|
|
Saturday, June 21, 2008
How Secular are Academics?
Many people, especially among political conservatives, believe that most academics are secular, possibly even hostile to religion. However, a recent study of academics' religious beliefs by the Institute for Jewish & Community Research suggests otherwise (some of the study's results have already been cited in our discussion of supposed anti-religious bigotry in academia). It is indeed true, that academics are on average less religious than the general public. However, far more academics are religious believers than atheists or agnostics. The prevalence of religious belief in academia undercuts claims, such as Rick Hills', that "Secular academics typically do not know many religious believers — especially not many overly devout Christians — and their isolation leads to the most naively lurid fantasies about what religious belief entails." It also reinforces my argument that academics' unfavorable views of Evangelical Christians and Mormons are mostly due to hostility to these groups' conservative political ideologies rather than a generalized antagonism to religion as such.
The IJCR study shows that 66% of academics believe in God, while only 19% say that they don't. This is a fairly overwhelming majority of theists, even though smaller than the 93% of the general public who say they believe in God. Some 66% of academics (compared to about 85% of the general public) identify with a particular religious denomination such as Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, or Muslim. With the important exception of Evangelical Christians (33% of the general public, but only 11% of academics), most major religious groups are represented among academics in roughly the same or higher proportions as in the general public.
It is, of course, possible that many theistic academics are still "secular" in the sense that religion doesn't play an important role in their lives. However, the IJCR survey shows that 63% of academics say that religion is "very important" or "somewhat important" to them. This is a lower figure than the 85% of the general public who fall into these two categories, but still suggests that religious belief is important to a large majority of academics. Further, 44% of academics say they attend religious services at least once per month (compared to 56% of the general public), and 73% of academics (compared to 86% of the general public) want their children to receive religious training.
Moreover, the gap between the general public's religiosity and that of academics may be smaller than it appears. Members of the general public are probably more likely to overstate their religiosity in surveys than are academics. There is a great deal of prejudice against atheists and agnostics in the general population, with some 50% of the public believing that it is impossible for one to be "moral" or have "good values" without believing in God. In academia, by contrast, the IJCR survey found that only 18% of faculty have a "cool" or "unfavorable" view of atheists (compared to about 50% of the general public who expressed similar "unfavorable" views of atheists in other surveys). Thus, there is much less incentive for academic atheists to hide their beliefs than for those in the general public to do so. There is also less incentive for academic theists to exaggerate their religiosity, church attendance, etc., than for those in the general population. But although academics are far more tolerant of atheists than is the general public, the overwhelming majority are not atheists themselves.
Like many other studies, the IJCR survey finds that academics differ enormously from the general public in their political orientation, with academics being far more left-wing. That is where most of the really important attitudinal differences between academia and the general public lie.
Epstein on Boumediene:
The University of Chicago's Richard Epstein has an interesting op-ed on the Boumediene decision in today's NYT. Here's a taste:
This 5-4 decision was correct. The conservative justices in the minority were wrong to suggest that the decision constitutes reckless judicial intervention in military matters that the Constitution reserves exclusively for Congress and the president. (Disclosure: I joined in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on the plaintiff’s behalf.)
Yet Boumediene is rich in constitutional ironies. In addressing whether non-Americans detained outside the United States are entitled to habeas corpus, the court passed up an opportunity to clarify the law, and instead based its reasoning, flimsily, on a habeas corpus case that was decided just after World War II. This is too bad, because issues as important as habeas corpus should turn not on fancy intellectual footwork but on a candid appraisal of the relevant facts and legal principles.
UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge comments on Epstein's article here, and Epstein replies.
No Smoking (Except for Pot):
Under a new smoking ban that will take effect in the Netherlands July 1, tobacco smoking in coffee shops and other public places will be prohibited. Marijuana smoking, on the other hand, will still be permitted.
Choosing Corn Over Conservation:
The New York Times reports that the federal government is considering allowing farmers to plant corn on lands that have been set aside for conservation purposes under various government programs. The immediate impetus for the potential policy change is the midwestern floods, but the increase in food prices brought about by Washington's long love affair with ethanol looms large in the background. Were the federal government not requiring the use of ethanol as a motor fuel, the floods would not have had as large an impact on food prices. This is yet more evidence that there is nothing "pro-environment" about corn-based ethanol.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Bill Stuntz on "Secular Universities and Evangelical Christians":
Bill Stuntz, a longtime member of evangelical churches, adds some thoughts based on his personal experience to our discussion on religion and the academy over at "Less Than the Least."
Legislatures, Institutions, and Constitutional Theory:
For my final post, I thought I’d begin a discussion of what I view as some of the broader implications of the examples I’ve been discussing. On first blush, I admit, my work seems incredibly obscure and esoteric. Even if it isn’t obscure -- actually, even if it is -- one might still legitimately ask what can be gained by such a detailed look into these examples. Who, after all, would want to look at something like “The Constitution” through the lens of something like the Post Office? I’ll have more to say about how I came to look at the Post Office at the end of this post -- for now, suffice it to say that I did not set out trying to understand the impact of the Post Office on constitutional doctrine -- but still it just seems downright weird. Beyond a simple understanding of the examples in and of themselves, is there anything else?
Well, I say “begin a discussion” because this is where I’m at the beginning of thinking things through seriously and would welcome comments. As I described on Tuesday, I think of the work as providing examples of a four-step process of constitutional lawmaking: (i) Congress passes a statute; (ii) The statutory provisions give an institution certain attributes; (iii) Over time, social practice embeds those attributes into the institution; and (iv) The courts then takes those embedded attributes and write them, in different ways, into constitutional doctrine.
In the comments on Tuesday, Orin suggested that this might be a broader phenomenon. All I can say is I certainly hope he’s right. Surely it is the rare academic who would content him/herself with the rather underwhelming claim, “I have developed the definitive theory of the relationship between the Post Office and the Constitution, so there!”
To me, one interesting thing about these examples is that this process doesn’t really comport with our ordinary conception about the sources of constitutional law. If we think, for example of Philip Bobbitt’s famous typology of constitutional arguments or of the constant concern about the counter-majoritarian difficulty, the idea that judicial constitutional lawmaking might derive in some ways from legislative determinations seems odd.
Of course, plenty of people have questioned the counter-majoritarian difficulty as a descriptive matter by simply denying that the Supreme Court acts in a counter-majoritarian manner. The most well-known articulations of this idea are by Robert Dahl and Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley (“the supreme coort follows th’ iliction returns”). But, while the constitutional principles in my examples are of course “majoritarian” in the sense that they were legislatively enacted, the time lag between the legislation and the Court’s rulings obviously makes “th’ iliction returns” irrelevant. So there’s clearly something else going on.
