David Bernstein

This biography of a living person does not cite any references or sources. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately. (May 2009) Find sources: (David Bernstein (law professor) – news, books, scholar)

David Bernstein is a Professor at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia, where he has been teaching since 1995. He was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center for Spring 2003 semester, at the University of Michigan School of Law for the 2005-06 academic year, and at Brooklyn Law School in Fall 2006.

Bernstein's scholarly writings have been in two main areas, expert evidence and constitutional history. He has written several books, and dozens of law review articles, essays, book reviews, and think tank studies.

Bernstein was born in Queens, N.Y. in 1967. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School, where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law, Economics, and Public Policy, and a summa cum laude graduate of Brandeis University.

Evidence

Bernstein is an expert on the Daubert case and the admissibility of expert testimony, and a past chairperson of the Association of American Law Schools Evidence section. He coauthored The New Wigmore: Expert Evidence (Aspen Law and Business 2003), and coedited Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law (MIT 1993). He began researching and writing about issues surrounding the admissibility of expert testimony while in law school, when he served as a research assistant for Peter Huber's influential Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom. He has published numerous academic-journal and popular-press articles on the subject.

Bernstein is known for advocating stricter standards for the admissibility of expert testimony, and the much more frequent use of nonpartisan experts.

Constitutional History

Bernstein is an expert on the "Lochner era" of American constitutional jurisprudence. He wrote Only One Place of Redress: African-Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Duke 2001), and Rehabilitating Lochner, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press, in addition to numerous journal articles.

Bernstein's work on Lochner is notable because unlike most other Lochner revisionists, he argues that the Supreme Court's liberty of contract jurisprudence was primarily rights-based, rather than resulting from concerns over "class legislation". His work is unique in that it often focuses on how the due process decisions of the "Lochner era" affected the rights and prospects of disenfranchised immigrants, women, and African Americans.

Other projects

Bernstein also wrote You Can't Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws (Cato Institute 2003).

He blogs for the popular Volokh Conspiracy group blog.

Publications

Books

• You Can't Say That: The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws (2003)
• The New Wigmore: Expert Evidence (treatise, with Kaye and Mnookin) (2004)
• Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations and the Supreme Court from Reconstruction to the New Deal (2001)
• Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law (co-editor, with Foster and Huber) (1993)

Selected Law Review Articles and Review Essays

• Revisiting Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 2008 Ill. L. Rev. 1393
• Expert Witnesses, Adversarial Bias, and the (Partial) Failure of the Daubert Revolution, 93 Iowa L. Rev. 451 (2008)
• The Red Menace Revisited, 100 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1295 (2006)
• Learning the Wrong Lessons from an American Tragedy, 104 Mich. L. Rev. 1961 (2006)
• Judicial Power and Civil Rights Reconsidered, 114 Yale L.J. 593 (2004) (with Ilya Somin)
• Lochner's Feminist Legacy, 101 Mich. L. Rev. 2140 (2003)
• Lochner's Legacy's Legacy, 92 Tex L. Rev. 1 (2003)
• Lochner Era Revisionism, Revised: Lochner and the Origins of Fundamental Rights Constitutionalism, 82 Geo. L.J. 1 (2003)
• Lochner, Parity, and the Chinese Laundry Cases, 41 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 211 (1999) (symposium)
• The Breast Implant Fiasco, 87 Calif. L. Rev. 457 (1999)
• Philip Sober Restraining Philip Drunk: Buchanan v. Warley in Historical Perspective, 51 Vand. L. Rev. 799 (1998)
• The Law and Economics of Post-Civil War Restrictions on Interstate Migration by African-Americans, 74 Tex. L. Rev. 781 (1998)

References

External links

Official sites

• Profile at the George Mason University School of Law website.
• David E. Bernstein Personal homepage.
• The Volokh Conspiracy.

Online publications

• Social Science Research Networks.