Say Anything Blog

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