I end the second article with an exploration of work in constitutional theory that can situate my examples, work by Robert C. Post and William Eskridge & John Ferejohn, among others. And, in my first article, I also look at work by Frederick Schauer. None of this work fits perfectly, however, and this is in part why I find this form of constitutional lawmaking so intriguing.
Post, for example, has written about the dialectical relationship between judicial constitutional law making and what he refers to as “constitutional culture,” which he defines as that “specific subset of culture that encompasses extrajudicial beliefs about the substance of the Constitution”; Eskridge & Ferejohn have written about what they refer to as “super-statutes,” statutes that fall into an “intermediate category of fundamental or quasi-constitutional law.” They argue that such statutes can be “imperial,” meaning that they can “affect other statutory schemes and even constitutional doctrine.” Schauer argues -- as a normative matter -- in favor of an institution-focused approach to the First Amendment. As I explain in the articles, all of this has something to say about my stories.
But, beyond these theorists, my articles also have a connection with -- what did Orin call him yesterday, the “blogfather”? -- Eugene. Allow me to explain. [And, I promise, he had no idea about this connection when he asked me to guest-blog.] Several people have asked how I came upon the Post Office as a subject of study. “Very circuitously” is the short answer. The slightly longer answer is this:
About six years ago, the Colorado Supreme Court held that the Colorado Constitution’s “Freedom of Speech and Press” Clause required that search warrants seeking certain book store records meet a higher standard than ordinary warrants and subpoenas. [A federal district judge in D.C. had done something similar in 1998 when Independent Prosecutor Starr sought records of Monica Lewinsky’s book purchases from Kramerbooks, a prominent independent bookstore in Washington, DC.]
A few years later, Eugene wrote an article entitled “Deterring Speech: When Is It ‘McCarthyism’? When Is It Proper?”, which among other things criticized the court’s reasoning. In the article, Eugene argued that seeking bookstore or library records was directly analogous to seeking all sorts of records that implicate people’s speech. Subpoenas of bookstores and/or libraries are, he wrote, “simply special cases of a more general and well-established phenomenon, subpoenas of information related to First Amendment activities.” And so why should they be treated differently from the many other kinds of subpoenas seeking information about First Amendment activity, subpoenas that never result in a heightened standard? As always, Eugene’s logic was impeccable, but something about the argument nagged at me. Why -- as a descriptive matter -- do courts make the distinction that Eugene had so convincingly explained was no distinction at all?
The answer that struck me was what sent me to look at the Post Office; what the courts had done in making it harder to subpoena a bookstore (and/or a library) was to protect, not individual free speech rights per se, but instead an institution that -- in a broad sense -- furthered First Amendment values. So, to understand privacy of bookstore/library records, my research took me to privacy of postal correspondence. And that, in turn, led me to the articles that form the basis of the series of posts I’ve written the past week. Eventually, though, my hope is to build on this work on the Post Office to try to understand other institutional contexts -- such as libraries -- that shape constitutional jurisprudence.
Of course, the connection I’m positing may be all wrong. After all, as a doctrinal matter, privacy of postal correspondence is viewed through the lens of the Fourth Amendment, not the First, and one can certainly make plenty of arguments that bookstores and libraries bear no resemblance to the Post Office. But I figure the best way to find out is to try the idea out here, where -- if I am wrong -- the blogfather will be right there to let me know.
Thanks again to Eugene for sharing this space with me and to you all for reading.
A Law Clerk's Ode to the Vinson Court:
In the latest Green Bag, John Q. Barrett has this fun little article (with some classic pictures) on some amusing lyrics about the Supreme Court written by William Rehnquist when he was a law clerk for Justice Jackson.
Why I Love the Law, Reason #362:
Because judges can write 85 pages of very serious analysis on the constitutionality of moving a zipper on a jacket. See today's en banc Fourth Amendment decision by the DC Circuit in United States v. Askew. The en banc court ended up taking a different view than the original divided panel: My coverage of the panel opinion from April 2007 is here. There are some interesting conceptual issues in play here that I'll probably blog about next week, but for now I wanted to just flag the decision so everyone is up to date on the latest in zipper jurisprudence. Thanks to How Appealing for the link.
More on Academics and Hostility to Religion:
In his excellent recent post, co-blogger Todd Zywicki cites some data that shed light on academics' attitudes towards different religious groups. Overall, I think the data confirm my theory that most academics are not hostile to religion as such, but merely to those religious groups that they perceive (for the most part correctly) as politically conservative.
The study Todd cites shows that 53% of academics have an "unfavorable" view of Evangelical Christians and 33% say the same of Mormons. By contrast, only 13% have an unfavorable view of Catholics and 3% towards Jews. As Todd points out, Evangelical Christians and and Mormons are generally seen as politically conservative, while Jews tend to be liberal, and Catholics somewhere in between. Todd may well be right that academics' views of Evangelicals and Mormons are based on stereotypes rather than personal experience. However, the stereotype that these groups tend to be politically conservative is actually correct. For example, a recent survey found that 47% of evangelicals describe themselves as "conservative," while only 14% call themselves "liberal." A Pew survey found that 72% of white Evangelicals voted for the Republicans in the 2006 congressional elections. The numbers for Mormons are similar (majority-Mormon Utah is perhaps the most reliably Republican state in the country).
With the exception of attitudes towards Evangelical Christians, the percentage of academics who view various religious groups unfavorable is actually similar to or lower than the percentages of the general public who feel the same way. For example, Todd expresses surprise that 13% of academics have an "unfavorable" view of Catholics. But a 2007 Pew Survey shows that 14% of the general public take the same view. The 33 percent of academics who have an unfavorable view of Mormons is only slightly higher than the 27% of the general public who gave the same answer in the Pew survey. And the Pew study shows that a much higher percentage the general public have an unfavorable view of Jews and Muslims than the percentage of academics who do so; 35 percent of the general public have an "unfavorable" view of Muslims and 9 percent have an unfavorable view of Jews. Among academics, the equivalent figures are 22% and 3%. The study Todd linked to also cites data showing that academics take a more favorable view of Buddhists than does the general public. The Pew study shows that 19% of the general public view Evangelical Christians unfavorably, which is of course a much lower figure than the 53% of academics who do so.
Thus, the evidence shows that those religious groups that are viewed more negatively by academics than the general public are the ones that are (for the most part correctly) viewed as politically conservative.
Todd nonetheless partially rejects my political bias theory of academic attitudes for the following reasons:
So what about Ilya's thesis that religious bigotry is a proxy for political bigotry? There may be some truth to this. I suspect that Evangelicals and Mormons are generally perceived as political conservative[s] and Jews are perceived as politically liberal. Other views, such as Catholics and Muslims, I suppose fall somewhere in the middle when it comes to such stereotypes. But I don't think this can explain it all either. For instance, I think that most academics are quite tolerant of conservative Jews. I also suspect that academics probably think that it is ok for blacks to be Evangelical or Southern Baptist, even if they dislike white Evangelicals.
