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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 August 12, 2013 21 Comments

Every semester for the past couple of years I've been privileged to be a guest speaker at the Ithaca College course on Independent Media conducted by Prof. Jeff Cohen.  I get to regale students with stories about Legal Insurrection, some of which are true.  (FTR, all of...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 11, 2013 26 Comments
Nancy Mace is one of the challengers to Lindsey Graham in the Republican primary, along with Richard Cash. There probably will be others. Mace is a newbie as a candidate, although she's been involved as a political consultant for years, and also co-founded the controversial FITS News website. I don't know enough about Mace to say that I'll support her versus the other challengers, but I do know enough to say that I hope a strong challenger emerges and that Graham is forced into a runoff. Mace seems to have the sound-bite friendly bio (1st female graduate of The Citadel, long family military history) to be an attractive candidate. I'm willing to give her a chance, to find out more, and to see how she develops as a candidate. The one thing I do not expect is a slick talker, who has a pat answer for everything. So it really troubled me to see Jay Severin attacking Mace as "not ready for prime time" because of an interview she had with Glenn Beck. Here's the Beck interview, in its entirety: Was it a great interview? Probably not. She seemed to have a few canned answers she kept coming back to, but it wasn't a terrible interview. And Beck asked some weird questions about her "soul" which probably caught her off guard. Sure, she also should have been better able to answer questions about why she was running, the influences upon her, and so on. I trust she'll earn from these interview experiences. But Severin declared her candidacy all but over:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 11, 2013 27 Comments
Harry Reid stated on Friday that Obamacare was just a step in the direction of a single-payer health care system:
Reid said he thinks the country has to “work our way past” insurance-based health care during a Friday night appearance on Vegas PBS’ program “Nevada Week in Review.” “What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever,” Reid said. When then asked by panelist Steve Sebelius whether he meant ultimately the country would have to have a health care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.”
It was treated as breaking news. Headlines Harry Reid Single Payer Some Republicans also seemed shocked: https://twitter.com/RepTomPrice/status/366551040650248193 This announcement, however, was neither breaking news nor reason to be shocked. Democrats have been saying that Obamacare was just a step in the right direction since the days in which Obamacare was first proposed: https://twitter.com/LegInsurrection/status/366555242764046336 Obama has been telling us that single payer was the goal since the time he was just a twinkle in the eye of the Chicago political machine (video via Hot Air):

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 11, 2013 23 Comments

Why not? The Kurds out number Palestinians several times over, and unlike Palestinians, have a real ethnic and cultural distinction from surrounding Arabs (and in Turkey, Turks). But for Europeans drawing lines on maps and Turkish national ambitions, there should have been an independent nation for...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 11, 2013 14 Comments

Maybe some things just need to fail for the greater good. Here's a good example of a system that needs to fail because it's consuming its public host.  The parasite and the host can't both survive. Via Michael Graham, Massachusetts Unions Reach Their Ultimate Goal: More “Collecting”...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 11, 2013 14 Comments

From Christopher: Seen today in Prescott, Arizona. Quality is not great because it was made from a moving vehicle. This enthusiastic Obama voter also has a Life Member sticker for the NRA in the top left corner of the rear window, and a "Life Member - National...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2013 9 Comments
I haven't written much about Harry Reid lately, although we do have over 100 posts in the Harry Reid tag dating back to the earliest days of this blog. He's a charmer, alright. Who can forget his famous pronouncement that the Iraq war was lost and the surge had failed? He then worked as hard as possible to make it so: Or when he called David Petraeus a liar? Branco's first cartoon at LI was Harry Politics:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2013 11 Comments

I've figured it out. Nature blogging! So you see, I walked over to Ithaca Falls, about a 10 minute walk from my house, with my friend to help him get over his blogger burnout problems. (Man, this is easy)...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2013 10 Comments

Instapundit turned 12 years old this week, and received appropriate accolades. It's not an overstatement to say that Prof. Reynolds has helped foster and keep up the spirits of the conservative blogosphere, including Legal Insurrection and College Insurrection. Which brings me to a related topic, blogger burnout. Legal Insurrection...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2013 23 Comments

We've all heard of the problems faced on Twitter with the #TwitterGulag resulting from false claims of harassment and/or spam. It's also a problem on Facebook, as detailed by Ruthie Blum (sister of John Podhoretz) at The New York Observer. Blum speaks of the problem faced by pro-Israel writers on Facebook...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2013 6 Comments

We might be hearing more about it. Instead, the pipeline project has been lost in the flood of Obama scandals and diversions. Obama scoffs at the project only creating 50 permanent jobs -- which is another "fact" just pulled out of his ...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2013 2 Comments
Leslie Eastman, who writes for Legal Insurrection and has her own blog, Temple of Mut, and Aleister from American Glob, both help run College Insurrection, including gathering the stories we aggregate there. In preparing this week's College Insurrection "Week" post, I realized once again the great job Leslie and Aleister do at finding interesting stories.  My thanks to them for their efforts. Never give up: Cause or effect? Bryan went to Auburn: Extremism in the defense of free speech is no vice: I think Berkeley Profs are even greater threats: He gropes, therefore he is:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2013 9 Comments

Too. From Gary: Seen in a parking lot in Marietta, GA. Normally a solid Red State area, perhaps showing some real battle fatigue. ...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 09, 2013 5 Comments

make sure you have this Twitchy article bookmarked, More Huffpo malfeasance: Byron York forces ‘update’ on Santorum gym shower comments The short version is that Rick Santorum made a comment about a conservative student group being denied locker room / shower facilities at a YMCA because of their politics, which...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 09, 2013 28 Comments
Obama is holding a press conference at 3 p.m. Eastern today before he leave on an extended vacation. Expectations are low.  He is expected to announce new NSA oversight measures. [press conference over - video embed removed] [Twitter feed removed] Obama prepared remarks on his intelligence community reforms are here. Some reactions: https://twitter.com/chrisgeidner/status/365912473955598336 https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/365912496336416768 https://twitter.com/charliespiering/status/365913857752969218

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 09, 2013 31 Comments

In February and March we focused on the Romeike homeschooling deportation case, DOJ seeks deportation of family persecuted in Germany for homeschooling: The Romeikes are devout Christians from Germany who wanted to homeschool their children because of what they perceived as the secularist agenda in German...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 09, 2013 0 Comments

Tom Cotton, running for Senate to unseat Mark Pryor in Arkansas, held a blogger telephone conference today. I sat in on it, breaking my usual policy of sitting in a hermetically sealed room with the drapes drawn and the lights out avoiding all human contact. All someone...

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