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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.

We have covered the War On Rush Limbaugh run by Media Matters and a bizarre group of dead-enders who spend their days tweeting advertisers and filling up pages on Facebook. I'm not going to repeat the long, sordid history of the StopRush and FlushRush movements.  But...

As longtime readers know, we're not big fans of the White Privilege verbiage, or the White Privilege consultant and pontificating class: In an otherwise good article about the Oberlin racism hoax, Conor Friedersdorf uses the term "white privilege" to describe the actions of the perpetrators:
White kids spreading the n-word and Nazi flags around campus for kicks, without giving a damn how many minorities they scare or upset, does seem like a great example of white privilege!
The editors or Friedersdorf chose to highlight and repeat that sentence as an insert mid-article:

Friedersdorf White Privilege

The problem is that the analysis and the entire post left something out, these were white liberal kids trying to make a liberal talking point come to life in a performance-art style endeavor: https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/370929969913806849 Those white liberal college students had a privilege above and beyond mere ordinary whites. That extra-special privilege was to have the mainstream media largely ignore that the performance-art inspired racial narrative which covered the news cycle in March 2013 was a hoax.  Only the conservative media seems to care. I have written to just about everyone I could find at an MSM or left-wing website who ran with the Oberlin racism narrative back in March, and almost no one has updated their stories. I emailed reporters and/or editors at The NY Times, The Boston Globe, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Slate.com, Huffington Post, and CNN, among others. Here's a typical email, which I sent to Slate.com:
You covered the racial incidents at Oberlin last March. It turned out to be a hoax, The Great Oberlin College Racism Hoax of 2013. Will you update?
Here's another one, sent to the "scoop" line at HuffPo:
Huffington Post ran numerous stories in various sections about racial incidents on Oberlin College's campus in March 2013. It turns out those were hoaxes perpetrated by progressive pro-Obama activists in order to get a reaction, http://t.co/BAACsOTX0g. Will you report the hoax and correct prior stories?
And The NY Times:
You covered this story last March, Photos of Oberlin College Students Rallying Against Hate Incidents. Turns out it was a hoax. Thought you'd want to know, since NYT may want to follow up now that the story has changed.
I also sent tweets to reporters who covered the story but for whom I didn't have email addresses: https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/370638270067003393 https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/370639994714476544

The spate of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and homophobic posters and graffiti that plagued the Oberlin College campus in February 2013 was definitively exposed as a hoax led by a pro-Obama liberal anti-racist student activist seeking to get a reaction from the community. The post by Chuck Ross of The Daily...

Maybe to thank them for building the gun that allowed him to lawfully defend himself against a brutal beating which put him in reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm? Maybe, as is speculated, to check out tactical shotguns? Maybe just because he is a private...

College Insurrection is One Year Old Check it out, along with Our 10 Favorite “Freshman Year” Posts at College Insurrection. ...

My first reaction when I saw this on Twitter was, is this a joke? The day after being sentenced to 35 years in prison, this? Apparently it's serious.  Manning announced on NBC via a letter that he will sue to force the Army to pay...

A massive racism hoax took place at Oberlin College in February 2013 in which two students made seemingly racist, anti-Semitic and other such posters, graffiti and emails for the purpose of getting a reaction on campus, not because they believed the hostile messages.  At least one of the...

Just as the NSA-Snowden leak story was being broken by The Guardian via Glenn Greenwald, and to a lesser extent at The Washington Post, I thought about writing a post with the title this post bears.  In the crush of other things, and the uncertainty as...

Don't say we didn't warn you repeatedly about Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his administration: Turkish Deputy Prime Minister blames “Jewish Diaspora” for Gezi Park protests Turkish Prime Minister drops what little is left of his moderate mask Turkish Foreign Minister salutes “all those martyrs who were...

All the media attention has been on Egypt the past few weeks. But Syria continues to implode, with death and destruction everywhere. The latest is the mass exodus of civilians. Here's the image: Here's the video: https://twitter.com/Jecon/status/369490385405374464...

He was acquitted of corruption charges. Somehow I doubt that would have happened but for the non-coup coup. The most recent reports are that he will be released within 48 hours. https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/369417801930264576 Remember, Obama told Mubarak to leave "yesterday" rather than allow the 9 month transition Mubarak was suggesting. It was an error we criticized at the time because the only political party at the time with the organization to win an election was the Muslim Brotherhood. The more secular and civil elements of society did not have time to make up for lost ground, and the rest is history. The anti-democratic MB won the elections and proceeded to act like everyone predicted. Now we're almost back to square one. https://twitter.com/EslamMouniir/status/369442004586868736 Updates to follow. https://twitter.com/AlArabiya_Urdu/status/369439753734590464 The Sinai continues to spin out of control, with 24 Egyptian policemen killed in an ambush near the Gaza border, which Egypt has now closed. There are reports they were executed: https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/369409135483183104 Don't be surprised if Egypt ends up attacking Gaza, which the MB now uses as a safe haven and also is the home to even more extremist Islamist groups.