Harvard Law & Policy Review:
The American Constitution Society has launched an official journal, the Harvard Law & Policy Review. (This is not to be confused with the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, a journal founded in 1978 that leans conservative/libertarian and is famous for its outstanding executive editing in Volume 20.)
The HLPR is accompanied by HLPR Online, "a forum for progressive debate about new and unorthodox solutions to the most pressing problems facing the nation." There are a bunch of interesting essays up on the site's webpage by the like of Laurence Tribe, Robert Post & Reva Siegel, Joe Singer, and David Barron.
I was particularly interested in this essay by Ian Bassin, former President of the Yale ACS student chapter. An excerpt:
For a reaction to the new journal posted at the conservative Weekly Standard, click here.
The HLPR is accompanied by HLPR Online, "a forum for progressive debate about new and unorthodox solutions to the most pressing problems facing the nation." There are a bunch of interesting essays up on the site's webpage by the like of Laurence Tribe, Robert Post & Reva Siegel, Joe Singer, and David Barron.
I was particularly interested in this essay by Ian Bassin, former President of the Yale ACS student chapter. An excerpt:
Ask a group of self-described liberal law students to articulate what they stand for and you’re likely to get either rambling, incoherent replies or blank stares. Those who do answer may touch upon issues ranging from equality to opportunity to reproductive freedom, but are unlikely to be able to unite these ideas under any consistent philosophical framework. Those who have a philosophical framework are lucky if they can explain it in less than 30,000 words.I wonder, do law students (on the left or the right) agree that this is true?
The single greatest problem of contemporary legal liberalism is that too many of us are at a loss for words to describe what we stand for. One irony is that our past success may be to blame for this current failure. Many of us grew up in such liberal atmospheres that we were never challenged to defend liberal principles or to even grapple with the difficult questions at their core. As American society has polarized over the last generation—mine is the first for whom red and blue are defining traits—more of us have grown up in homogenous intellectual spheres. Instead of having our peers challenge our ideas, we play yes men to ourselves, nodding in agreement on what we believe without ever having to utter a definitive phrase. . . .
Compare this with what a conservative at many of today’s left-leaning law schools must experience. In most of her classes, the only conservative voice she hears is her own. In order to cling to her beliefs, she must defend them tenaciously with both friend and foe. Confronted with a chorus of opposing arguments, her education is an intellectual boot camp. She’s been tested, her positions forged in fire, and she’s emerged a refined soldier for her cause. The liberal, on the other hand, has spent his period of intellectual maturation on the couch so to speak. Every once in a while either throwing or receiving that knowing look, but never having to exert too much effort to get it right. While the conservative emerges muscular and defined, the liberal is paunchy and a bit slow.
For a reaction to the new journal posted at the conservative Weekly Standard, click here.
Related Posts (on one page):
- We're Not the Judean People's Front's Harvard Law & Policy Review:
- Harvard Law & Policy Review:
in other instances it is more difficult to take the conservative/libertarian stance b/c it often sounds heartless. when you make an argument that there shouldn't be welfare or a minimum wage, what do you say when somebody replies with something like "but what about those less fortunate?"
i'm a full fledged capitalist, but i do agree that it can be difficult selling the position to others.
Why should it be surprising that law students, who are a product of a post-secondary environment devoid of intellectual and philosophical rigor, are unable to put forward a short, coherent explanation of their political views? They've never been asked to explore politics. If they have, it's been through the distorting lens of vapid media soundbites and a politician's spin.
Conservatives do not emerge muscular and defined; they emerge calcified. The popular conception of conservatism has no consistent philosophical tradition to draw upon which would lend the proper musculature. There are nods to Locke or Hobbes or even Nozick, but they sound the names in the hope of borrowing the reputations of those authors rather than their ideas. How many alleged liberals have read Rawls or Bentham?
I majored in philosophy and spent more than a few classes and evenings discussing proper political philosophy. I consider myself a classical liberal, which today's audience knows as a libertarian. But until the modern liberals can appreciate the difference, I won't hold out much hope that the latest crops of law students will display a true political philosophy, which is what Mr. Bassin was lamenting.
A typical example is Social Security discussions:
A: It is to keep old people from poverty.
B: Discuss that for a while.
C: The idea of means testing to exclude the rich comes up.
D: Social Security is an old-age pension so you can't means test.