My own experience is that politically conservative Jews are not viewed more favorably by liberal academics than are other conservatives. The reason why this doesn't translate into unfavorable attitudes towards Jews more generally is that conservative Jews are exceptional and also that most of them are not conservative because of their religious beliefs. By contrast, the majority of politically aware white Evangelicals and Mormons are conservative, and that conservatism is often at least partially dictated by their religious commitments. As for black Evangelicals and Baptists, the fact that academics may view them more favorably than whites of the same religion is entirely consistent with my theory. Black Evangelicals and Baptists tend to be liberal (or at least to vote Democratic), whereas white ones tend to be conservative Republicans. Politically conservative blacks, by contrast, are not popular in academia, whether they are religious or not. Although I don't have survey data to prove it, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is harder to be a conservative or libertarian black in academia than to be a white academic with similar views - perhaps because some leftists view black conservatives and libertarians as "traitors" to their racial group.
To say that academics' hostility to certain religious groups is based on political ideology is not to say that such hostility is justified. As a general rule, I don't think it's defensible to have a negative view of an entire religious group merely because the majority of its members disagree with you on political issues. Be that as it may, what we have here is more a case of political intolerance than religious bigotry. Significantly, the percentage of academics who have an unfavorable view of various religious groups is, in most cases, the same as or lower than the percentage of the general public who feel the same way.
But what's the evidence from Scandinavia?
You'll be relieved to know that, according to an unofficial count compiled by the Sacramento Bee, opposite-sex marriages in California contain equal numbers of men and women:
Based on a tally of the licenses Thursday – using first names as a
guide – 60 percent of the same-sex newlyweds this week are lesbians
and 40 percent are gay men. Among heterosexual couples – to no one's
surprise – the gender breakdown is 50-50.
(Thanks to David Link for the pointer.)
Dartmouth Election Wrap-Up:
Some readers have asked how the Dartmouth Association of Alumni election turned out--the result was that the pro-parity slate was defeated. This probably means the end of the AoA's lawsuit to enforce the 1891 Agreement that promised parity between elected and appointed trustees. In February, Dartmouth's Motion to Dismiss the lawsuit was denied on all three counts.
Joe Malchow '08 has a new essay on Minding the Campus that summarizes the issues and results of the election, "How Dartmouth Thwarted Their Alumni."
Academia and Religion:
When it comes to the attitude of academics toward religion, I suspect that the truth is probably closer to the view articulated by Rick Hills or Ilya than to Eugene's more charitable view. In particular, what the data (and personal experience) indicate is that the views of academics toward religion is not uniform. In particular, academics have a highly negative view of Evangelical Christians and very little hostility to Jews.
According to a study by the Institute of Jewish and Community Research, 53% of professors have an unfavorable view of Evangelical Christians but only 3% have an unfavorable view of Jews. A summary of the study is here. 33% have unfavorable views of Mormons. Muslims, Atheists, and Catholics all score in double-digits. Who would've thought that 13% of academics have unfavorable views of Catholics?
Now let me say that again--53% of academics have an "unfavorable" view of Evangelical Christians. It is almost impossible to imagine any identifiable group of Americans today who would hold such a reflexively negative view of other groups of Americans. I can't imagine that any degree of racial bigotry by any group toward any other group would even approximate this degree of bigotry and prejudice. I also have to say that based on my personal observations this finding is completely plausible (note that it was a Jewish affairs organizaiton that conducted the study so one wouldn't expect that it had an axe to grind or was biased toward trying to find evidence of anti-Evangelical sentiment).
So what to make of this? Given that there are a divergence of views toward different subsets of religious groups, this does not seem to me to be consistent with Eugene's thesis that what is going on here is an incomprehension of a religious worldview. It is clear that bigotry toward Evangelicals and Mormons is much deeper than mainline protestants, Buddhists, and Jews. As Ilya suggests, it is likely that many academics simply know no Evangelicals (at least that they are aware of), so this seems to be pure bigotry based on some general prejudice. But I doubt many academics know many Buddhists either, yet very few hold negative perceptions of Buddhists. And I doubt that academics are any more informed about what "weird" views Buddhists hold than Mormons or Evangelicals. All of these views are based primarily on simple prejudice (in the descriptive sense) not on knowledge or experience.
So what about Ilya's thesis that religious bigotry is a proxy for political bigotry? There may be some truth to this. I suspect that Evangelicals and Mormons are generally perceived as political conservative and Jews are perceived as politically liberal. Other views, such as Catholics and Muslims, I suppose fall somewhere in the middle when it comes to such stereotypes. But I don't think this can explain it all either. For instance, I think that most academics are quite tolerant of conservative Jews. I also suspect that academics probably think that it is ok for blacks to be Evangelical or Southern Baptist, even if they dislike white Evangelicals. Ditto for other unusual religious groups, such as the Amish. My opinion on this score is based on hunch, not data, however, so I could be wrong--it may be that academics hate conservative Jews or black Southern Baptists as much as Evangelical Christians, but my instinct tells me that is not the case.
If that is true, then I think the answer must lie somewhere closer to Hills's thesis that what is really going on here is something closer to simple bigotry, hatred, or fear. The source of the bigotry, I suspect, is cultural in nature. Conservative Jews and black Southern Baptists are ok because their religion is seen as an extension of their cultural and ethnic background and academics look at those cultures through a multicultural mindset.
Moreover, I suspect that many academics would say that their negative stereotypes are justified because they have formed a perception that Christians are "hateful" people intent on imposing a theocracy on the United States. So they would say, "My hostility is based on their hostility, so it is fully justified."
Hills's experience reflects a really quite common mindset in my view. And the disbelief that is expressed is not that suggested by Eugene--"Really, how could he believe that?" What the disbelief suggests is, "Really, yet he seems like such a nice guy. How could he hold such [hateful] views?"
Finally, let me stress one final point--what is so surprising to me about all of this is that the views of academics toward Evangelicals and Mormons are likely based purely on stereotypes and ignorance. I doubt that many academics know any Evangelicals (that they are aware of) and few probably know many Mormons, nor do they likely have much but superficial knowledge about the views of many of these people.
Update:
A commenter notes that in the population at large there are subgroups who are also viewed unfavorably. Opinion polls show that indeed to be the case to some degree. According to this poll, atheists are viewed negatively by 45% of the population and scientologists by 52%. Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians are viewed negatively by 23-25% of the population at large.
I have updated the post to reflect this.
