Good Intentions

That’s “age-ed” and “learn-ed,” up there. I have to be snooty about words. Because I majored in words.

Well anyway, second week of this semester and already I’m getting swamped. My schedule does lend itself to allowing me some leeway in reading (read: using breaks between classes to read), which is nice. This happened last semester as well, but moreso here.

Three of my four substantive law professors are–how shall I put this–old.

And I don’t mean this in a bad way. They’re just old people. Prof. ConLaw is an older lady; this is her final semester teaching. She’s Jewish, which I find amusing–being a Hebrew myself–and she is very enthusiastic and even bombastic in her teaching style. An anecdote:

Prof: *starts to explain the Cohen case* “…What were these three Jews doing selling lottery tickets? Shameful! I’ll just cover up their names…”

She’s like that all the time.

Prof. Property is amusing as well and has an interesting teaching style: He draws cartoons up on the board. Yep. They help us understand. Really. They do. Also he’s focusing a lot on theory and less on black-letter law, which is a departure from last semester.

Prof. CrimLaw is ALSO entertaining, and might be the most entertaining. Observe:

Prof: “So I will be calling on you so we can have a discussion, and you can all have a discussion with each other…unless you’re all complete dullards.”

Gems, I tell you! Comedic gems!

Prof. Admin is a pretty interesting guy. He used a coin to create a binary number to decide who won some books he gave away. Quite amusing and enjoyable.

Anyway, hopefully this semester chugs along at a nice pace and doesn’t kill me. Fingers crossed.

Tonight’s the Veep debate. Biden v. Palin, what a treat. This will, needless to say, be interesting. I’ll conjure up some thoughts after the debate, or you can catch me on Twitter (sarcascio).

Earlier this afternoon I went to a Federalist Society meeting. Now, for those of you who don’t know, FedSoc is the conservative/libertarian group who believe in a strict construction of the Constitution–meaning that what’s there is there and nothing should be read into it–and believe judges shouldn’t “legislate from the bench.”

That latter phrase is especially meaningless, because that’s essentially what the common law is. Court gets a case, there’s no statute controlling the issue, the judges make shit up based on vague legal authority and even more vague legal scholarship. Boom. Common law, until it gets overruled or reversed. Judges read into legislation all the live long day to find out what intent a given legislature has imbued into it. In fact, there’s a whole section of my Torts class where we talked about how judges were reading into criminal statutes what intent the legislatures had to see if they (the judges) could import that criminal statute into tort law.

Right from out of their asses, it came.

So anyway, I think “judicial activism” is a silly phrase, when basically the judiciary is always activist in some form or another to some group or another.

Anyway, the speaker was this fellow, Roger Pilon, who was an interesting speaker, to say the least. He definitely butted heads with some of the folks in the room, including this guy, Professor Sasha Volokh, who, along with his brother, run The Volokh Conspiracy. Needless to say, all of these people are really big deals in the legal world: Pilon is with the Cato Institute and has an impressive CV, and the Volokhs are equally impressive.

Pilon mainly talked about the 14th Amendment and how it essentially ruined America for all the libertarians out there. He wants to return to a very strict interpretation of the Constitution, one exactly and totally in line with how the Founders wrote it. He fully believes this is a tenable position to hold. I am not so sure.

I did agree with some of what he was saying: the government should only step in when the rights of a person or group are being trampled on by some other person or group. That is perfectly fine. However, Pilon paints the government as a villain in all that it does, not a necessary evil but an unnecessary evil. He also made some incediary remarks about how we are not all equal and that there is no equality of opportunity, only “equality under the law.” This is, of course, open for debate.

Anyway, this gentleman, Professor Peter Linzer, gave a rebuttal to what Pilon was saying and agreed with him on many things but also disagreed with him. He mainly diverged from Pilon regarding government intervention into the markets, citing the current crisis as evidence that a lack of government intervention is what caused this in the first place. Pilon countered with a vaguely “But Clinton!” statement, claiming that the Clinton administration wanted to broaden Fannie and Freddie’s ability to give subprime loans to people who apparently could not pay them back. Now, your humble author doesn’t know all the nuances of the crisis, so I will hold my judgment on this.

All in all, it was a very good lecture. Most people left around 1pm because they had class, but I stayed for about 45 more minutes to hear students (and Professor Volokh) try to argue against Pilon, who had a coherent response for every question.

I think this is why I came to law school, this fascinating exchange of ideas. It’s too bad you don’t really get that during class…