E: It gets a really crappy return for a pension
F: The return doesn't matter, it is to keep old people from poverty.
G: Sigh.
He's mocking himself and doesn't even realize it, but that's what liberals do.
(And apropos of nothing, hurrah Prof. Singer! An excellent professor among excellent professors.)
I would add to that (at least from a philosophical perspective) the liberal view of an expanded 14th amendment. To me, the only mistakes of Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas, etc., is the misplaced focus on privacy. Again, we're talking philosophy here -- "what the law should be" and not "what the law is." In that regard, I think liberals simply disagree with the several recent states' S Ct opinions rejecting, for example, the application of Loving v Virginia to the right for homosexuals to marry.
Those two topics -- (1) free markets v. social justice and (2) realistic equality -- I think provide a substantial base for a liberal philosophy.
I definitely agree that this insular community that is created does prevent their ideas from being properly challenged. I could go and on with examples, but i'll save you all.
Her response was, "Basically everything you just said, I believe the opposite."
Well...why? Can you explain?
"No, all I really heard was right-wing blah blah blah wah wah wah blah blah blah."
How do you have thoughtful discussion with that? I think the author of the quote is mostly right. The liberal students can take the correctness of their politics for granted and most of the professors they encounter will do nothing to make them question that moral certainty. Arguments are unnecessary. There is also a sense I get from true believers on both sides that holding passionate beliefs, even those not really supported by any evidence, is somehow admirable. That as long as the person really believes it that fact somehow insulates him from criticism.
But I also think that, inasmuch as the liberal mindset is anchored in the holder's sense of his own compassion and inherent goodness, argument is unnecessary because he CARES. He feels passionately, so what if the facts don't exactly line up neatly with his political world view? And, again, this moral preening isn't really called into question in the normal course of a legal education.
I made a joke to my new friend that she was the first real live Democrat I had ever met. She said the same thing about herself and Republicans and I don't think she was kidding.
I wouldnt be so bothered by it if even 10 percent of them could make compelling arguments for why their way of doing things isnt horribly broken. Sadly, it always seems to come back to the moral arguments for the welfare state and how their vision can trump math, economics and the constitution. More often they dont even consider it and just get annoyed if you try to muddy the waters with silly questions like "how will you pay for it without destroying the economy?"
When you take from people that have, they produce less. And when you give to people that have less, they also produce less. Indeed, they have a disincentive to produce at all. So, you have a govt that shifts money around and makes just about everybody worse off by destroying wealth.
That's the basic difference between Libertarians (and some conservatives) and Liberals. The former believe that doing something that feels good but produces nothing or produces less than cost, is not good enough. Liberals just go on their motives, regardless of the outcome.
The majesty of magical thinking.
Seriously, good for Mr. Bassin for offering that analysis. He's exactly right, and the sooner others realize it the better off liberal law students will be. As he and others like JR Watson point out, there's no doubt they're in a hole (as a whole) due to collective atrophy.
Now, this may have been a combination of tuning-out to some degree my 1L year and taking hardcore-legal classes (neither corporate classes nor "law and basketweaving and puppy dogs" classes) with carefully selected professors my second and third year. But I found my views sufficiently challenged by a range of professors and peers, both conservative, "liberal", and leftist.
That's a second note: "liberals" make up a majority of law students, but only in the sense that "liberals" equal the modern centrist establishment of the modern Democratic party - these people are globally pretty centrist or even center-right. Actual leftists, in my view, were as persecuted as conservatives - even more so, as while conservatives have tended to be well-organized and politically motivated, with basic (if simplistic and generally wrong) mantras, leftists faced much more criticism and rarely got the time to put together the type of nuanced response that their forms of critical legal studies, legal realism, and socialism required.
But ACS doesn't represent that third group - NLG does, and NLG suffers from being a bit wacky.
At base, the problem is that the -world- is full of suffering. There's a tremendous amount of it. You could give away every dollar you have, immediately, in the most efficient manner possible, and there'd still be tremendous suffering - the difference would be minimal. The US could utterly impoverish itself overnight giving away charity, and there would be a marked reduction in starvation and want among the recipients, but even that wouldn't be enough to stop suffering - it'd just shift cheap suffering to expensive suffering (starvation to cancer from industrial pollutants and heart disease from high cholesterol, by way of example?) Naturally, it'd also bankrupt us in the process, increasing the amount of suffering significantly.
