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Author: William A. Jacobson

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William A. Jacobson

William A. Jacobson is a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School.

He is a 1981 graduate of Hamilton College and a 1984 graduate of Harvard Law School. At Harvard he was Senior Editor of the Harvard International Law Journal and Director of Litigation for the Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project.

Prior to joining the Cornell law faculty in 2007, Professor Jacobson had a highly successful civil litigation and arbitration practice in Providence, Rhode Island, concentrating in investment, employment, and business disputes in the securities industry, including many high profile cases reported in leading newspapers and magazines.

Professor Jacobson has argued cases in numerous federal and state courts, including the Courts of Appeal for the First, Fifth and Sixth Circuits, and the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

Professor Jacobson has a national reputation as a leading practitioner in securities arbitration. He was Treasurer, and is a former member of the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association, a professional organization of attorneys dedicated to protecting public investors. He frequently is quoted in national media on issues related to investment fraud and investor protection, and in the past has served as one of a small number of private practice attorneys who trained new arbitrators for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

Professor Jacobson is co-author of the Securities Arbitration Desk Reference (Thomson-Reuters), updated annually.

Professor Jacobson is frequently quoted in the media on political and legal topics, has authored many Op-Eds in major publications, and appears on television and radio to discuss politics and the law.

A more complete listing of Professor Jacobson's professional background is available at the Cornell Law School website. The views expressed here are his own and not those of any employer or organization,

The best way to reach Prof. Jacobson is by e-mail here.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 32 Comments
Really, now we're going to make estimated payments to insurance companies because healthcare.gov doesn't even have a payment system? Megyn Kelly discussed this tonight. (Video added at bottom of post.) Here's the Reuters report, Short-term fix eyed for another problem with U.S. healthcare website:
Dec 3 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's administration has found a short-term fix to pay insurance companies for plans selected on HealthCare.gov, the not-yet-complete government website used to shop for insurance required under Obama's healthcare program. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has not yet finished building the part of the website that would transfer billions of dollars in subsidies for plan premiums and cost-sharing payments to insurance companies. It is part of a long technical to-do list that has so far focused on fixing the errors and lag times in the part of the website used by consumers.... The administration is planning a "workaround" for payments, said Daniel Durham, vice president for policy and regulatory affairs at America's Health Insurance Plans. Health plans will estimate how much they are owed, and submit that estimate to the government. Once the system is built, the government and insurers can reconcile the payments made with the plan data to "true up" payments, he said.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 47 Comments

A follow up to An increasingly dangerous presidency and More on Obama lawlessness. You can read the full testimonies at the links. The key thing is that there may be no remedy -- other than at the ballot box in 2014 -- to Obama's lawlessness. There...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 2 Comments
In an interview airing now on Lebanese OTV television, Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah discusses the Iranian nuclear deal (summary translation via NOW Lebanon):
The Iran nuclear deal has significant repercussions. The region’s peoples are the biggest winners from this deal because regional and international forces have been pushing for war with Iran which would have had dangerous repercussions in the region. The deal pushed off the [potential Israeli and US] war [against Iran]. Israel cannot possibly bomb nuclear facilities without the US’ green light. Monopoly of power is no longer present. All American wars have failed. John Kerry made it clear that the US does not want more wars. The US and Europe have failed in the region. It is unlikely that normalization will take place. Iranians wanted to reassure the Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia. [interview in progress, check link for more]
More translation at Naharnet:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 6 Comments
A highly criticized Swiss analysis suggested a moderate possibility of polonium poisoining as the cause of Yasser Arafat's death.  Arafat's widow had requested the testing. Palestinian political officials immediately announced (as they had even before the Swiss report) that Israel was the culprit. AFP now is reporting that a French group of experts dismisses the claim of poisoning (h/t NOW English): https://twitter.com/AFP/status/407878555729928192 Arafat's death: French experts dismiss the poisoning theory  (via Google Translate):
So says a source close to the ... The experts appointed by the French justice to investigate the death of Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004 near Paris, depart the thesis of poisoning the Palestinian leader, told AFP on Tuesday a source familiar with the matter. "This report rejected the theory of poisoning and goes in the direction of a natural death," the source said, confirming information from France Inter. Recent reports of Swiss and Russian medical tests on samples of the remains of the historic Palestinian leader had revealed the presence of abnormal amounts of polonium-210 in the body and seemed to support the theory of poisoning.
Update: Al Jazeera is reporting similar findings:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 03, 2013 6 Comments

From Nanette: Spotted in Kingwood, TX Absolutely love the bottom one and thought you would too! Thanks for all you do! ...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 02, 2013 40 Comments

