Author: Hans Bader

Hans Bader is a former senior attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The New VAWA–A Threat to College Students

Cross-posted from Open Market. Provisions are being added to the 1994 Violence Against Women Act that could undermine due process on campus and in criminal cases, as civil liberties groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and civil libertarians like former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer have noted. The changes are contained […]

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Tyler Clementi and the Anti-Bullying Panic

Cross-posted from Open Market A jury has convicted Dharun Ravi of hate crimes in the Tyler Clementi case, which created a furor over bullying that led to legislation that endangers free speech on campus, and helped spawn a thriving “anti-bullying” industry that has enriched opportunistic consultants and self-proclaimed experts. Ravi surreptitiously captured on webcam his […]

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Obama Seeks Disability Quotas

Cross-posted from Open Market The Obama administration is pushing quotas in the workplace and higher education, seeking to force businesses that have federal contracts to hire at least 7 percent disabled workers, and encouraging colleges to use race in admissions to achieve a “critical mass” of black and Hispanic students — a de facto quota.  […]

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The Good-Hearted, Wrong-Headed Anti-Bullying Campaign

Cross-posted from Open Market “It launched a hundred ‘anti-bullying’ initiatives at all levels of government, but much of what you think you know about” the Tyler Clementi case “is probably wrong,” notes legal commentator Walter Olson at Overlawyered, the world’s oldest law blog. Andrew Sullivan discusses this as well, linking to Ian Parker’s article in […]

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12 More Law Schools Sued for Defrauding Students

Cross-posted from Open Market. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a team of eight law firms have just “sued a dozen more law schools across the country, accusing them of luring students with inflated job-placement and salary statistics and leaving graduates ‘burdened with debt and with limited job prospects.’ The lawyers . . . […]

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Obama Fosters the Skyrocketing Tuition He Criticized

Cross-posted from Open Market. In his State of the Union Address, President Obama decried skyrocketing college tuition, attempting to take advantage of public anger over the steadily-worsening college tuition bubble. This was ironic, since his own Administration has done much to foster rising college tuitions. For example, it imposed the 90-10 rule, which forced low-cost educational institutions to raise their tuition to […]

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The Ever-Expanding Concept of “Bullying” Casts an Ominous Shadow Over Free Speech

Cross-posted from Open Market. A school superintendent has labeled a column in a school newspaper that criticized homosexuality as “bullying.” (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as “bullying” answered the question “no.” The […]

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A Law Professor Takes on the Victimhood Industry

                                           Keeping quiet can seal your fate if you are a professor facing a campus kangaroo court after being accused of racial “harassment” over your classroom speech. Free-speech advocates use adverse publicity to save wrongly-accused professors from being convicted and fired. They put to good use Justice Brandeis’s observation that publicity cures social evils, […]

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What Do the Law Schools Think They’re Doing?

Crossposted from OpenMarket.org The New York Times featured an excellent news story Sunday by David Segal on the costly white elephant that is legal education in America. He describes how law school is expensive because of government-enforced accreditation standards that prevent law schools from containing costs even if they wanted to (and in truth, most […]

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How Federal Aid Drives Up College Tuition

At Bloomberg News, Virginia Postrel writes about how federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable have instead encouraged rapidly rising tuitions, in a column entitled, “U.S. Universities Feast on Federal Student Aid.” Education analyst Neal McCluskey links to four studies showing that increased government spending on student aid results in large tuition increases. As […]

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Senate Bill Would Further Undermine Due Process on Campus

http://www.openmarket.org/2011/10/24/senate-bill-would-further-undermine-due-process-on-campus/

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Washington Invents an Anti-Bullying Law

There’s no federal law against bullying or homophobia.  So the Department of Education recently decided to invent one.  On October 26, it sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to the nation’s school districts arguing that many forms of homophobia and bullying violate federal laws against sexual harassment and discrimination.  But those laws only ban discrimination based on sex […]

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