In the long run, reducing suffering requires scientific advances. The more we learn, the more resources we have available and the more efficiently we can alleviate suffering with those resources. Take the problem of world hunger. There were not a few people in the 1970s who were of the opinion that there was a worldwide food crisis - that food would be so scarce in the future that it would become itself a strategic resource. In fact, the world population does continue to increase, but we're no longer worried about the supply of food, because science kept up - we have advanced agriculture techniques, new and better strains of staple crops, better fertilizers, what have you, and we produce enough food that nobody HAS to go hungry. In fact, it's cheap enough that the cost of food aid to counter the occasional drought isn't even significant anymore. Because of technology, food shortages are now almost entirely a product of political decisions at the local level, and many fewer people are starving to death. This is good, no?
EVERYTHING in society is like that. Medical care is getting better, so we can live longer and healthier lives. Industrial production is becoming more productive, so that less effort is needed to make goods, meaning more of us can enjoy those goods. I don't think anybody here is prepared to say that we haven't advanced culturally - the internet is a good enough argument of that...)
But to get all this advancement, you have to keep society up and running - in other words, you have to say "I cannot solve the world's problems today, I -must- accept that no matter what I do, people will suffer," and furthermore work to make that society a better place. Yes, that might mean comforting the afflicted - but every improvement still counts, even if it's just making people that much more comfortable or happy. Shoot, being polite to people is part of it.
If you've accepted that society cannot end suffering now, but can reduce suffering and provide better lives if it's left to run and advance, then you can answer the "but what about the people that are hurting now?" It's a little cold, sure, but pretty rational.
And that's the kind of argument you learn to put together if you're a conservative in a university. Fortunately, it's not as bad as it used to be - I recently went back to round out the degree, and you'd be surprised how many conservatives are running around. On the other hand, it -is- Houston...
My younger brother and I get into political discussions all the time. He's the kind of liberal that reads more Marx than Adams, I'm a Republican who'd be a Libertarian if they got past Lyndon LaRouche. Our family has learned to duck and cover when we get going. But he's a hell of a lot sharper on several issues than "the liberal average" because he has to cut his teeth on me, and vice versa. (The fact that we're both pretty far up the bell curve, intellectually speaking, doesn't hurt here.) We're also a lot more moderate on certain issues than average. He's a nuclear power advocate, I've voted in favor of gay marriage.
It's tough to talk about "the average" of somebody, because if we're going to be frank, the average of ANYTHING isn't going to be able to hold up the philosophical underpinnings. There are lots of liberals who've never been challenged about the central themes of their philosophy, but there are also a number of conservatives for whom thinking starts and stops with the Bible (or, more often, with what their preacher told them was in the Bible... I've had my share of arguments on that end too!)
I do find that people don't give you much flak for being opposed to them politically if they understand, at the same time, that you're a lot smarter than they are. Not exactly a solution available to the general public, but I admit that I take shameless advantage of it...
It was everything I could do to keep from laughing. I just said, "I wouldn't have said it if I didn't think it."
After he recovered his composure, he and I fenced at it for about three or four minutes before the rest of the class came to his rescue.
I wasn't really winning, mind you... the philosophical differences were too extreme to allow for "victory" of any kind in that debate. But the rest of the class (really about twelve people out of sixty) decided I was wrong, and proceeded to pretty much just form the consensus that I was evil and bad and not worth listening to.
For the record, this was Crim Law and had to do with the handling of a hypothetical "untreatably insane, highly dangerous convict who cannot function in society or be held responsible for his actions." Hey, it was the professor's hypo, not mine. I said that the proper thing to do with rabid dogs is to put them out of their misery.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this doesn't strike me as a particularly revolutionary idea... nor a particularly illiberal one, but what do I know?
Basically, an unprincipled faction of '60s and '70s liberals took over the US campus culture and robbed the next generation of liberals of the intellectual diversity necessary to develop actual ideas. But at least they all spent 4 years feeling really good about themselves, so I guess it's a wash.
However, I'm not sure another journal is the answer - liberals, for all the problems they have this day, have no shortness of places to publish, including the very ACS friendly Harvard Journal of Legislation.
Someone above mentioned debates over Affirmative Action. We had several heated debates in class, but the majority was clearly anti-affirmative action. This may have been because many white students in the room felt cheated that they didn't get into a better school or get more scholarship money. But it was up to the minority of the class to defend Affirmative Action.
