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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.

The Gibson's Bakery v. Oberlin College lawsuit has entered two post-trial phases: (1) Post-trial motions then appeals, and (2) public relations. As part of this jockeying, Oberlin College's president Carmen Twillie Ambar has written op-eds and given interviews in which she asserts that Oberlin College was held responsible for the speech of students. This, she argues, presents a threat to campus 1st Amendment rights because it could force universities to clamp down on student speech to avoid liability.

The anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement insists it is merely "pro-Palestinian" and not anti-Semitic. There is a mountain of evidence otherwise, but sometimes there is a clarifying moment as to how calls to boycott Israel have become mainstreamed. Such a moment came on Twitter regarding India's recent moves in Kashmir, which we covered in India Revokes Special Status for Muslim-Majority Kashmir, May Open Up Region to Hindu Immigration.

Every time I think the media-Democrat frenzy could not get any more frenzied, it gets more frenzied. How seamlessly they have transitioned from almost three years of Russia-collusion-mania to the current frenzy claiming that anyone and everyone who supports Donald Trump is a white supremacist.

David Gibson, one of the owners of Gibson's Bakery and a plaintiff in the lawsuit that yielded almost $32 million in damages against Oberlin College, has just posted a video on Facebook announcing that he has pancreatic cancer. (h/t to multiple readers for alerting me) In the video (below), David says that Oberlin College has known about his illness for several months, and made a motion in court to keep that information away from jurors.

The Democratic Socialists of America provide considerable energy for Democrat candidates. The label Democratic Socialist is embraced by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others. The DSA just held its annual conference, and it was pretty much what you would expect when 1000 socialists got together -- it devolved at times into self-parody.

Everything is unfolding just as we predicted almost two years ago. We predicted that as the Democrat presidential field looked likely to yield a sure loss to Trump, Democrats would turn their lonely eyes to Michelle Obama, possibly as late as the convention if it looked like a Bernie win.

Another Democratic Debate took place tonight, and it was all so predictable, with the exception of Marianne Williamson. She certainly raised her profile with an aggressive endorsement of reparations, speaking out against the 'dark psyche' of Trump, and other concerns about healing the nation. I would not be surprised if she got a bounce.

On July 30, 2014, Kemberlee Kaye did her first post for Legal Insurrection, about failed border policy. Over 2000 posts later, she's still here. Kemberlee quickly carved out a niche of covering cultural (war) issues, particularly in defense of dads, and against political correctness and pseudo science:

I've been more than a little distracted the last few days, so I haven't been able to follow the news cycle (aka Trump's Twitter feed) quite as closely as the rest of the internet. My takeaway from glimpses of the fighting is that Trump has Democrats defending and supporting:

Dr. Einat Wilf writes and lecture extensively on Zionism and anti-Semitism. A point we've made here repeatedly, particularly as to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, is that while in theory there is a difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, in the real world they are almost always the same.

Elizabeth Warren's not practicing what she preaches is a recurring theme in her political career, beyond her Native American problem. As we covered in 2012 and again recently, Warren made millions representing large corporations in legal cases hostile to consumers and workers, yet portrayed that work completely differently: Elizabeth Warren’s erroneous claim to have tried to help women with breast implant claims when she represented Dow Chemical