Justice in the Legal World
Justice in the Legal World
The State of Virginia answers with a resounding "yes" the question: Will there be consequences when a big law firm publicly dumps a client for craven, pandering, PC reasons?
Last week King & Spalding announced that it would not continue to represent the U.S. House of Representatives in supporting the Defense of Marriage Act against a constitutional challenge in federal court. (The Obama Administration had already announced it would decline to oppose the challenge.) Another King & Spalding client, the Attorney General for the State of Virginia, concluded that he should reconsider his retention of the law firm to prosecute the state's ongoing challenge of Obamacare in federal court:
King & Spalding’s willingness to drop a client, the U.S. House of Representatives, in connection with the lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was such an obsequious act of weakness that I feel compelled to end your legal association with Virginia so that there is no chance that one of my legal clients will be put in the embarrassing and difficult situation like the client you walked away from, the House of Representatives. . . . Virginia does not shy away from hiring outside counsel because they may have ongoing professional relationships with people or entities, or on behalf of causes that I, or my office, or Virginia as a whole may not support. But it is crucial for us to be able to trust and rely on the fact that our outside counsel will not desert Virginia due to pressure by an outside group or groups. . . . Virginia seeks firms of commitment, courage, strength and toughness, and unfortunately, what the world has learned of King & Spalding, is that your firm utterly lacks such qualities.
Ouch. I guess when a law firm plays politics, it works both ways.
"No Fair! You Tricked Me Into Thinking I Was Smarter Than I Am!"
"No Fair! You Tricked Me Into Thinking I Was Smarter Than I Am!"
Via Ann Althouse and Instapundit, I ran across this article, which I was sure would turn out to be a joke. Alas. A tax law professor at Pepperdine is outraged to discover that some law schools offer merit scholarships to incoming students with a high GPAs and/or LSAT scores, but they condition the continuation of the scholarship funds on the students' maintaining a "B" average in law school. What the crafty villains don't reveal is that only a fraction of students keep their law school GPAs that high. Not a tiny fraction, mind you, perhaps a third. Their nefarious motive? To attract students with high GPAs and LSAT scores who might not otherwise attend (thus boosting the schools' rankings), but only if the students can in fact excel in law school. Have you ever heard anything so cruel, so fraudulent, so self-interested?
The author of this article suggests that incoming students have no idea that law schools grade on the curve -- evidently a shocking crime in itself -- or that keeping a "B" average won't be a cakewalk for most of the incoming class, not all of whom can expect to be above average. And apparently the students practically never ask simple questions about the distribution of grades on which their continued access to free money will depend. As one law school official mused, “This isn’t meant to be sarcastic,” he said, “but these students are going to law school and they need to learn to read the fine print.”
I'm perplexed by the harm that's supposed to be suffered here. The students are free to finish law school with a "C" average, but they will have to take out student loans, which they will then have to pay back. They spend only one year finding out that they're not likely to graduate at the top of their classes, and therefore can expect a really tough time landing one of the higher-paying legal jobs. This is information that will come in very handy as they decide whether those student loans are a good bet. They've had one year of law school absolutely free, which (common perceptions to the contrary; I know what you're all thinking!) hardly disqualifies them for a useful and fulfilling life on some other career path.
*I like Ann Althouse's comment-board instructions, by the way:
Join our community of commenters. I'm big on free speech, but if you want to push its limits you'd better be interesting. You can't just stop by to drop an insult or a lie that you can't defend. Earn it. Or be circumspect.
May Day
May Day:
The skeletons in the May Day carol's paintings appear to take the living by the hand and lead them away to the hidden land of the dead. The woodcut of the skeleton leading the child away from his family is particularly moving. Those who travel that road do not reappear, but vanish from the world of men -- just as a branch of May, full of flowers, will soon be gone as if it never had been at all.
Yet today we have a counterpoint in Rome. This tradition of the display of the incorrupt body has a significant history in the West. It has always seemed odd to me to disinter and display the body of the dead; if it were being done by someone other than the Pope, one might say it was sacrilegious. If in this case it is instead religious, it is still the sort of thing that strikes me as strange.