We have been covering the case of the Romeikes, devout Christians from Germany who wanted to homeschool their children because of what they perceived as the secularist agenda in German public schools. They fled and sought asylum in the U.S. after they faced mounting fines...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 02, 2013 8 Comments
The machete murder of British soldier Lee Rigby on the open street by Islamic terrorists garnered widespread media attention in the U.S. at the time. Leslie wrote about the case last May, My Memorial Day Tribute to Self Defense, and we featured British newspaper front pages: Daily Mirror Cover - Machete Terror Attack The ongoing trial of the murderers, however, has not received much attention in the U.S. media.  Here are some updates from British media.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 02, 2013 28 Comments
Yesterday the Obama administration declared Mission Accomplished on the healthcare.gov website. But the mission that was accomplished was something of a Potemkin Village -- the "front end" has been improved to a lower level of failure. Taking the glass half-full approach, 80-90% of users will be able to use the website. But that's just the appearance side of the story. The "back end" still doesn't work right and much of the system hasn't even been built yet. Add to that the sticker shock not only from premiums, but from outsized deductibles, and the declaration of Mission Accomplished is worthy of the Tsars and Tsarninas. Here are some other historical references which may apply:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 02, 2013 4 Comments
We have written many times before about how we only hear about the non-Jewish Arab refugees created when the Arab armies invaded Israel in 1948, but hear almost nothing about Jewish refugees from Arab countries: The claim that the Nakbah -- the catastrophe -- created only one refugee problem is a fundamental part of anti-Israeli agitation and an impedement to peace as Palestinians insist on a right of return for non-Jewish refugees and their descendents. In fact, there were an equal number of Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries for Israel. (The Forgotten Refugees - Full Documentary Movie is available on YouTube) Approximately half of Israel's current Jewish population are such Jewish refugees from Arab countries or their descendents. This exchange of populations goes unrecognized because Israel absorbed and welcomed its refugess, while Arab countries -- long before there was a "Palestinian" national identity -- kept the non-Jewish Arab refugees in separate camps and refused them and their descendents citizenship or other civil rights in many cases. There is an effort to change this misperception and to recognize the Jewish Nakbah, the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Arab countries, as part of any international discussion of Palestinian refugees. The effort at the U.N. is being led by Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor, as reported by The Times of Israel, UN Jewish refugees panel aims ‘to rectify history’:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 01, 2013 20 Comments
Daniel Seidemann is an Israeli who runs a non-governmental organization, Terrestrial Jersusalem, that describes itself as " an Israeli non-governmental organization that works to identify and track the full spectrum of developments in Jerusalem that could impact either the political process or permanent status options, destabilize the city or spark violence, or create humanitarian crises." According to NGO Monitor, Terrestrial Jerusalem receives its funding mostly from Europeans and one U.S. foundation and actively seeks to undermine Israeli policies which seek to maintain, among other things, a unified Jerusalem under full Israeli control. Seideman has written that he sees some measure of re-division of Jerusalem as inevitable and considers Israeli actions as contrary to the peace process:
Upon my arrival in Israel more than forty years ago, I too subscribed to the "Jerusalem mantra," whereby Jerusalem was "the-eternal-undivided-capital-of-Israel-that-would-never-be-redivided" (one word, and a noun). It was consensus, the impermeable devotion to an article of faith. The harsh realities in the ensuing years undermined that faith, and finally, in the summer of 2000, during President Clinton’s Camp David summit, it collapsed. It then became apparent, and has remained so, that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will end within the borders of a politically divided city. Jerusalem was deflowered at Camp David.
We have noted before the problem of Palestinian rock throwing, and how it is minimized by Western media as not consequential. Particularly when the rocks are thrown by children, it's no lose for anti-Israeli groups:  If the rock lands its mark, the mission was accomplished; if the child also is arrested, it's doubly good because the phalanx of international and Israeli leftist photographers will be there to record the moment as reflecting Israeli brutality (as just happened with the Bedouin protests). Seidemann recently was the victim of such rock throwing while stalled in traffic in East Jerusalem. His account of the event got particularly attention because he blamed Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem not the rock throwers (for an alternative, more accurate legal history of why East Jerusalem is not illegally occupied, see Prof. Eugene Kontorovich's lecture, The Legal Case for Israel).