A key example from this year: the Federalist Society's first event - a panel discussion - put forth the competing ideas of Professor Charles Fried, Professor Steven Calabresi, and (liberal) Professor Larry Tribe. The first ACS event? A lecture by Professor Tribe. While liberals are busy preaching to one another, conservatives and libertarians are engaged in meaningful debate that challenges the full political spectrum.
What remains to be seen is whether the Harvard Law &Policy Review will actually engage opposing viewpoints in order to strengthen liberal ideals, or if the journal will be yet another avenue in which liberals pat each others' backs.
In the meantime, I remain grateful for my liberal education, which has taught me to challenge liberal and conservative ideas alike, and in the process has made me a better conservative and lawyer.
I don't think it's fair to say that liberals are intellectually "paunchy and slow." To the extent that the commentators suggest that liberal law professors have no ideas or intellectual rigor, I think that's a mistake. They merely outnumber the conservative professors with ideas and intellectual rigor. One seeking to find the good conservatives needs to expend more effort to do so, and the Federalist Society is a great help in that regard.
I think that the ACS's practice of emulating the Federalist Society is a great thing. Both organizations encourage people to think more seriously about issues that--I think--are important to think seriously about. So good for them for recognizing the traps into which liberals often fall and for trying to learn from their enemies. If the ACS is actually going to promote honest debate in the way that I think the FedSoc has (though some may disagree with me on this), good for them, and may the best ideas win.
My law school classes had a vocal minority of Conservatives who were willing to speak up for the "cause" and present the "other side."
I object, furthermore, to the implication that Conservative students DO have a "consistent philosophical framework". The same students who were taking the right-wing "economic analysis" approach (never mind corporate responsibility) in tort law were taking up the "personal responsibility" talking points in criminal law (never mind economic analysis of the criminal justice system.)
While the tone is a bit disagreeable, the piece raises a good point. A "progressive vision of the law" is little more than "results we like." Dahlia Lithwick makes a similar point here, and I think Ian Bassin recognizes that the ACS has its work cut out for it along these lines.
Tell a conservative or libertarian that health care is a "right," and he'll have heard it a million times before, and will know the arguments on each side. Tell a liberal that antidiscrimination law is a violation of property rights, and he'll stare at you, shocked, and think you're a member of the KKK. It's not merely that they think it's wrong, but that they think it's so beyond the pale that they've never even considered it. Tell a conservative or libertarian that free trade doesn't work and he'll have heard the debate. Tell a liberal that the New Deal did not save the economy and he'll look at you like you just announced the earth was flat.
Justin illustrates the cocooning perfectly:He lives in a world where even conservatives support a massive expansion of Medicare and the Department of Education (a quarter century after Reagan proposed abolishing the latter), and he thinks that the "modern centrist establishment" is "center right."
Bassin had it right: liberals won all the battles -- at least all the domestic policy battles -- from the 1930s on, and so they don't know what to do with themselves now.
Not to mention, there is going to be a serious bidding war between the L&P Review and CR-CL. Respected academics will more likely want to publish in CR-CL, because it is older and has a lot of cachet. This means that the L&P Review will get the lesser legal articles and be stuck mostly with policy articles. Which, I fear, will turn it into basically a screed for the left. Sure, some might say the JLPP is the same for the right, but at least there, it has a monopoly on conservative *law* at HLS, not just policy -- something the L&P Review *won't* have on the left.
Furthermore, conservatives (Kozinski, Scalia, Randy Barnett, amongst others, I'm looking in your direction) tend to think that the Constitution just happens to textually (or, if that fails, originally - or if that fails, they'll think somethimg up) embody their own political values.
This type of haughty, bland assertions that their side is simply right and their opponents are not only wrong but simply disingenuous seems to be en vogue amongst the "patriotic" right of the blogosphere today, but that neither makes it so nor makes it on point in this discussion.
I call shenanigans.
I'm keeping my mouth shut, and I'm going to stay "in the closet." I don't see "coming out" at all--what do I get out of it?
And poor Richard Posner. He gets no respect whatsoever. People say he has a cruel heart because he uses economic formulas. That's what the mushy middle is all about: showing you've got "heart" rather than ideas. Maybe that's why Bush chose to call himself a "compassionate conservative." I'm thinking Karl Rove figured all of this out a long time before anyone else.