Surely it is intended to seem strange. The branch of May is provided to draw your attention to the order of the world, and remind you of something mysterious and true about it: the order of death, and our powerlessness to reclaim things lost in time. The display in Rome is meant to make an assertion to the contrary, and so of course it must seem strange: it is a claim made in defiance of the ordinary truths of the world.
The May Day carol is a part of the memento mori genre, which has existed in the West since antiquity. Not only in the West: the samurai Daido Yuzan wrote:
One who is a samurai must before all things keep constantly in mind, by day and by night, from the morning when he takes up his chopsticks to eat his New Year's breakfast to Old Year's night when he pays his yearly bills, the fact that he has to die. That is his chief business. If he is mindful of this, he will live in accordance with the paths of Loyalty and Filial Duty, will avoid the myriads of evils and adversities, keep himself free from disease and calamity and moreover enjoy a long life. He will also be a fine personality with many admirable qualities. For existence is impermanent as the dew of evening and the hoarfrost of morning, and particularly uncertain is the life of the warrior, and if he thinks he can console himself with the idea of lifelong service to his lord or unending devotion to his relations, something may well happen to make him neglect his duty to his lord and forget what he owes to his family. But if he determines simply to live for today and take no thought for the morrow, so that when he stands before his lord to receive his commands he thinks of it as his last appearance and when he looks upon the face of his relatives he feels that he will never see them again, then will his duty and regard for both of them be completely sincere, while his mind will be in accord with the path of loyalty and filial duty.I have always thought it was wise advice.
The skeletons in the May Day carol's paintings appear to take the living by the hand and lead them away to the hidden land of the dead. The woodcut of the skeleton leading the child away from his family is particularly moving. Those who travel that road do not reappear, but vanish from the world of men -- just as a branch of May, full of flowers, will soon be gone as if it never had been at all.
Yet today we have a counterpoint in Rome. This tradition of the display of the incorrupt body has a significant history in the West. It has always seemed odd to me to disinter and display the body of the dead; if it were being done by someone other than the Pope, one might say it was sacrilegious. If in this case it is instead religious, it is still the sort of thing that strikes me as strange.
Surely it is intended to seem strange. The branch of May is provided to draw your attention to the order of the world, and remind you of something mysterious and true about it: the order of death, and our powerlessness to reclaim things lost in time. The display in Rome is meant to make an assertion to the contrary, and so of course it must seem strange: it is a claim made in defiance of the ordinary truths of the world.
"What Happened to Your Eyebrows?"
"What Happened to Your Eyebrows?"If your mom never had to ask you that, you weren't doing it right.
The "Watts Up With That" site skewers a modern, safe, and boring Chemistry Set that advertises proudly on its cover, "No Chemicals!." What's really entertaining about the post is the trips down memory lane in the comments, where readers fondly recall blowing up themselves, their friends, and their environments in long-ago youth, before things got safe.
It reminded me of my own friends and family. A good friend in high school learned to make nitroglycerine and enjoyed setting vials of it in the middle of deserted fields and chunking rocks at them until they blew up. He let the sun go down on this game once and had to spend an anxious night chunking rocks out into the dark, tortured the whole time by the fear that a boy scout troop would wander into the explosive zone. When he set off his home-made volcano in science class, the fire department had to put it out. Another friend blew three feet of water out of the family swimming pool with the phosphorus he'd carelessly left in a bucket of water in the sun -- he noticed the perilously low water level just in time to throw the bucket into the pool.
It was the same, apparently, for the older generation: My father, who lost half of his hearing at an early age from this kind of thing (don't ever let a beaker of flash powder dry overnight in a school locker), often regaled us with antisocial stories about flushing sodium down the school toilets, which would cause every nearby toilet to geyser in an entertaining fashion. An excellent high school teacher of mine had lost a hand and an eye to a white phosphorus explosion, but was cheerful about life and learning nevertheless.
My favorite story from the comments:
In those days it was difficult to get my Dad’s attention, especially when he was working on one of his own projects. He tended to answer all questions and comments with a sort of, “Hmm,” without really listening to you. He was working away on an anvil in the cellar when my brother told him he had made some nitroglycerine. He said “Hmm,” turning away to get his hammer. While he was looking away my brother put some of the nitroglycerine on the anvil. Dad turned back, brought his hammer down, looked up at the hammer imbedded in the plaster of the ceiling, turned to my brother, and inquired, “What did you just say?”I think I recognize the gentleman.