Update:
Some readers have taken issue with my use of the term "bigotry." I used that term to try to capture the flavor of the response that Rick Hills heard in his friend's remark--"the academic’s irrational fear of, or intense discomfort around, theist and, in particular, Christian, beliefs." The flavor of the remark is that the friend had a negative prejudice against Christians such that he or she was surprised to learn that the person in question was a Christian. This is functionally no different from meeting someone who is inconsistent with one's negative stereotypical prejudices of a racial or ethnic group. I think the correct word to apply to that prejudice is "bigotry," but if there is a different word, then please suggest the correct word. I think that the term must be freighted with greater normative implications than I intended, as I intended it to be used descriptively, not normatively.
Northwestern to Offer Two-year, Five-semester, Law Degree:
(Sketchy) details here. Northwestern will also require all students to take two new course, one in "analytic skills" (finance, statistics, accounting, etc.), and one in "legal services behavior."
FISA Deal Reached:
It took forever, but it finally happened: A deal on foreign intelligence monitoring. You generally can't rely on the press to report accurately on this sort of super-detailed legislation, but the Washington Post is reporting that the key moves of the new legislation are these: Under the surveillance agreement, which is expected to be approved today by the House and next week by the Senate, telecoms could have privacy lawsuits thrown out if they show a federal judge that they received written assurance from the Bush administration that the spying was legal. . . . The legislation also would require court approval of procedures for intercepting telephone calls and e-mails that pass through U.S.-based servers -- another step that the White House and GOP lawmakers previously resisted. That sounds pretty sensible, although I'll need to read the language first to get a sense of what really happened. Stay tuned.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The Milton Friedman Institute and Ideological Intolerance in Academia:
The University of Chicago has decided to establish an economics research institute named after the late Milton Friedman. Normally, a university's decision to name an institute after it's most famous and successful professor would be a completely uncontroversial nonstory. However, over 100 University of Chicago professors have signed a letter protesting the decision. Essentially, they object to naming a research institute after Friedman because he was a libertarian rather than a liberal or leftist - even though Friedman's academic distinction is such that he clearly deserves the honor. It is inconceivable that you could find 100 academics at Chicago or any other major university who would sign a letter opposing the creation of an institute named after a liberal academic whose intellectual achievement's were as great as Friedman's.
The letter states that naming the center after Friedman would "reinforce among the public a perception that the university's faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity." This is a weak argument to say the least. No one assumes that universities endorse all the views of the people they name research centers or buildings after. For example, I teach at the George Mason University School of Law. That doesn't lead anyone to assume that I or the university as a whole endorse Mason's opposition to the Constitution or his other political views. Everyone understands that the university is named after Mason to honor his achievements, not to express agreement with his opinions. Universities - including Chicago - routinely name all sorts of facilities in honor of liberals or leftists without anyone even suggesting that this might lead people to think that the school lacks "ideological diversity." Even more to the point, the University of Chicago, like most universities, has entire departments overwhelmingly dominated by liberal or leftist ideological views. I doubt that many of the signers of the anti-Friedman letter are concerned about this, even though it leads to a real lack of ideological diversity as opposed to the mere "perception" thereof.
Some letter signers interviewed in the Chicago Tribune article linked above claim that the center will be a "right-wing" organization that, in the words of one, will cause "work at the university and the university's reputation [to] take a serious rightward turn to the detriment of all." There is no proof of this other than a sentence from the Institute's proposal which says that it will focus on the issues raised in "some of Milton Friedman's most interesting academic work." Obviously, focusing on the issues addressed in Friedman's work is not the same thing as automatically endorsing his conclusions. But even if the Institute does attract a disproportionate percentage of libertarian or (less likely) conservative scholars, so what? Plenty of academic departments and research centers are overwhelmingly left-wing. As long as the work produced by the Institute is of a high quality and is judged by objective standards, it should not matter if a disproportionate percentage of it is right of center. Since the Institute would be run by Chicago's world-class economics and business school faculty (including several Nobel Prize winner), it's highly likely that it will produce outstanding scholarship.
In my view, academia as a whole is in need of greater ideological diversity. But that doesn't mean that every single department or research center has to be internally diverse, merely that the academic world should be more diverse overall. Diversity across institutions is sometimes furthered by homogeneity within particular schools and departments. If the Milton Friedman Institute does end up producing primarily libertarian or conservative work, that would actually increase the overall diversity of the University of Chicago and the academic world as a whole, since both are overwhelmingly liberal (it's true that the Chicago Economics Department tends to be libertarian, but most of the university's other departments have ideological orientations similar to those of their counterparts at other schools - i.e., liberal ones).
In fairness to the University of Chicago, it should be noted that the 100 signers of the letter represent only 8% of the school's total full-time faculty. It's possible that some of the non-signing faculty sympathize with the signers' objectives. But the majority of the school's faculty - maybe even a majority of its liberal faculty - perhaps do not agree with the letter. By no means all liberal and leftist academics are ideologically intolerant. The majority, I think, are not. But there is obviously an intolerant minority that wields considerable influence.
NOTE: The article claims, incorrectly, that the University of Chicago Law School is "conservative." That isn't true, even if one defines "conservative" broadly to include libertarians. The University of Chicago Law School has historically had more libertarian professors than most other top law schools (and a few real conservatives as well). But it has always had a majority of liberal professors, at least since the New Deal. The fact that merely having a substantial minority of non-liberal scholars was enough to give the school a "conservative" reputation is itself an indication of the ideological imbalance in academia.
UPDATE: The text of the 100 scholars' letter is available here. All of their stated concerns focus on the Institute's supposed "neoliberal" ideology and the "harm" that that might supposedly do the University's reputation for "diversity." Read the letter and judge for yourself.
You Know You're Blogging Too Much . . . .
when you are writing a law review article and you instinctively end your paragraph and begin a new one by typing: < br > < br > & nbsp ; & nbsp ;
Child of couple in civil union can receive Social Security insurance benefits:
So says the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel in an opinion letter interpreting the effect of the Defense of Marriage Act on the benefits eligibility of the child of a non-biological "second parent" in a civil union:
Although DOMA limits the definition of “marriage” and
“spouse” for purposes of federal law, the Social Security Act does not condition eligibility for
CIB [child's insurance benefits] on the existence of a marriage or on the federal rights of a spouse in the circumstances of
this case; rather, eligibility turns upon the State’s recognition of a parent-child relationship, and
specifically, the right to inherit as a child under state law. A child’s inheritance rights under
state law may be independent of the existence of a marriage or spousal relationship, and that is
indeed the case in Vermont. Accordingly, we conclude that nothing in DOMA would prevent
the non-biological child of a partner in a Vermont civil union from receiving CIB under the
Social Security Act.
There's a good summary of the opinion letter, the factual background, and the reactions of both supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage and civil unions at Law.com. Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, for example, is quoted as being "disappointed" that the administration did not take a "pro-family" position by denying benefits to the child.