I'm a compassionate law student. And a quiet one.
Justin, aren't you proving the author's point by suggesting that the majority of liberal students don't participate in serious intellectual debates about the issues of our day?
It's true that the Harvard Law Review will occasionally publish articles by conservatives/libertarians. But at HLS, there is the HLR and there are all the other journals, and the HLR isn't in the same camp as them from the standpoint of student decisions of which journal to join. The other journals all have a left-of-center bent (except JOLT) which doesn't have a lot of political stuff. Here's the list:
* Black Letter Law Journal
* Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review
* Environmental Law Review
* Human Rights Journal
* Harvard International Law Journal
* Journal of Law &Gender (formerly Women's Law Journal)
* Journal of Law and Technology
* Journal on Legislation
* Latino Law Review
* Negotiation Law Review
* Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left
So for left of center students, this is simply one more left of center HLS journal to pick from.
As a libertarian, I have strong disagreements with liberals and conservatives both, and no particular affinity for either. From that somewhat objective standpoint, I have noticed some distinct trends with liberal-leaning students.
First, they seem far less inclined than conservative students to attend events featuring speakers or perspectives with which they disagree. Thus, while many conservative students seem eager to duke it out with invited speakers, most (but by no means all) liberals tend to simply boycott the event instead. Second, it has absolutely been my experience that liberal students tend to be much less knowledgeable about the basic arguments that have been made on different sides of a given issue.
While liberals certainly don't give anything away to their conservative classmates intellectually (to the contrary in many cases), their tendency to be less well-versed on the issues they espouse does tend to leave them looking somewhat "paunchy" by comparison.
First, liberal students they seem far less inclined than conservatives to attend events featuring speakers or perspectives with which they disagree. Thus, while conservative students are typically eager to show up and "duke it out," liberals seem more inclined to simply boycott speakers whose message they don't like. Second, it has definitely been my experience that liberal students tend to be less knowledgeable than conservatives about the basic arguments surrounding any given issue. Certainly there are exceptions to that rule -- sometimes quite notable exceptions -- but the general trend is unmistakeable.
While I don't believe liberal students give anything away to their conservative classmates intellectually (to the contrary in many cases), their tendency to be less well-versed on the issues they espouse -- together with their greater willingness to play the moral-outrage trump card in order to shut down debate that has become uncomfortable -- does leave them looking "paunchy" by comparison. I find that particularly unfortunate because what passes for conservatism these days is becoming an increasingly rich source of truly appalling ideas and policies.
Not that it matters any, but Rush Limbaugh has been saying that over the airwaves that for years.
To start with, I'll offer a representative anecdote like many others have earlier. In my 1L Torts class (taught by a right-wing-off-the-cliffer), even the professor was shocked by how many students disagreed with his devil's advocate suggestion that perhaps doctors receive unfair special treatment in negligence standards (for medical malpractice), compared with other individuals who have life-and-death jobs, like say aircraft mechanics. Of course, that was easily followed up by asking how many students' parents were doctors or similar medical professionals. The answer: a very large number of them. Surprise! To think that law students aren't the sons and daughters of janitors and coal miners....how could it be!
It's just simple self-interest. Higher income parents ==> Higher educatioms ==> More likely to go to law school, and the end result is a plurality of self-interested young libertarian zombies spouting Ayn Rand-like screeds against regulation and all other things that just coincidentally might interfere with their own wallets and their rationalizations of their positions of power and privilege.
Of course, affirmative action is solidly despised at my school, as others have noted. It's hardly stereotypical liberal heaven. Of course, to again agree with previous commenters, I'm sure it's also self-interest, since even the white liberals probably feel like they got screwed out of some of the elite schools by undeserving minorities.
I would also add that after the libertarianoids, the loudest groups are centrist limousine libs, followed by the apathetics, and trailing behind would be the social conservative/true right-wingers and the true leftists would be way behind. Shockingly, the two ideologies you might expect to be most common among the "working-class" segement of the population (left- and right-wing populism) are both exceedingly rare.
But then again, maybe my school is just weird. (and it's not George Mason!)
Not to sound like one of those tiresome old-timers, but in those days conservatism barely even registered on the scope: the prevailing atmosphere of liberalism was so omnipresent that you really did feel weird dissenting from it in class.