Grim's going to love talking about this item.
Now, I seem to remember some EC comics from the 1950's (you can find reprints of these things if you look) with titles like "Frontline Combat" that had all sorts of stories about GI's going bonkers in combat--mostly they seem to be Korean War stories--that seems to agree with the first paragraph above.
Maybe the saying is right: It's all in your head.
So what is actually going on here? American writer Ethan Watters’s recent book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Psyche, offers a highly subversive answer. It is that American society has been permeated by psychoanalytical beliefs about the fragility of the human mind.
This creates an expectation, he argues, that people who have been through horrible experiences will be traumatized. The veterans are simply falling in with that expectation, and exhibiting the symptoms that the theory says they should be showing.
In Britain, where the psychoanalytical approach never got such a hold on popular culture, this expectation is much rarer—and so are the symptoms of PTSD.
Now, I seem to remember some EC comics from the 1950's (you can find reprints of these things if you look) with titles like "Frontline Combat" that had all sorts of stories about GI's going bonkers in combat--mostly they seem to be Korean War stories--that seems to agree with the first paragraph above.
Maybe the saying is right: It's all in your head.
We Don't Need No Stinkin' Secret Ballot
We Don't Need No Stinkin' Secret Ballot
Fresh on the heels of its lawsuit against Boeing for attempting to locate a new plant in a state where it can commit the crime of running a profit, the NLRB now says it plans to sue the states of Arizona and South Dakota for passing state constitutional amendments requiring a secret ballot for unionizing a company.
The two targeted states argue there is no federal pre-emption of state law in this instance, because the federal labor statute doesn't prohibit secret ballot elections. The NLRB counter-argues that "Congress did not condition [the] fundamental right [to unionize] on the employees' manifesting their choice in a secret ballot election." It also explains that it is unfair to place employers "under direct state law pressure to refuse to recognize – or withdraw recognition from – their employees’ choice of a bargaining representative if that representative has not been designated in a secret ballot election." Yeah, I don't think that possibility is bothering many employers, but thanks for watching out for us!
Arizona and South Dakota aren't the only potential targets. While they passed their constitutional amendments by 61% and 79% votes respectively, voters in South Carolina and Utah passed similar constitutional amendments by 86% and 60% popular votes. The NLRB explained that it is not pursuing immediate lawsuits against the two additional states because it "doesn't have enough staff to handle four lawsuits at the same time." That confession suggests an immediate counter-strategy to this litigator.
The long-term counter-strategy, of course, is scheduled for November 2012.
Just Don't Let Them in the Foxholes
Just Don't Let Them in the FoxholesWhat better way to establish that a certain type of militant secular humanism is just another evangelical religion? Atheists seek chaplain roles in military.
The Invisible Hand
The Invisible HandFor years I read about the bloated public sector, without often encountering any effective measures for curbing it. Finally a handful of states and municipalities are doing the unthinkable: cutting their budgets. The response is a general rush for the door:
California is one of many states seeing double-digit increases in retirement applications from public employees like Essex. States across the U.S. are grappling with budget deficits totaling more than $540 billion since 2009, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and many legislatures have passed or are considering bills that would cut the pay of public workers, raise the amount they contribute to their benefits, or require furloughs. . . .I see this as a good thing: people responding appropriately to price signals that reflect reality. The state workers' skills aren't being lost to society, only to the public sector. The ones who are doing work that their neighbors value will find work in the private sector. That way, the people who want the skills will be the ones who pay for them at a market rate, instead of passing their cost onto others. Nurses can be expected to fare better than bureaucrats. In the meantime, the public sector can get back to hiring only as many workers as the citizens are willing to support with taxes.
Because of the recession, many workers postponed retirement in 2008 and 2009. That and demographics explain some of the recent increase in retirements. Politics is also a factor, as budget-tightening officials take on the unions they say are driving up costs. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has likened his state's teachers union to "political thugs." Retirements there jumped 60 percent between 2009 and 2010. In Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker has signed a law limiting collective-bargaining rights, retirements are up 79 percent in the first quarter of 2011 over the same period last year. . . .