I'm no expert on Social Security benefits, but the result seems right as a textual matter under both DOMA, which forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriages, and the Social Security Act, which defines an eligible child as one who has the state-law right to inherit from a parent regardless of the marital status of the parent. A contrary result would have put the federal government in the position of saying that not only is the parents' civil union created by state law unrecognized, but that the legal parent-child relationship created by state law is unrecognized. While it appears the legal parent-child relationship in the case arose from the parents' civil union, rather than from an adoption, the continued recognition of that parent-child relationship under Vermont law, including the inheritance right, is not dependent on the continued existence of the civil union.
The Limits of Fourth Amendment Injunctions:
I have just posted a very short essay (12 pages), The Limits of Fourth Amendment Injunctions, for a symposium issue of the Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law. The essay is a response to the Sixth Circuit's still ongoing litigation in Warshak v. United States, the e-mail privacy case I have blogged about; the essay attempts to take the basic insights of my wannabe amicus brief and broadens it into a short scholarly article. Here's the abstract: When is injunctive relief appropriate in Fourth Amendment cases? Should courts feel free to craft wide-ranging injunctive relief to avoid Fourth Amendment defects? Or is there something wrong, either as a matter of doctrine or policy, with crafting broad injunctions in Fourth Amendment cases?
This brief essay will suggest answers to these questions. The first part argues that as a matter of history and practice, injunctive relief has been used narrowly as an on-off switch for carefully-defined practices. The most significant doctrinal hook for this limitation is Article III standing: Injunctive relief requires a real and immediate threat of future injury to establish a case or controversy. The precise meaning of that requirement remains murky, but it arguably means that a plaintiff must show a real and immediate threat of a highly specific set of facts occurring.
The second part argues that as a matter of normative policy, any ambiguity in the current state of the law should be resolved against imposing broad Fourth Amendment injunctions. Crafting broad injunctive relief forces courts to assume duties that they are not competent to handle. Fourth Amendment doctrine is tremendously fact-specific: every fact pattern is different, and even the exceptions to the exceptions have their own exceptions. Courts are poorly suited to design broad injunctive relief in this setting. Courts should therefore decline to craft Fourth Amendment injunctions covering classes of facts instead of individual facts.
A Nice Little Rant from Georgia Supreme Court Justice Joseph Lumpkin (1853):
He was writing in a case that considered whether the absence of a seal made a certain document void, but in the process touched on broader jurisprudential principles. I found the passage interesting and colorful, though somewhat one-sided, and thought I'd pass it along (some paragraph breaks added):
For myself, I am free to confess, that I despise all forms having no sense or substance in them. And I can scarcely suppress a smile, I will not say “grimace irresistible,” when I see so much importance attached to such trifles. I would cast away at once and forever, all law not founded in some reason — natural, moral, or political. I scorn to be a “cerf adscript” to things obsolete, or thoroughly deserving to be so.
And for the “gladsome lights of jurisprudence” I would sooner far, go to the reports of Hartly, (Texas,) and of Pike and English, (Arkansas,) than cross an ocean, three thousand miles in width, and then travel up the stream of time for three or four centuries, to the ponderous tome of Sidenfin and Keble, Finch and Popham, to search for legal wisdom. The world is changed. Our own situation greatly changed. And that Court and that country is behind the age that stands still while all around is in motion.
I would as soon go back to the age of monkery — to the good old times when the sanguinary Mary lighted up the fires of Smithfield, to learn true religion; or to
Henry VIII. the British Blue-Beard, or to his successors, Elizabeth, the two James's and two Charles's, the good old era of butchery and blood, whose emblems were the pillory, the gibbet and the axe, to study constitutional liberty, as to search the records of black-letter for rules to regulate the formularies to be observed by Courts at this day.
I admit that many old things may be good things — as old wine, old wives, ay, and an old world too. But the world is older, and consequently wiser now than it ever was before. Our English ancestors lived comparatively in the adolescence, if not the infancy of the world. It is true that Coke, and Hale, and Holt, caught a glimpse of the latter-day glory, but died without the sight.
The best and wisest men of their generation were unable to rise above the ignorance and superstition which pressed like a night-mare upon the intellect of nations. And yet we, who are “making lightning run messages, chemistry polish boots and steam deliver parcels and packages,” are forever going back to the good old days of witchcraft and astrology, to discover precedents for regulating the proceedings of Courts, for upholding seals and all the tremendous doctrines consequent upon the distinction between sealed and unsealed papers, when seals de facto no longer exist! Let the judicial and legislative axe be laid to the root of the tree; cut it down; why cumbereth it, any longer, courts and contracts?
UPDATE: Whoops, got the date wrong in the original header; I for some reason recorded the date as 1845, but it was actually 1853, as the corrected header indicates. Thanks to Bill Raftery for setting me straight.
Academics and Hostility to Religion:
Rick Hills claims that many academics have an "irrational fear of, or intense discomfort around, theist and, in particular, Christian, beliefs," which he labels "theophobia." I don't doubt that there are some academics who hold such views. But I think that most seeming academic hostility to religion is actually hostility to the association between religiosity and conservatism in current American politics. Academics are overwhelmingly left-liberal and some of them are not particularly tolerant of right of center political views, whether religiously motivated or not.
Certainly, most liberal academics have no objection to religiosity when it is associated with political causes they support. Many liberal and leftist academics are sympathetic to "liberation theology" and other efforts to associate religion with left of center causes. Martin Luther King is a hero to most liberal academics even though he was a Christian minister. Barack Obama's open religiosity doesn't seem to have hurt his image among academics either. The late Robert Drinan was a prominent left-wing law professor and also an ordained Catholic priest. His religion doesn't seem to have attracted any significant academic hostility.
On the other side of the ledger, I know of a considerable number of conservative and libertarian academics - myself included - who are atheists or agnostics. As far as I can tell, the hostility that we sometimes encounter in the academic world because of our political views is not significantly reduced by our lack of religiosity.
While there are probably some academics who are hostile to religion as such independent of its perceived association with political conservatism, this is a relatively minor phenomenon. Certainly, such generalized "theophobia" among academics is far less common than is generalized hostility to atheism in the general public. For example, as I discussed in this article, some 51% of the general public believe that "[i]t is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral and have good values" and 50% would refuse to vote for a "well-qualifed" candidate for president nominated by their party if he were an atheist. By contrast, I doubt that more than a tiny fraction of academics believe that you have to be an atheist or agnostic to "be moral" or would refuse to vote for a presidential candidate of their party merely because he was a religious believer. Indeed, the vast majority of academics are going to support Obama this year, apparently unconcerned by his religious beliefs. Admittedly, I don't have systematic survey data on academics' attitudes on these points and so would welcome correction from anyone who does have such data. But these are my impressions on the basis of many years spent in the academic world, and acquaintance with a wide range of left of center academics.