Ironically, I felt I had more in common with some of the real left-wing radicals than I did with the instructors. And the feeling was to some degree mutual: I knew one hard-core leftist who approvingly quoted Reagan on tax withholding, and how it anaesthetized the people to the rapaciousness of government.
During the 1976 presidential campaign, when I supported Reagan, the guy whom I had the most in common with was a supporter of Fred Harris (!).
Bottom line: if as a conservative on the campus in the 1970s you weren't prepared to articulate a comprehensive defense of the conservative position, you might as well not bother to make the argument.
Thanks for proving the point!
Oops, rhetorical question.
Here everyone gets fair dibs at comment without being confronted by a sea of hostile, dismissive co-commenters: argument is taken seriously, and my sense is that on most threads, liberals and conservatives get equal screen time.
On CrookedTimber? You're lucky if you don't get treated as a pariah/condescended to/assumed to be an idiot for daring to question the prevailing orthodoxy.
It is an accurate reflection of Bassin's underlying point.
For a moment there, I thought you said "intellectual mastrubation". It seems to fit the general liberal ideal.
I agree that Scalia is a conservative, and like Barnett, seems to sometimes read the text of the Constitution as embodying his political views. This problem, unfortunately, is widespread across the political spectrum. A bit more seriousness about original intent would solve this problem.
Lyndon LaRouche is and has always been a Democrat. He has never been a Libertarian.
Cling to the party of Foley, Abramoff, DeLay, and Bush if you want, but don't blame it on LaRouche.
The professors were all quite open to conservative or libertarian arguments, even if they openly disagreed with them. The professors kept tabs on who the conservatives were so that they could be called out to present the other side of an issue. The liberal students, however, were so obnoxious that they would hiss fellow students making conservative points.
Moral posturing was often substituted for logical reasoning.
A key example from this year: the Federalist Society's first event - a panel discussion - put forth the competing ideas of Professor Charles Fried, Professor Steven Calabresi, and (liberal) Professor Larry Tribe. The first ACS event? A lecture by Professor Tribe. While liberals are busy preaching to one another, conservatives and libertarians are engaged in meaningful debate that challenges the full political spectrum.
I agree with Bassin's general point, but CrimsonGuest, that's baloney. Liberals in law school get good exposure to conservative theories, whether or not they're forced to refine their own. What do you think the Federalist Society and Fellowships do all day? If you haven't been getting enough exposure, then get out more often. And your example hardly proves your point; the first events of the year? Why is that relevant? The ACS hosts discussions as well as lectures, just as the FS does.
o'connuh, j:
Here everyone gets fair dibs at comment without being confronted by a sea of hostile, dismissive co-commenters: argument is taken seriously, and my sense is that on most threads, liberals and conservatives get equal screen time.
On CrookedTimber? You're lucky if you don't get treated as a pariah/condescended to/assumed to be an idiot for daring to question the prevailing orthodoxy.
I think you're more or less right about the VC, but it's not because of the politics of the blog. There are echo chambers on both the left and the right; probably the majority of both. See, i.e., LGF.
I don't buy this. It's undercut by Texas v Johnson, or Hamdi (I think that was the detainee case where Scalia dissented with Stevens), by the dissent Morrison v. Olson. by Kozinski's vote in the Seattle deseg case now before the S Ct.
by contrast, I can't think of one S Ct case in which a liberal leaning justice voted vs his presumed policy preferences, save maybe Tex v Johnson, when Kunstler apparently so angered Stevens that he went with the dissent. point some out to me if I'm wrong though.
Ah, but do consider like with like - CrookedTimber likes to think of itself as the intellectual liberal-left equivalent of VC. Bassin's point is reflected by the relative 'openess' of the comment threads in either blog.
If we agree that CrookedTimber is more of an echochamber, shriller, more dismissive, less intellectually serious (sorry, but snark/posturing is not a replacement for reasoned argument), the question is - why the contrast in attitudes?
The salient difference is politics (not because liberals are inherently uncritical, but because of the reasons Bassin talked about).
This sounds like it ought to be some sort of joke.
Is it? If so, why is it funny, for the edification of us non-lawyers and non-law-journal-readers? Is it mere poking fun at it not being famous at all? Or being poorly edited?
