Erwin Chemerinsky: You Win Some, You Lose Some

Erwin Chemerinsky

Erwin Chemerinsky, you may or may not know, is a prominent constitutional law
scholar who was hired, then bizarrely fired, as the new dean for the University
of California at Irvine, supposedly for being ‘too liberal’ to be Dean at the
school in conservative Orange County. His detractors have not surfaced, as far
as I know. Fellow con law profs Hugh Hewitt and Glenn Reynolds have been steadfastly
supporting Chemerinsky in this odd ordeal.

Today, he was reinstated
as the new dean of the law school, as he worked out a deal with Chancellor
Michael Drake.

However,
he lost in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals representing Rachel
Corrie’s family against Caterpillar. Corrie’s family claimed that Caterpillar
provided Israel with tractors "it knew would be used in violation of international
law." Rachel Corrie was killed when she got in the way of a Caterpillar
tractor clearing an area of explosives. The case was dismissed because the tractors
were bought by the federal government and transferred to Israel, and this decision
was a foreign policy "political question" that the courts cannot second-guess.

For Chemerinsky, justice was served correctly to him in both instances.

Crossposted from WILLisms.com