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

Promises, Promises

Posted on February 14, 2009
There must be a site, or sites, somewhere monitoring the fate of Obama?s campaign promises. I?d appreciate pointers to the best of them. Off the top of my head, and not trying at the moment to source and cite each one, here are a few that come to mind: 1...

Obama Admin. Chooses Not To Appeal Anti-Quota Decision

Posted on February 13, 2009
From a Pacific Legal Foundation press release: The U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Defense will not seek Supreme Court review of a November, 2008, federal appeals court ruling that struck down the Defense Department?s racial quota program in contracts...

Hope?

Posted on February 13, 2009
Fortune editor Nina Easton reports today that Austan Goolsbee, staff director and chief economist of President Obama?s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, has, well, interesting hopes for the the success of the stimulus bill. ?Within six months, for sure, you want to see that the recovery package is doing things...

More Virginia ?Diversity?

Posted on February 10, 2009
Two days I ago I discussed (here) the Student Bar Association at the University of Virginia encouraging students to sign a pledge of allegiance to ?diversity.? And today, because of this recent article in the student-run Cavalier Daily, I find it necessary to discuss ?diversity? at UVa one more time...

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First They Came For Welfare Reform, And Then...

Posted on February 10, 2009
Mickey Kaus has pointed out that the ?stimulus? bill working its way through Congress would reverse one of the most significant domestic accomplishments of the Clinton administration, welfare reform. It would do so by paying states to expand their welfare roles and allowing them to avoid welfare reform?s work requirements...

Affirmative Action: The Nation Banked On It

Posted on February 08, 2009
As I have pointed out too many times to cite, when ?affirmative action? was first imposed on the federal government by presidential executive orders (Kennedy?s 10925 in 1961; Johnson?s 11246 in 1965) government agencies and contractors were barred from discriminating against ?any employee or applicant ...

Is Justice ?Diverse?? Release 2.0...

Posted on February 08, 2009
A little over a week ago, discussing a report from a liberal organization at a liberal law school lamenting the lack of ?diversity? among state court judges, I asked, ?Is Justice ?Diverse??.? Today this long article in the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Argus prompts me to return to that question, if for no other reason than this revealing introductory non-sequitur: In a state where more than 8 percent of the citizens and 25 percent of the male prison population are Native American, many are watching as Gov...

Racial Equality: ?People Are Realizing It?s Not The End Of The World?

Posted on February 08, 2009
To the stated surprise of many diversiphiles, the sky hasn?t fallen on Nebraska, despite the fact that a substantial majority of its citizens passed a constitutional amendment barring the state and its agencies from continuing to practice racial favoritism...

UVa Law?s Pledge Of Allegiance To Diversity

Posted on February 07, 2009
Karin Agness reports (on NRO?s Phi Beta Cons) that the Student Bar Association at the University of Virginia law school is encouraging all students to sign the ?2009 Diversity Pledge.? She quotes the entire Pledge, which I encourage you to read, but I will limit my comments here to its first paragraph: Every person has worth as an individual...

UPDATE!

Posted on February 07, 2009
Does Obama Think Republicans Are Un-American? has been UPDATED.

More Entertainment From California

Posted on February 06, 2009
Everyone knows that entertainment is perhaps California?s most important export, but most are under the mistaken impression that it comes primarily from Hollywood. It doesn?t. It comes from UCLA, Berkeley, and other precincts where liberals manufacture more and more zany attempts to evade Prop...

Does Obama Think Republicans Are Un-American?

Posted on February 06, 2009
The president, who campaigned on the promise of bringing an end to bitter partisanship, made a highly partisan speech to House Democrats who were on a ?retreat? in Williamsburg last night. Politico called that retreat ?a partisan love fest.? In a ?fired-up? speech to the House Dems on Thursday night, writes Politico?s Jonathan Martin, Obama accused his Republican critics of wanting to return to ?the same policies that for the last eight years doubled the national debt and threw our economy into a tailspin...

All The Fit That?s News To Print...

Posted on February 05, 2009
Cathy Trower is research director and Anne Gallagher is assistant director of Harvard University's Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (Coache). In the Chronicle of Higher Education they report (Feb. 4) the findings of a Coache study ?on what assistant professors want and need to be successful in academe...

This $15 Billion Will Stimulate ... What?

Posted on February 05, 2009
Education Week reports a little pot of gold stashed away in the pending ?stimulus? bill that I hadn?t noticed, or seen discussed, before. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says he is eager to use a proposed $15 billion federal incentive-grant fund in part to reward states, districts, and even nonprofit organizations that have set high standards for the students they serve...

Black Acceptance Rates

Posted on February 04, 2009
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has recently published its useful survey of the first year enrollment figures for blacks at 20 of the nation's top rated universities, public and private, for 2008. Nothing too surprising in the data. Brown, for example, admitted a little over 13% of all applicants but 22% of black applicants...

Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber: Where The Rubber Meets The Road, Or ... Bring On The Unintended Consequences!

Posted on February 03, 2009
Whether or not you recognize it by name, most of you by now have read about Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. That?s the case in which the horrible, right-wing, run-amok activist Roberts Supreme Court, via right-wing Justice Alito, held that when Congress wrote, in the Equal Pay Act of 1963, that anyone feeling he or she has been the victim of pay discrimination must file a complaint within 180 days (in Alabama and a few other states; 300 days in others), Congress actually meant what it said...