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 01, 2013 220 Comments
The post on Friday regarding Obama's lawlessness has generated some furious defense of Obama by one commenter, and even more furious pushback by other readers, An increasingly dangerous presidency. The defense of Obama, that no court has found him to have violated the law, is both wrong and off point. The problem with Obama is the completely political basis for his decisions whether to honor or ignore the law. For example, if granting a waiver helps him with political allies, he grants it; if not, not. This is not the rule of law, or the good faith exercise of administrative discretion, it is the use of discretion for political purposes. That in many, but not all, instances he can get away with it because of the separation of powers and the hesitancy of the judiciary to get involved in administrative decisions in no way justifies the conduct. Lawlessness includes a lack of predictability to enforcement of the law, and that is what we have in this administration. The prior post was based on Charles Krauthammer's column on lawlessness of the Obama administration. Here Krauthammer expands on his point, via RCP:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 01, 2013 23 Comments
The Obama administration just announced that it has met the completely arbitrary, dumbed-down goals it set for healthcare.gov. These goals were not what was supposed to exist on October 1, but what the administration believed it could meet and therefore met in order to declare the website fixed.  Operation Fixed Website: Feds will declare healthcare.gov fixed no matter what. https://twitter.com/ZekeJMiller/status/407148182011777024 https://twitter.com/amandacarpenter/status/407149347533361152

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 01, 2013 7 Comments

From J: East St. Louis isn't too fond of O. Spotted today on I-64. Thanks for all you do. Happy Hanukkah.   ...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2013 8 Comments

I wasn't watching live because I didn't really care. But the rubbing-it-in that's going on is quite enjoyable to watch. (I was tempted to draw political analogies, but that would have cheapened the moment.) Good collection of video/gifs/photos at SB Nation. https://twitter.com/gregorydjohnsen/status/406945912863211520 https://twitter.com/japarsons/status/406946057298259968 https://twitter.com/sbnation/status/406943478870843392 https://twitter.com/AaronWorthing/status/406950865309007872 Good luck collecting: https://twitter.com/tjboyd15/status/406829975053291520...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2013 25 Comments
If Obama can do it, why can't I? A follow up to a prior question, What race is an illegal alien? Obama is pivoting back to immigration reform, which really amounts to an amnesty push, because without amnesty there could be "reform" of a wide variety of immigration issues. During a speech at DreamWorks, Obama curiously stated that he could tell who were immigrants based on their faces (transcript via RCP):
OBAMA: As I was getting a tour of DreamWorks, I didn't ask, but just looking at faces, I could tell there were some folks who are here not because they were born here, but because they want to be here and they bring extraordinary talents to the United States. And that's part of what makes America special. And that's part of what, by the way, makes California special, because it's always been this magnet of dreamers and strivers. And people coming from every direction saying to themselves, you know, if I work hard there I can have my piece of the American Dream.
I know exactly what he means. I spotted this immigrant from a mile away (the one on the left). Piers Morgan Mike Tyson Must have been the fear of deportation on his face:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2013 5 Comments
Days of Rage is just about every day in the anti-Israel movement. Today is was a Day of Rage over an Israeli proposal, still working its way through the Knesset, to relocate about 15% of the Bedouin who live in the Negev Desert from dispersed, mostly dilapidated housing built without permits into newer, more centralized housing also in the Negev. That plan has sparked the usual cries of Ethnic Cleansing from anti-Israeli international groups and Israeli leftists. In fact, no one is being cleansed. The vast majority of Bedouins will stay where they are, and none will be forced out of the area the Bedouins have inhabited in Israel. The Day of Rage has not received a lot of attention in U.S. media, or even on social media outside of the hastag #StopPrawerPlan. But not for lack of trying. AP reports:
Large protests over a plan to resettle nomadic Bedouin Arabs in Israel's southern Negev desert caused injuries Saturday and led to some arrests as well as condemnation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Protests focused on a bill that would move thousands of Bedouins into government-recognized villages. Opponents charge the plan would confiscate Bedouin land and affect their nomadic way of life, but Israel says the moves are necessary to provide basic services that many Bedouins lack and would benefit their community while preserving their traditions.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2013 13 Comments
Operation Fixed Website is about to get under way.
Tomorrow, the Obama administration will unleash a public relations campaign declaring healthcare.gov fixed: Obama administration officials said Saturday they were "on track" to have the problematic ObamaCare website running smoothly by their self-imposed Nov. 30 deadline. "With the scheduled upgrades last night and tonight, we're on track to meet our stated goal for the site to work for the vast majority of users," Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Aaron Albright told Fox News, in a statement. Administration officials have since announcing the deadline qualified expectations and outcomes by repeatedly saying the site would work for the “vast majority of people.” The Washington Post earlier Saturday reported the administration was prepared to announce Sunday that they have met deadlines for improving HealthCare.gov.
Fixed has been so far defined downward for healthcare.gov, that almost anything other than a 404 Error message is "fixed". Via NPR, How Will We Know If HealthCare.gov Is Fixed?
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