"Theophobia":
Rick Hills (PrawfsBlawg) writes:
Just a few days ago, I was discussing a mutual friend with a former colleague. The latter was astonished by our mutual friend’s Christianity: “What’s up with that?!” he exclaimed, expressing bewilderment and even nervousness at the thought that a well-regarded -- indeed, by academic standards, famous -- professor could believe in the existence and beneficence of an omniscient and omnipotent God. If was as if our Christian friend had declared that the world was flat or was dabbling in alchemy. My former colleague even worried that, if a serious academic could believe in God, he was capable of believing in, or attempting, anything — attempting to walk across the East River unaided by a water taxi, gunning down students in hallways, speaking in tongues at a faculty meeting, you name it.
Hills goes on to label this attitude "theophobia" and explain why he disagrees with it, among other things because "there is no obviously persuasive reason to believe that religious belief as such has any more harmful consequences than lack thereof."
Here's my quick thought on the subject: I tend to agree that fear of religious belief as such (as opposed to of specific religious beliefs) is probably unjustified, for the factual reasons Hills mentions.
But I take it that many irreligious people who are bewildered by others' religious beliefs aren't afraid of the beliefs so much as they find them factually unfounded — much like they would find beliefs in astrology, ghosts, werewolves, or for that matter the Greco-Roman pantheon to be factually unfounded. For that matter, I take it that even many Christian academics would disapprove, on empiricist rather than theological grounds, of those who say they believe in Zeus, Xenu, the Zodiac, or vampires. Why should we be surprised that irreligious academics would take the same view, but as to factual claims of the existence of God as well as to the other factual claims? (Note that there were some very interesting responses to these arguments in the comments to this post of ours from late 2005.)
This is especially so as to beliefs "in the existence and beneficence of an omniscient and omnipotent God." So perhaps what Prof. Hills is seeing is more disapproval of those who are seen as unduly willing to believe in what the disapproving person sees as fairy tales, rather than disapproval of those who are seen as morally or practically threatening.
"Public Hearing in ... [Sheriff's] Deputy Slaying Case Closed to Public" --
apparently without even any purported legal justification. From the Sacramento Bee:
A public hearing -– in which murder suspect Marco Antonio Topete was to be formally charged Wednesday in the slaying of a Yolo County sheriff's deputy –- was closed to just about everyone except the slain deputy's survivors and his law-enforcement colleagues [about 25 to 40 of them -EV].
Barred from the hearing were the defendant's wife, mother and sister, and members of the general public, including the media.... [D]eputies had locked the door and kept it locked during the hearing....
The Sheriff has now apparently admitted that the deputies' action "was 'a huge mistake.'" The judge in charge of the courthouse is quoted as saying that "The doors are supposed to be unlocked when court is in session. This kind of hearing should have been open to the public. There are no excuses. It shouldn't have happened."
Thanks to my student Jenny Macht for the pointer.
Another Great Satire from The Onion:
Court Reverses Father's Decision to Ground Daughter by Keeping Her from a School Overnight Trip. I just love it how the Onion can take real practices and extrapolate them three steps forward to the utterly absurd.
The article is on what must be some mirror site for The Onion — something in Canada called TheGlobeAndMail.com. And it's odd, but the other stories on the site don't seem that funny. Well, here's an excerpt:
First, the father banned his 12-year-old daughter from going online after she posted photos of herself on a dating site. Then she allegedly had a row with her stepmother, so the father said his girl couldn't go on a school trip.
The girl took the matter to the court ... [and] Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday that the father couldn't discipline his daughter by barring her from the school trip....
Lucie Fortin, the lawyer representing the 12-year-old, said the judge found that depriving the girl of the school trip was an excessive punishment.
She said the girl has already been forbidden to use the Internet and her father also punished her by cancelling her participation in an extracurricular event.
In an odd twist for The Onion, the satire goes on to give some pretty humdrum and not very funny details. (Is The Onion losing its touch?) The story notes that the trip was a three-day outing marking the girl's graduation from sixth grade, and apparently not a part of the school's educational curriculum. The story also notes that the parents are divorced, and "[the girl's] father has legal custody but for the past month she has lived with her mother," but the story describes the matter as a dispute between the girl and the father, not a dispute between the two parents' judgment or a question about whether the mother should get temporary or permanent legal decisionmaking authority.
In any case, it's great humor, despite the excess of realistic detail. Thanks to Dennis Nolan for the pointer. I should note that there's a small chance that the story isn't a satire after all, but, really, given the absurdity, how likely is that?
UPDATE: Commenter David Malmstrom points to another news story that suggests the matter might indeed have been partly a dispute between parents: "The girl's mother allowed her to go on the trip, but because the school wouldn't allow the girl to go unless both parents consented, the girl, with the mother's support took legal action against her father."
But it seems to me the absurdity remains: It's absurd that a judge would step in to decide whether grounding a child from a school trip is "excessive punishment." If the mother petitioned for a change in custody, that would indeed justify (and require) a judge's intervention, because it would involve a major life decision, and would determine which parent should have disciplinary authority -- something the courts have to do in case of a divorce -- rather than whether a particular grounding decision was justified. But when the school policy is that both parents must consent, which is to say that each parent has veto power, and one parent does exercise his veto, it makes no sense for a judge to decide the matter for herself instead of leaving it to the vetoing parent's judgment.
The Post Office and the Origins of the Constitutional Principle of Communications Privacy:
Today, I’ll describe my last example of the phenomenon of a constitutional principle deriving from an embedded characteristic of the Post Office: the Fourth Amendment right of communications privacy. As readers of this blog no doubt know, communications privacy issues have been big news for a long time. Orin Kerr, for example, has written extensively on the question of e-mail privacy, and of course, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won a Pulitzer Prize — and perhaps Woodward and Bernstein treatment for the rest of their careers — for uncovering the NSA’s telecommunications surveillance program. Whole organizations are now devoted to the issue of online privacy, and whole law classes now focus on it. And, of course, just yesterday, the Ninth Circuit addressed the question of Fourth Amendment protection for text messages.
Modern Fourth Amendment privacy law is usually seen as deriving from Justice Brandeis’s seminal dissent in the 1928 case Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 471 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting), a case in which the Supreme Court held that wiretapping a criminal defendant’s telephone didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment. I argue, though, that we need to go further back than Olmstead, back to the eighteenth century. But — and this should come as no surprise if you’ve read my previous posts — rather than back to the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, we need to go back to early postal policy.
Thus, the crux of my claim is that the constitutional principle of communications privacy didn’t actually come from the Fourth Amendment or the Constitution at all; it came from eighteenth-century postal policy. Again, as with my two previous posts, I will discuss a little eighteenth-century history and then some constitutional law.
Early Postal History — Postal Privacy
So let me start with postal privacy, the idea that the government cannot open sealed mail without a warrant (even though it is of course the government that owns and operates the postal network). Where did postal privacy first come from? Though there is no simple answer and the ultimate embedding of postal privacy into the institution of the Post Office took time, postal privacy became a central feature of the legal regime that defined the American Post Office from its very beginning.