Impending pay and benefit cuts prompt others to quit. Florida Governor Rick Scott has proposed that workers pay 5 percent of their salaries to help cover pension contributions and health-insurance premiums as the state tries to trim a $3.8 billion deficit this year. Florida's retirement numbers are already 23 percent higher in the first seven months of the 2011 fiscal year than in all of 2010. Texas legislators may require state employees to pay for 10 percent of their health-insurance premiums, and the state expects retirements to climb 54 percent this fiscal year over last. . . .
The bottom line: Many states are seeing double-digit increases in retirement applications as legislators trim pay and benefits.
Triumph O'er the Grave
Triumph O'er the Grave
Every year during Lent the liturgy calls for us to omit the usual "Alleluias" from our responses at several points in the service. It takes an effort of will not to add them at their accustomed places; it reminds us of the dark struggle we are commemorating. At last comes Easter. The joy and relief of the returning "Alleluia" at this season is very powerful.
These two triumphant numbers are so well known among Sacred Harpers that no one gets his part mixed up, and half of the singers don't need their books any more. The "Easter Anthem" being a little longer and involved than most Sacred Harp songs, the group in this particular video took the unusual step have having two leaders in the hollow square. (No, we don't sing this kind of music at my church -- I wish!)
Happy Easter to you all.
Wealth & Civilization
Wealth & Civilization:
Aristotle, however, is very clear on the positive effects (as well as the moral hazards) associated with wealth. The good life becomes possible, Aristotle says in the Politics, only once the bare necessities of life have been arranged. This is true for the individual and for the wider civilization. The problem comes only if you lose sight of your objective: that is, if you stop trying to obtain sufficient wealth for the good life, and find yourself simply trying to obtain wealth.
The man without wealth cannot live well, though, because he must be driven by necessity rather than by virtue. Too, some virtues -- such as liberality and generosity -- cannot be practiced without disposable wealth.
I trust that Professor Armstrong is aware of all this, and the reviewer simply failed to mention it. These ideas are not so very new, or radical, as the review suggests: even the monastics, devoted to a very spiritual idea of the good life, nevertheless invested a great deal of labor into the production of material wealth. The monastic cell may be small and spare, but it was meant to be clean and well-kept; and the fasts were to be mixed with feasts.
A new book by professor John Armstrong challenges the idea that wealth is bad.
Armstrong’s teachings are refreshing because high thinking has traditionally been hostile to money. Following Socrates, the philosophers of ancient Greece resolutely separated the things of this world from the welfare of the soul. The Stoics considered material goods irrelevant to the good life, while the Epicureans (despite their reputation) regarded piled possessions as a positive hindrance to the ataraxia, life without disagreeable sensation, which they sought. Cynic—“Dog”—philosophers sometimes pursued a pure asceticism: Diogenes the Cynic lived on the street in a giant pot, and (the story goes), when asked by the stooping Alexander the Great what gift he would like to receive, retorted, “Just stop blocking the sun!”I wonder if Professor Armstrong indeed read the Greeks in the way that his reviewer suggests. It's always dangerous to assert that someone is 'following Socrates,' who famously asserted that he had nothing to teach; although now and then he would raise and defend propositions, it was never clear if he was doing so in earnest or for the joy of exploring the idea.
Come Christianity, the narrow eye of heaven’s needle always threatened the camel of wealth. As the new religion spread in the Roman world and had in practice to accommodate wealthy parishioners and plump prelates, nevertheless its theology shifted little in favor of Mammon. Even the globular Christian grandees of late Rome and Constantinople, whose shining silks hurt the eye and whose countless rings bent the hands that bore them—even they idolized filthy hermits babbling in the desert[.]
Aristotle, however, is very clear on the positive effects (as well as the moral hazards) associated with wealth. The good life becomes possible, Aristotle says in the Politics, only once the bare necessities of life have been arranged. This is true for the individual and for the wider civilization. The problem comes only if you lose sight of your objective: that is, if you stop trying to obtain sufficient wealth for the good life, and find yourself simply trying to obtain wealth.