We don't. I don't read the blog, much less its comments, and don't have an opinion as to their quality. I'll start following, so as to form one, I suppose. But I'm very dubious of your claim that dissent isn't allowed there; I skimmed the comments on the front page and didn't find any beat-downs. Do you have examples?
I participate in political discussions in many internet mailing lists, discussion boards, usenet groups, blogs, etc., (too many, in point of fact) which were not specifically established around one ideology or the other. Some are aimed for fellow alums of my alma mater, others for fellow attorneys, others around some other common interest.
Inevitably, in any such forum where liberals predominate, the minority conservatives or libertarians will remain and debate (and incidentally will often be admonished by the administrators of the forum for being too argumentative). In any forum where conservatives or libertarians predominate, the minority liberals will quit and go form their own group, for "progressives" (the new euphemism) only.
Now, I look at that as an example of cocooning -- liberals being unwilling or unable to debate those with whom they disagree, and being more interested in receiving validation of their own views, while conservatives relish the intellectual debate. An alternative explanation (which you can believe if you choose) is that conservatives/libertarians are nastier than liberals. But regardless of whether that explanation or the cocooning one is accurate, it reflects a real difference between the sides in their approach to political debate.
What I found interesting about Hopwood: There were white students with lower scores than the minority students. Nobody argued about it. No press, no nothing.
This sounds like it ought to be some sort of joke.
Is it? If so, why is it funny, for the edification of us non-lawyers and non-law-journal-readers? Is it mere poking fun at it not being famous at all? Or being poorly edited?
My guess would be that Orin was the executive editor, but that's just a guess.
I don’t know if this is liberal or conservative (labels). I’m prepared to say that the internet has helped us to produce the same old cultural activities, over and over and over, faster, more aggressively, and so on. When it comes to culture, our behaviors have not advanced very much and the internet is a more convenient way to reproduce the same old behaviors, i.e., rob, cheat, steal, educate, learn, love, marry, hate, make money, etc.
Advanced? If you mean the ‘integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon our capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations, I tend to agree.
Yes, the internet has helped us advance. But if you mean as Americans, (customary beliefs, social forms, material traits), I tend to disagree. Here’s a bold statement: Historically, the internet has not helped us advance beyond what we’ve always been.
Avatar continues: “But to get all this advancement, you have to keep society up and running - in other words, you have to say "I cannot solve the world's problems today, I -must- accept that no matter what I do, people will suffer," and furthermore work to make that society a better place.” I tend to agree with your view, but it’s a cop out.
Bassin's essay captures the gist of these attitudes very well.
Contrary to socialist belief, "poverty" and "wealth" are mostly a function of age in the US. People tend to start off with modest income and few assets, gaining more as they grow older.
Due to the fact that we often measure wealth by income in this country, many of the "poor" at any given time are people like me who are taking a break from their careers to do other things. Others are college students and graduates beginning their careers. Even out of a prestigious private university, starting salaries arent exactly sky high- you still have to pay your dues.
Yeah, having money helps, but I dont think it has as much affect on your life outcome compared to innate ability, work ethic and the other cultural traits passed on from your parents. As long as you have the ability, you will get ahead in this country.
Arguably, Stevens voted against his policy preferences in Raich. He referred to the "unfortunate facts" of this case or something to that effect, implying that his heart was with the terminally ill patients, but he felt bound by statute and precedent to rule against them.
The faculty seem mostly to be left-of-center in their political views, and classes on "social issues" (family law, sexual orientation law) seem to select for students who are left of the median here. A notable contrast is business law: every business law class I've taken has been taught by a fairly hardcore law &economics professor, and few members of the class are ever interested in challenging that point of view. The idea that law should be sensitive to distributive consequences is very difficult to get out, because the business law classes are taught on the conservative assumption that Kaldor-Hicks is the baseline by which all things must be measured.
I am especially fond of those times when he invites some liberal type on the show for an interview, and wham - he hits them with, seriously delivered, the totally obvious conservative counterargument to their whole thesis.
It's like a slow pitch. You would think that going into an interview with someone who's faking being a conservative that you would be ready for the most obvious conservative line to be tossed at you and you would have your ready counter to demolish it... but many aren't. They fumble when they realize that they either have no rejoinder or their rejoinder is politically inappropriate... and Colbert has to back off and give them an out.
I love the socialist assumption that a bureaucrat in a central office is the best decider of what things I need to become happiest and most productive.
