Thursday, December 20, 2018

Big Media David: In JTA on State Anti-BDS Laws

I'm in JTA with an article on the debacle that are the state anti-BDS laws. As written, they tend to be both PR and constitutional trainwrecks. And that might be a good reason not to write them! But, if you insist, I offer some helpful advice on how to draft them to avoid the obvious pitfalls, including:

  1. Don't single out Israel, and
  2. Don't regulate private conduct, but only demand that the contractor not discriminate in the course of fulfilling the contract.
If you pay close attention, adding these two hints together yields something like ... a generic anti-discrimination pledge, rather than a specifically "anti-BDS" law. This is not a coincidence.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Are you saying that states should pass laws implicitly making it illegal for contractors to boycott Saudi Arabia as well? I don't see how that would be a good thing. No one should be forced to buy anything from Saudi Arabia (or Israel, for that matter).