarly resistance to attacks on the racial discrimination at the core of affirmative action in higher education...

We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate...

Posted on March 22, 2009
Politico: ?Obama struggles as communicator? Of all the pitfalls Barack Obama might face in the presidency, here is one not many people predicted: He is struggling as a public communicator.... New York Times: ?Weekend Opinionator: Obama?s Communication Breakdown? From giving contradictory statements on the economy to making gaffes about the Special Olympics, team Obama has lost the communications magic that propelled it to the White House...

Has Dodd Gone Dotty?

Posted on March 21, 2009
... Or maybe he?s always been dotty. In either case, it is well known by now that the Administration, Democratic leaders, and their followers on both sides of the aisle rushed through the ?stimulus? bill so fast they didn?t have time to read it, and so were and are blissfully unaware of many of its provisions...

Ideological Exclusion

Posted on March 20, 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Education has two interesting pieces today on free speech and openness to alien ideas (or not). In the longer and more analytical of the two staff writer Peter Schmidt begins on a metaphorical (or is it allegorical?) note: Imagine a world where people can say whatever they want but are forced to wear earplugs at all times...

Is Bernanke Playing Chinese Checkers?

Posted on March 19, 2009
Asia Times, ?Dollar Crisis in the Making, Part 3? There is mounting evidence that China's central bank is undertaking the process of divesting itself of longer-dated US Treasuries in favor of shorter-dated ones. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System: To provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the Committee decided today to increase the size of the Federal Reserve?s balance sheet further by purchasing up to an additional $750 billion of agency mortgage-backed securities, bringing its total purchases of these securities to up to $1...

Hope!

Posted on March 19, 2009
Perhaps the best movie one-liner of all time can be found here.

Voting Discrimination: The Real Thing

Posted on March 18, 2009
Since debates over voting discrimination today usually involves arcane notions of ?vote dilution,? ?majority-minority districts,? ?pre-clearance? of even mundane changes in voting rules or procedures, etc., it is sometimes difficult to remember what real, unadulterated voting discrimination was like in the old days...

Gilding The Lilly: Not A Tax, But...

Posted on March 18, 2009
As I noted here last month, the first bill President Obama signed into law dramatically expanded the protection offered by (and the prospects of employer liability under) Title VII?s prohibition of job discrimination. I quoted the following (and more) from Stuart Taylor: The new law will virtually wipe out the 300-day time limit (180 days in Alabama and some other states) during which employees can file claims of discrimination under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act...

Polluted Waters

Posted on March 18, 2009
I?m almost surprised that this Los Angeles Times column by Tim Rutten on ?Rep. [Maxine] Waters' troubling ties? hasn?t received more attention. I suspect it would have had it not appeared in the middle of a flurry of fallout over the AIG bailout. In fact, I think what Rutten both reveals and reminds us of is worthy of more anger than the AIG bonuses, but maybe news that minority politicians are more interested in feathering racial nests (including their own) is no longer considered newsworthy in elite political circles...

The Beauty of One-Party Government ...

Posted on March 18, 2009
... is that you don?t have to put up with messy, time-consuming, embarrassing dissent. Bloomberg reports today (HatTip to Drudge): President Barack Obama may try to push through Congress a health-care overhaul, energy proposals and tax increases by using a partisan tactic that would thwart Republican efforts to block the measures...

Diversity?s New Proxy (Or, Proxy By Proxy)

Posted on March 18, 2009
According to the libs, as we all know, race is a valid proxy for all sorts of wonderful (but no bad) ?differences.? That?s why schools and colleges are so determined to jiggle their admissions requirements, lowering them where necessary, to assign or admit students from the approved racial groups: so that all their same students can be exposed to a few different students...

Racial Silence

Posted on March 18, 2009
Politico has a long article today on Obama?s continuing reluctance to talk about race, noting that today is the anniversary of the important speech in Philadelphia in which candidate Obama, trying to deflect criticism of his long association with Rev...