Liberals And Free Speech

Posted on January 31, 2009
In an interesting post today, Ilya Somin criticizes President Obama?s assertion, in his inaugural address, that ?The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.? Here?s Somin: This is a commonly heard argument in response to concerns about the growth of government...

Duties Of A ?Diversity Provost??

Posted on January 30, 2009
Ever wonder what a ?Diversity Provost? does? Purdue University, which is looking for one, apparently isn?t too sure (HatTip to a vigilant reader). Purdue University invites nominations and applications for the position of Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion (VPDI)...

Democrats And Equality

Posted on January 29, 2009
Referring to a host of Inaugural balls that sported exclusive VIP sections, Mickey Kaus asked, ?how can a party claim to want all Americans treated equally if, you know, the party doesn't treat them equally?? Easy. The same way a party can claim to oppose quotas but require them in the selection and seating of delegates to its presidential nominating conventions, not to mention statements such as this one by the nominee of its last convention.

Istook Is Not Mistook

Posted on January 28, 2009
Ernest Istook, who describes himself in this interesting piece (HatTip to Roger Clegg) as ?now recovering after 14 years in Congress,? has some good advice for President Obama. What began as affirmative action has transformed into reverse discrimination...

Is Justice ?Diverse??

Posted on January 28, 2009
An academic friend who prefers to remain anonymous (you would, too, if you taught where he does) pointed me to a new report, Improving Judicial Diversity, recently published by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School. Given the degree of diversity of political opinion in most elite law schools like NYU, you will have already confidently (and accurately) predicted that the report finds a woeful lack of ?diversity? among state court judges...

More ?Sensible Prescriptions? From Roger Clegg

Posted on January 27, 2009
Yesterday I discussed (here) what I termed a few ?Sensible Prescriptions For Change We Can Believe In? that Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, had posted on National Review Online. NRO?s John Derbyshire posted some surprisingly lame criticism?s of Clegg?s comments here, and Clegg posted an unsurprisingly strong reply here...

Improving The Education Of All Students Is Unfair!

Posted on January 26, 2009
Because of my daily wanderings through the museum of contemporary liberalism ? especially its attitudes regarding race, discrimination, etc. (whose ever-changing but always familiar exhibits are on display in politics and in the mainstream, academic, and specialized media), I have long since lost whatever capacity I might have had in the past to be shocked or surprised by even the strangest and most outlandish artifacts produced by this increasingly alien culture as it strays farther and farther from traditional American values...

Sensible Prescriptions For Change We Can Believe In...

Posted on January 26, 2009
Roger Clegg writes today that ?[a] realistic goal? for our race relations ?would be for being black to be roughly analogous to being Irish.? Now, if I didn?t know and admire Roger I would worry about that prescription. I would worry that he meant that Irish-Americans (and, by extension, Luso-Americans, Jews, Catholics, etc...

Roger Clegg Objects To Bean-Counting

Posted on January 22, 2009
The following is a Guest Post from Roger Clegg, president and general counsel of the Center For Equal Opportunity. NOW THAT BARACK OBAMA IS PRESIDENT, MAY WE PLEASE STOP THE BEAN-COUNTING? The Washington Post had an editorial last month, ?Bean Counting, 2008,? about the relative ease with which President-elect Obama is putting together an administration that ?look[s] like America? ? to quote, as the Post does, Bill Clinton?s promise to do so when he was President-elect...

The Politics Of Obama?s Religion

Posted on January 19, 2009
Mark Tooley, who directs the United Methodist Church program at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, asks, ?Where Will The Obamas Worship?? His answer seems to be, at the site that, ?after careful political contemplations,? sees the most politically efficacious...

Yet Another Study...

Posted on January 15, 2009
Inside Higher Ed discusses yet another study finding that eliminating affirmative action would be bad bad bad. The authors, economists and a business school professor, applying no doubt sophisticated statistical techniques, found (sit down and prepare yourself for a shock) that eliminating racial preferences would lead to a ?dramatic [35%] drop in the enrollment of students from underrepresented minority groups at the most competitive colleges...

Is The Washington Press Corps Too White, Or Too ... ?

Posted on January 14, 2009
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post is worried (and he claims others are worried) that too many members of the Washington press corps look like him. He probably doesn?t mean that they?re not Hollywood-handsome, or even that too many of them are Jewish (which I assume he is, and if he hasn?t checked to see how many Jews there are, how can he be sure that?s not what he calls a ?cause for concern??)...

Disparate Impact Returns To The Supreme Court

Posted on January 10, 2009
The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Ricci v. DeStafano, the Los Angeles Times reports today. New Haven, Connecticut, seeking to maintain diversity in its fire department, scrapped a civil-service test after it became clear the white firefighters had the best scores...

Another ?We?re All Racist!? Study, With A Faux-Lincoln Gloss From Time

Posted on January 09, 2009
Time Magazine celebrates yet another study arguing that we?re all racist, that if we think we?re not racist we?re wrong, that our efforts to be tolerant crash inexorably against the rocks of our deeply ?ingrained? racial biases. Here?s the abstract of the study from Science: Contemporary race relations are marked by an apparent paradox: Overt prejudice is strongly condemned, yet acts of blatant racism still frequently occur...

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