In fact, one of the most important moments in the development of postal privacy occurred with the establishment of the American Post Office as separate and distinct from the colonial post office during the Revolutionary War. I include lots of details in the second of the two articles, but the key point is this: the reason the Continental Congress first adopted its own postal network in 1775 was in large part that the rebels wanted a communications network that was free from British surveillance. Remember, these people were very likely viewed as traitors — even before the outbreak of the war — and they needed to communicate across long distances to plan their opposition to the British.
At the end of the war, this fear of government surveillance was then written into the law regulating the Post Office. The Continental Congress passed its first comprehensive postal Ordinance in 1782, and it included a prohibition on the opening of mail without a warrant. Eventually, the prohibition was written into the same 1792 Post Office Act I’ve mentioned during my past two blog posts. Over time, the statutory prohibition on opening mail became embedded into the fabric of the postal network.
Most important for my purposes, this entire development was independent of the drafting and ratification of the Fourth Amendment. [… although, in an interesting coincidence, Jefferson — as Secretary of State — officially notified the state governors of both the ratification of the Bill of Rights and the 1792 Post Office Act in the very same letter. See Bernard Schwartz, The Bill of Rights: A Documentary History (1971), vol. 2, at 1203.]
Constitutional Law — Communications Privacy and the Fourth Amendment
As I noted above, Justice Brandeis’s dissent in Olmstead — which would have held that warrantless wiretapping of a telephone violated the Fourth Amendment — is largely viewed as the intellectual underpinning for Berger v. New York, 389 U.S. 41 (1967), and Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), the two cases that form the backbone of the modern constitutional principle of communications privacy. [I want to emphasize here that I’m referring here only to the general principles embodied in Brandeis’s Olmstead dissent, since Orin Kerr has specifically argued that Olmstead has not been overruled.] [CORRECTION: In the comments, Orin corrects me here. I should have said that he has argued that the Court has never adopted Brandeis's Olmstead dissent. My mistake.] But Justice Brandeis’s dissent had its precursors too. Crucial among the precedents on which Brandeis relied was the 1878 case Ex parte Jackson, 96 U.S. 727 (1878), the first case in which the Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment preserved a realm of communications privacy.
In Ex parte Jackson, the Court ruled, in dicta, that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the government from opening a sealed letter without a warrant. The details of Ex parte Jackson aren’t crucial. What is important, though, is that the Court simply announced this principle, and did so without citation to any cases or constitutional history. The remarkable thing about this is that the rest of the Court’s opinion — the case’s holding is that the Constitution permits Congress to prohibit the mailing of lottery advertisements — is littered with references to constitutional history.
Still, if the Court was inclined to rule on the Fourth Amendment question, we shouldn’t really be surprised that there is no reference to the drafting and ratification of the Fourth Amendment. As best I have been able to determine, there is no evidence to suggest that the Fourth Amendment was originally meant to encompass postal privacy. Modern scholars of the history of the Fourth Amendment debate a lot of different things, but no historian of the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment that I’ve found makes any mention of postal privacy, and the only scholar I’ve found who directly addresses the notion that Ex parte Jackson might be based on the original understanding, Telford Taylor, concludes that it isn’t.
So, in short, the statutory prohibition on opening letters became an institutional feature of the Post Office, which in turn led to Ex parte Jackson. The constitutional principle of communications privacy thus originally came not from the Constitution, but rather from postal policy.
Tomorrow, I’ll sketch out some concluding thoughts about the examples I’ve described the past three days.
5-4 Split Watch:
The Supreme Court handed down five more opinions today. SCOTUSBlog has the details. Only one of the five, Kentucky Retirement Systems v. EEOC, was 5-4, and it produced an interesting line-up. Justice Breyer wrote the majority opinion, joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Stevens, Souter and Thomas. Justice Kennedy filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, and Alito. Also worth noting is that the Court's preemption holding in Chamber of Commerce v. Brown was written by Justice Stevens for a seven justice majority. Only Justices Breyer and Ginsburg dissented.
With today's decisions, the percentage of cases decided by a 5-4 margin this term is below 15 percent. With only ten more cases to go, it seems this term's level of unanimity, and relative lack of ideological division, may resemble OT2005 more than OT2006. Of course, some big cases remain in the queue, so we'll have to wait until next week to know for sure.
Sue OPEC?
Thomas Evans suggests a new target for activist state Attorneys General: the member states of OPEC. The attorneys general of the various states should sue OPEC as an alien or, pleading alternatively, as a foreign state. (A joint action by the attorneys general is the method the states used to collectively sue tobacco companies, Microsoft and health maintenance organizations.)
The states should contend that Article III of the Constitution outweighs the act of state doctrine. Respect for the sovereignty of a foreign government for acts “done within its own territory” does not, even if very liberally construed, protect decisions reached by a cartel based in Austria that directs 13 nations to sell their product at inflated prices to customers outside their boundaries. If the states won the case, the court could recover substantial damages based on assets and commercial activities of OPEC member nations in the United States. Such a suit would face substantial obstacles, Evans notes, including separation of powers concerns, but he still thinks it is a good idea, even if only to focus public attention on OPEC's "illegal" activities.
I am sure some lawyers think litigation is an answer to nearly every problem, but I am not one of them. Assuming OPEC is a sufficiently strong cartel to be a major concern, I think there are better alternative courses than seeking to sue OPEC's members in federal court. Even assuming a lawsuit could bear fruit (and I doubt it could), I am inclined to think destabilization of OPEC makes more sense than confrontation. Cartels are notoriously difficult to maintain, all the more so when they face external competition. So, why wouldn't an increase in oil production and development in non-OPEC states undermine OPEC's influence? Increasing the dynamic and competitive nature of energy markets would seem to make more sense than trying to tie up sovereign oil producing states in litigation.
Will Energy Woes Help Wind Power?
President Bush and Senator McCain have both called for renewed offshore oil and gas drilling. With gasoline prices inching above $4 per gallon, political opposition to such development may be on the ebb. What about opposition to offshore wind development? The WSJ investigates. While there is no formal moratorium against offshore wind power, environmentalist and NIMBY opposition has stalled every sea-based wind project proposed in the U.S. thus far. Europe, on the other hand, has over 20 offshore wind farms in operation.
No Monopoly on Economic Nonsense:
In today's WSJ, Karl Rove observes both John McCain and Barack Obama are proving "that in close elections during tough economic times, candidates for president can be economically illiterate and irresponsibly populist." He criticizes Obama for embracing a Carter-esque windfall profits tax, and McCain for seeking to direct how oil companies invest their own profits. He concludes:
Messrs. Obama and McCain both reveal a disturbing animus toward free markets and success. It is uncalled for and self-defeating for presidential candidates to demonize American companies. It is understandable that Mr. Obama, the most liberal member of the Senate, would endorse reckless policies that are the DNA of the party he leads. But Mr. McCain, a self-described Reagan Republican, should know better.