Leaving aside the obvious argument that courts are an inefficient means to accomplish redistribution of wealth, lets focus on the obvious faults of redistribution itself.
In capitalism, there is exploitation to the extent that one person will get more value out of another person than he gives. But the reason it works is that every person values things differently. A person with no money will value money over his labor. A wealthy person may forgo some of his money and conserve his labor for recreational use. In the end, each person has traded away the things he values least for the things he values most. Even the poorest people in America can achieve wealth or happiness if they are willing to trade away enough of their time to gain valuable skills and then trade away enough of their labor to purchase their dreams. And all along, they will produce things that others value, working diligently towards the rewards they have chosen as most compelling.
What possible improvement upon this could socialism ever accomplish? A central planner cannot motivate or reward the average person- or should I say, they can reward ONLY the average person- one size fits all. Take everything people have and then give them back what the government wants them to have, and you will make everyone miserable and unproductive and society will be poorer as a result. Every redistributive path leads to a society dominated by force, for without force, you cannot extract wealth for redistribution. The government eventually discovers it can extract wealth and retain much of the value for its own use. In the end, the government ceases to deliver value to the people, and they no longer bother producing wealth for it to extract. Havent you seen this failure mode enough times yet?
1) I don't like it. Daddy, fix it!
2) How many people can I patronize today?
The first comes up whenever people argue in favor of nationalizing the entire medical industry and paying for everybody's health care by taxing "the rich." The second is bound up with the whole political correctness problem.
What bothers me about this isn't the leftist aspect so much as the breathtaking elitism. It presumes that somebody, somewhere can fix any problem named (details tend to be left conveniently vague), and it presumes that the speaker is allied with that somebody.
I'm not sure if anything can be done about the "Daddy, fix it" problem among people who are actually adolescents. That's a natural way for kids to think, at least if they have grown up with daddies who are in a position to fix anything. The trouble is people who don't grow out of this mindset, especially when they end up teaching. They can do real damage.
"Inevitably, in any such forum where liberals predominate, the minority conservatives or libertarians will remain and debate (and incidentally will often be admonished by the administrators of the forum for being too argumentative). In any forum where conservatives or libertarians predominate, the minority liberals will quit and go form their own group, for "progressives" (the new euphemism) only."
That certainly has not been the case in forums such as this. I have read comment threads in which the arguments posed by you and several other angry conservatives have been quickly dispatched by liberals not shirking from the discussion.
Let's look at how this thread started: OK asked whether readers agree with a Yale student's view that liberals have trouble enunciating their philosophy. A number of commenters have set forth that philosophy, which contradicts the Yale student's assertion.
In response conservative commenters have fairly stuck to ad hominem attacks against liberals in general. They confuse disagreement with liberal principles on the merits with the original subject of the post -- have those principles been adequately communicated. During a discussion about the economic effects of the New Deal, when a liberal looks at you like you just said the world is flat, it's not because the liberal is "cocooning" or unable to articulate a reasonable position, it's because perhaps your position is just wrong. If not wrong, perhaps your liberal counterpart simply disagrees with it. That says nothing about liberalism at its core, or liberals' ability to communicate what they believe. You simply don't agree with what they believe. That's your right.
I think the real "cocooning" is far greater on the Right. As I stated in an earlier post, the real, modern liberal philosophy is best articulated now by the likes of Cass Sunstein at U of C. His (now dated) book Republic.com addresses this very subject, and points out the Right has sought out its own echo chamber far more than the Left has. For example, even if we accept as true that there is a liberally biased media (which I don't), the stated desire has been for objectivity. It is the Right that expressly feels the need to set up media that reflects its viewpoints.
I said "such forums," referring to forums "which were not specifically established around one ideology or the other."
That is, places like the VC don't qualify, because liberals who come to VC know what they're getting into, and the ones who come are ones who are interested in discussing with (or at least snarking at) non-liberals.
But that's the point: liberals think their political views are "objective." That's the very essence of cocooning. It's true that there are some conservatives who only want to interact with media that agree with them, but (a) they realize that they're doing so, so they aren't fooling themselves in the same way, and (b) because the liberal media is so ubiquitous, they encounter liberal views anyway. Unless you go hide in the Unabomber's shack in Montana, you're going to be exposed to the views of the MSM, whether you want to or not.
Whereas many liberals really have never been exposed to conservative or libertarian ideas at all.