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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 13, 2009 12 Comments

The political world looked bleak on April 29, 2009, just after Arlen Specter had announced that he was switching to the Democratic Party. The Democrats, understandably crowing, seemed to be unstoppable. The Democratic agenda to control the most minute aspects of our lives through health...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 13, 2009 6 Comments

Camille Paglia, a supporter of Barack Obama, gets it (emphasis mine):As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 12, 2009 8 Comments

Mary Robinson will get the United States Medal of Freedom today.Ms. Robinson presided over the 2001 “"World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance," in Durban, South Africa. Durban was an anti-Semitic hate fest, a grotesque and macabre exercise in linguistic word games...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 11, 2009 3 Comments

FreedomWorks, which had the temerity and meanness of spirit to encourage people to attend town hall meetings, was subjected to an organized attempt to jam its phone lines, much like happened to the Republican National Committee. FreedomWorks has published the audio files of some of...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 11, 2009 7 Comments

The notion of August being a time to debate the specifics of the Democratic and Obama health care restructuring plan is something of a misnomer, since there is no single plan. The illusion is being created of a true debate, but in fact we are...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 11, 2009 8 Comments

"We don't know who Obama really is," or words to that effect, has been a standard theme of people opposed to Obama's election and governance. What I called the "Door No. 2" effect in the very first post I did on this blog, back on...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2009 2 Comments

What is it about this August. It seems that every caricature of Democratic incompetence, intolerance, snobbery, tax-and-spendiness, and manipulation is coming true right before our very eyes:Matthew Yglesias: If Only We Had Some Means of Taking Rich People’s Money and Devoting it to Public Purposes.Greg...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2009 7 Comments

Not this President, that one. The bad one who wanted to strip us of all our freedoms.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRyxOzlJK98]--------------------------------------------Follow me on Twitter and Facebook...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 10, 2009 13 Comments

So this is what it comes to. After eight years of protesters hanging George Bush in effigy, calling him a Nazi, disrupting conservative speeches on campuses by taking over stages or throwing pies, creating websites and movies that wished for Bush's death, and a myriad...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 09, 2009 4 Comments

The much ballyhooed Cash for Clunkers program has had the unintended consequences of driving up the cost of new and used vehicles and used auto parts, according to independent studies of the auto markets. The Cash for Clunkers program demonstrates the danger of government trying...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 09, 2009 4 Comments

An article in the NY Times, Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security, deserves a special place in the annals of journalism in the service of liberal politics. The thrust of the article is that global climate change "could" cause massive geopolitical disruption in...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 09, 2009 7 Comments

Barack Obama's penchant for creating strawman arguments is trickling down, way down. The argument now is that since government delivers water to our faucets, maintains roads, and regulates the electric grid, anyone who opposes a government take over of our health system hates modern life:I...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 08, 2009 4 Comments

Oliver Willis: Steve Benen tries to understand just why wingnuts are so angry about health care reform. He doesn’t make bad points, but its so much simpler than that. We on the left think that rage has to be somewhat rational, for instance we raged...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 08, 2009 89 Comments

Sarah Palin has kicked off (another) firestorm of criticism because of the statement she released on her Facebook page:The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 08, 2009 3 Comments

One of the benefits of the current turmoil over health care restructuring is finding hypocrisy in the hyperbole being used against opponents of health care restructuring.From John Marshall of Talking Points Memo, August 7, 2009:Most significant here is not the right-wing liars and demagogues making...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 07, 2009 2 Comments

New low. The firefighter care is played, as in, people who do not support unsustainable public union contracts which are sinking state and municipal budgets, or who do not support health care restructuring which will sink the federal budget, must hate firefighters:As I'm watching a...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 07, 2009 1 Comment

The big economic news of the day is that the unemployment rate dropped one-tenth of one percent. The Obama administration is hailing this as the start of a turnaround and a sign that the stimulus spending is working, something of the end of the beginning...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 07, 2009 9 Comments

"It's War."So screams left-wing blogger Zandar feeding off of the frenzied writings of Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein, who declared health care protesters "political terrorists." To make sure we didn't miss the point, Zandar put the words in bold type. The blog is Zandar Versus...

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