The ?Overrepresentation? Of Immigrant Blacks

Posted on March 17, 2009
Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on a new study?s finding that among high school graduates, ?immigrant blacks? ? defined as those who immigrated to the United States or their children ? are significantly more likely than other black Americans to attend selective colleges...

Men And Boys Need Not Apply: Obama Wants Fairness For ?Women And Girls?

Posted on March 16, 2009
President Obama wants to be fair to women and girls (men and boys are presumably on their own.). Toward that end last week he signed an Executive Order creating a new White House Council on Women and Girls. Its mission, an accompanying White House statement said, ?will be to provide a coordinated federal response to the challenges confronted by women and girls and to ensure that all Cabinet and Cabinet-level agencies consider how their policies and programs impact women and families,? something that by implication has been heretofore ignored...

Sorry State Of Affairs (Affairs Of State?) When You Can?t Define ?State?

Posted on March 15, 2009
It all depends on what the meaning of ?state? is. You?d think by now, after over two hundred years of experience with those pesky sovereign (or not) units, we?d know what a state is, but as Bush v. Gore and several subsequent controversies have reminded us, we don?t...

Seek And Ye Shall ... A) Find, B) Discriminate...

Posted on March 15, 2009
According to this article in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, the ?Rochester Police Department is seeking more minorities.? (HatTip to reader Mike Bertolone) Recruitment Officer Jesse Green said anyone can apply to take the test since city residency is not required when applying...

?Civil Liberties For Our Side Only?

Posted on March 14, 2009
Tom Maguire skewers liberals Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias for ?their unsteady commitment to civil liberties.? ?The topic,? Maguire writes, is the right of Deborah Weinsig, a Citigroup equity analyst who covers retail stocks, to explain to her clients why she thinks that card check will be bad for WalMart...

The Boy President

Posted on March 12, 2009
President Obama?s performance in his first months in office has reinforced my belief that it would be a big mistake to elect a boy to do a man?s (or woman?s) job. Note to the politically correct language police: I am very much aware that ?Boy? was long a racist, insulting, demeaning term used, especially in the South, to refer to black men...

Supreme Courts ?Refuses To Expand? Or ?Narrows? Voting Rights

Posted on March 09, 2009
In an important decision handed down today the Supreme Court, according to the Associated Press, ?refuses to expand voting rights.? The 5-4 decision, with the court's conservatives in the majority, could make it harder for southern Democrats to draw friendly boundaries after the 2010 Census...

Dahlia Lithwick: Switch Hitter

Posted on March 09, 2009
Dahlia Lithwick writes cute, sassy legal analysis for SLATE. As I noted here (and liked the description so well that I used it again here), she is ?known more for the sizzle than the steak of her columns.? Although she is reluctantly willing to prick a liberal balloon or two on occasion, what heavy artillery she has is always reliably aimed at conservatives...

Quotas Come To Charities

Posted on March 08, 2009
It?s not enough that more of rich people?s income will, thanks to President Yes-We-Can!, be given to the IRS and that the deductions allowed for giving to charity will now be reduced, starving charities of funds they would formerly have received. Now, according to this disturbing article by Naomi Schaefer Riley in the Wall Street Journal (HatTip to InstaPundit), the ?diversity? police are demanding that private ?public interest? organizations, i...

No We Can?t! (Or Won?t!)

Posted on March 08, 2009
Carol Swain, the impressive Vanderbilt law professor we first encountered here, points out that our new ?Yes We Can!? president ?has lofty goals. Under his tutelage,? she wrote recently in the Nashville Tennessean, ?we will cure cancer, end our dependence on foreign oil, reform health care and guarantee higher education to everyone who wants it...

Peremptory Racial Nonsense

Posted on March 06, 2009
The more I think about what the current conventional liberal wisdom (pardon the oxymoron) regarding racial discrimination, especially as that wisdom defends racial preference policies, the more it strikes me as incoherent peremptory nonsense, as in: per?emp?to?ry adjective (esp...

Draft ?Em! : Release 2.0

Posted on March 05, 2009

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