The man without wealth cannot live well, though, because he must be driven by necessity rather than by virtue. Too, some virtues -- such as liberality and generosity -- cannot be practiced without disposable wealth.
I trust that Professor Armstrong is aware of all this, and the reviewer simply failed to mention it. These ideas are not so very new, or radical, as the review suggests: even the monastics, devoted to a very spiritual idea of the good life, nevertheless invested a great deal of labor into the production of material wealth. The monastic cell may be small and spare, but it was meant to be clean and well-kept; and the fasts were to be mixed with feasts.
A Late Easter
A Late EasterSince the Counsel of Nicaea met in 325 A.D. to resolve a number of disputes in the early Christian Church, the "moveable feast" of Easter in the Western Christian tradition has been reckoned as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This computation is modified slightly by a couple of simplifying conventions: the vernal equinox is taken as fixed on March 21, while the date of the full moon for ecclesiastical purposes may vary slightly from the astronomical date.
In any case, the result is that Gregorian Easter can fall anywhere from March 22 to April 25. In years like 2011, when one full moon appears shortly before the equinox (March 19), and the next full moon appears on a Monday, Easter comes very late: in this case, only one day before the last possible date. The last time Easter fell on the earliest possible date, March 22, was 1818, a performance that will not be repeated until the year 2285. The last time it fell on the latest possible date, April 25, was 1943; it will not do so again until 2038.
Holidays fixed by solar and lunar cycles always link me in my imagination to ancestors who began watching the skies, noting the patterns, teaching them to their descendants, and working out simple rules that could predict such complex behavior. The fact that we should be able to perceive order around us is the central mystery of my life.
Unknown Voices
Unknown Voices
I don't know who this singer/player is, but my sister just sent me a link to her rendition of "The Blackest Crow" on YouTube. I sure like how anyone can upload a performance from her living room and make it accessible to anyone in the world who likes that kind of music. It combines the best part of amateur, personal music with the easy transmission of recorded music.
This performer also does an amazing job with an instrumental rendition of the music from "The Last of the Mohicans." I didn't know it was possible to get that kind of effect out of a dulcimer.
The Secular Grail
The Secular GrailWhenever I read stories like the one about "Spring Spheres" that I mentioned yesterday, or the Cult of the Pre-Patriarchal Goddess, or today's Dailer Caller article about environmentalists urging Christians and non-Christians alike to take advantage of this Sunday to celebrate "Earth Day," I reflect on how difficult it is for even for steadfastly modern, "rational," and secular human beings to be resolutely materialist. It seems that if you cut most people off from their society's traditional religion for even a short while, they revert to some kind of deism or paganism.
Don't get me wrong. A reverence for the natural world is among my strongest passions, felt so strongly that it can easily overwhelm my concern for other people, if left to itself. In general I haven't the least problem with Earth Day or even some of the more radical varieties of environmentalism. But I don't think the Easter Sunday pulpit ought to be given over to a homily on global warming. For one thing, of course, I'm unconvinced that global warming, even assuming we've identified a trend that's more than noise in the signal when viewed over millennia, is anthropogenic at all. The pulpit is no place to be expounding a contested scientific theory that will arouse divisive political passions.
What's more important, though, is that -- even if we had the perfect solution to an incontestable AGW theory in our hands -- Easter is a peculiarly inappropriate time to be indulging in fantasies about remaking the Earth into a perpetual Paradise. We can resolve not to do anything unnecessary to foul the Earth, but it is not at any time going to be converted into a place where we will find what we seek in Heaven. Earth is a place where we can find a great deal of natural pleasure, where we can meet our physical needs, and where we can do our duty. It is not a place where our souls can find their destiny. It's a creature, like us, and not something to be worshipped in its own right.
Easter is a time to reflect on what's going on besides the natural Earth around us. It's a time to grapple with Death and what might overcome it (which, in the natural world, is absolutely nothing). If those reflections send us back into our daily lives determined not to behave like self-obsessed littering ignoramuses with the beautiful natural bounty that has been bestowed on us, that's great. But that's a sideshow, not the main event. The source for virtues that will help us live better on the Earth is not in the Earth.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)