Rove is not known for his mastery of energy policy or economic principles, but in this case he's right on target.
Underappreciated Advantages of US Pro Sports Over International Soccer:
The conjunction of the Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals and the European Soccer Championship led me to reflect on two important advantage of US pro sports over international soccer: soccer often promotes nationalist and ethnic violence and provides propaganda fodder for repressive or corrupt governments, while US pro sports (with extremely rare exceptions) do not.
European and Latin American soccer rivalries are commonly linked to nationalistic and ethnic antagonisms (e.g. - England vs. Germany, England vs. Ireland, Germany vs. Poland, etc.). Even the fan bases of teams in internal national soccer leagues often break down along ethnic lines. This conjunction of sports rivalries and nationalistic/ethnic rivalries often leads to violence. The most notorious example is the 1969 "Soccer War" between El Salvador and Honduras - a conflict which might have been funny except for the fact that 2000 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. And there are many lesser cases of riots and other violence resulting from soccer games.
Many European and especially Latin American soccer teams are also closely associated with governments. This often allows repressive and corrupt regimes to obtain propaganda benefits from the teams' victories. For example, the repressive Brazilian and Argentinian military governments of the 1970s increased their public support as a result of their national teams' World Cup victories in 1970 and 1978. In Europe, Mussolini, Franco, and the communist government of the Soviet Union derived similar benefits from their teams' successes. On a lesser scale, incompetent or corrupt local governments in Europe sometimes benefit from the victories of local clubs.
In the United States, by contrast, pro sports rivalries are based on geographic divisions that have little or no connection to deeper social antagonisms over race, religion, or political ideology. As a result, even the most heated US sports rivalries, such as the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, rarely result in violence between fans of opposing teams - and never in the form of the large-scale soccer riots that we sometimes see in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The recent incident in which a Yankees fan killed a Red Sox fan was shocking in part because it was so exceptional. It would not have been nearly so unusual in the annals of European, Asian, or Latin American soccer. The key difference is that there is no broader Boston-New York conflict that goes beyond the sports rivalry, while the same cannot be said for many international soccer rivalries.
And because US sports teams have relatively few associations with government (with the important exception of indefensible government subsidies for sports stadiums), politicians don't benefit from their victories. The Red Sox and Patriots' championships in 2004 didn't do anything to help Massachusetts Senator John Kerry's presidential bid. This year's Celtics victory probably won't help Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick overcome his political troubles. And President Bush isn't getting any political benefit from the Texas Rangers' recent offensive prowess.
Obviously, I'm not saying that there is anything intrinsically wrong with soccer as a sport. I enjoy baseball and basketball much more than soccer, but that is purely a matter of personal preference. Nor am I saying that Europeans and Latin Americans shouldn't root for their soccer teams. The problem is not soccer as such, but the social and political organization of the sport in much of the world.
US pro sports leagues are sometimes criticized for failing to engage the deeper loyalties of fans as much as soccer does in other countries. On balance, it's actually a good thing that they don't. Related Posts (on one page): - Underappreciated Advantages of US Pro Sports Over International Soccer:
- Championship No. 17:
- An Amazing Celtics Comeback:
Scott Glover Defends His Description of Judge Kozinski's Files:
In this very interesting radio program on the LA Times' story about Judge Kozinski's fileserver, there's an interesting moment in which the LA Times reporter who broke the story, Scott Glover, defends his description of the video of a man running away from a donkey as a "video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal." I apologize for blogging about the topic, as I gather most VC readers have had enough of this story, but Glover's defense strikes me as so completely absurd that I wanted to comment. In the radio segment, Glover argues that his description of the video does not in any way suggest that the video contained or suggested a sexual interest in animals. (Which it didn't, to be clear; I just watched it for the first time, and it's clear the man is trying his best to avoid such contact). Here's what Glover says, at around the 10:20 mark: Let's talk about the image of the farm animal, which I believe I described as a "video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal."
This has caused quite a buzz, and I'm not sure why. If you look up "cavorting" in the dictionary, it talked about "to prance" or "to romp about." There's not a sexual connotation there. . .
If I thought [the video] was an attempt at bestiality, I certainly would have described it as such if there was evidence to support that. I was just describing what is there, there was no attempt to make it seem like something else. That strikes me as a remarkably lame explanation. When used to describe a group acting together, the word " cavort" means "to have lively or boisterous fun; [to] romp." True, there are many uses of the term that have no sexual connotation. But a man running away in fear to avoid being sexually assaulted by a donkey is not cavorting: he is not enjoying himself. And it's hard to imagine nonsexual ways that a half dressed man could enjoy himself with a sexually aroused farm animal. It seems to me that the sexual connotation is obvious, and that Glover's defense is absurd. Thanks to Patterico for the link; he is also on the radio program together with blogfather Eugene.
Championship No. 17:
For Boston sports fans, nothing will ever equal the joy that we experienced when the Red Sox Reversed the Curse in 2004. But this Celtics win is probably the second most satisfying Boston sports victory in my lifetime. It's great to see the franchise return to glory after all the anguish that it and the fans went through since the death of Len Bias. The Celtics set several records in the process, including largest margin of victory in a clinching game (second-largest in any Finals game), biggest comeback in a finals game (Game 4), most steals in a finals game (18 in Game 6); and most 3 pointers in an NBA finals series (Ray Allen, with 22 - shattering the previous record of 17). And of course it was great to do it against the Celtics historic rival - the Lakers. We don't hate the Lakers like we do the Yankees, and in fact I have great respect for the Lakers players, tradition, and organization. But - in part for that very reason - it still means more to win against them than any other NBA team.
It isn't a great time in politics, law, and public policy - my main areas of interest. But I take some small comfort in the recent successes of my favorite Boston sports teams, the Red Sox and Celtics. I'm only sad that Red Auerbach and Dennis Johnson didn't live to see this victory.
UPDATE: In the initial post, I accidentally stated that the Celtics' record comeback was in Game 2 rather than Game 4. The mistake has now been corrected.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Interesting Background to the AP's Copyright Enforcement Story:
Robert Cox has the scoop. The basic conclusion: "[T]he AP is not on some wild rampage through the blogosphere, lawyering up to to go after every blogger who quotes an AP story in any way. Yet that is how this story has been portrayed . . . " Thanks to Instapundit for the link.
"What Did It Mean To 'Bear Arms' in 1791?"
Linguist Bill Poser, blogging at Language Log (one of my favorite blogs), comments on the Linguists' Brief filed in support of the collective rights view in D.C. v. Heller.
|