Recently in Academia Category

I learned my constitutional law at Stanford Law School.  The School is dominated by left wing professors, as most are, but I have to admit the education was pretty good.  For the tuition they charge, it sure should have been.  In any event, I have to think my Con Law class was better than the one taught by Professor Michael Avery. 

Those seeking to abolish the death penalty hold a minority position in this country, and it is  --  as publicly debated issues go  --  not much of a minority.  The Gallup poll puts public support for abolitionism at 30% or slightly less; in California, the Field poll finds abolitionism even less popular, attracting a bit less than 25% support.

This does not stop abolitionists from claiming The Greater Wisdom, and doing so in indignant if not outraged terms.  I have debated this subject many times and in many fora, and it's surprising how often otherwise thoughtful and civil people are willing to attack the retentionist position with words like barbaric, racist and ignorant:  "If only the unwashed masses knew what we experts know."  It's also surprising, to me at least, how often otherwise insistently secular people are willing to use religion to bully their way to the supposed moral high ground.

I thus had a strong deja vu feeling when I read a piece in today's Wall Street Journal noting the contempt, if not venom, that has surfaced in the vocabulary of progressivism.  The article is about the recent debate on raising the debt ceiling, which is hardly the subject of this blog.  But if you substitute the word "retentionist" for "conservative," and "abolitionist" for "progressive," the piece is a dead ringer description of the snarling, holier-than-thou attitude of an increasing number of death penalty opponents.

Given their thoroughly outmanned position, one might think modesty to be a more becoming attitude than belligerence.  Would that they thought so too.     

The great state of California is all but bankrupt.  There's no money to be found.  It's been ordered to release over 30,000 prisoners because the funding is not there to keep them in what a (slim) Supreme Court majority views as constitutionally adequate conditions.  The state legislature seems poised to order a referendum to abolish the death penalty, based principally on the argument that, deserved or not, it's just too expensive.

The state education system has not been spared. UC San Diego will no longer offer a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master's program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature.

Still, while the State's foremost obligation  --  the physical safety of its citizens  --  and long-honored fundamentals of its university system take a hit, some things escape.  As Heather MacDonald reports, the "diversity" leviathon is going great guns:

Not only have diversity sinecures been protected from budget cuts, their numbers are actually growing. The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time "vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion." This position would augment UC San Diego's already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor's Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women's Center.

Translation:  While the already bloated culture of victimization gets a geyser of funding to take over the state's universities, the number of actual victims  --  of recidivist crime, that is  --  is headed for a big increase, because there's no money left to see to their safety.

Billionaire George Soros is not exactly known as a friend of vigorous law enforcement, or of the United States for that matter.  Nonetheless, and believing that meeting the opposition is better than just sneering at them, tomorrow it seems I will have the opportunity to ask Mr. Soros a question or two.  This is because I've been invited to the Cato Institute's book forum on "The Constitution of Liberty" by F. A. Hayek.  Also in on the forum will be the brilliant Professor Richard Epstein of NYU.

I've spent all day wondering what I should ask Mr. Soros, and if anyone has an idea, I'm all ears.

There's not a whole lot I can say about this story, so I'll just let it speak for itself:

A California teachers union is under fire after passing a new resolution supporting a convicted cop killer.

The California Federation of Teachers (CFT) last month passed a resolution reaffirming their support for Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was sentenced to death in the 1982 murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner during a routine traffic stop.

In the resolution, the CFT alleges Abu-Jamal's trial was unfair and calls the former radio journalist a civil rights hero.

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The resolution also describes the former Black Panther as a civil rights hero saying, "Mumia Abu-Jamal has for decades as a journalist fought courageously against racism and police brutality and for the human rights of all people...the continued unjust incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal represents a threat to the civil rights of all people."

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The Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is now reconsidering a 2008 decision to award Abu-Jamal a new sentencing hearing due to flawed jury instructions after the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the decision and ruled that a neo-Nazi did not deserve a new sentencing hearing on those grounds.

The Abu-Jamal case is a scandal, alright, but not for the reasons the CFT thinks.  It's a scandal because an unrepentant cop killer has played a willing audience of liberal airheads for close to 30 years to avoid the justice he has earned.

Kent discussed Walter Olson's book, Schools for Misrule, earlier this week.  Today, I had lunch with Walter and a few friends at the Heritage Foundation, where Walter gave a talk on the massive pro-defendant (and generally leftist) bias in the nation's law schools.  I'm embarrassed to say that my alma mater, Stanford, is right up there, or down there, with the worst.  Stanford's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic is, for example, a true menace.  In a criminal case, I have never known it to take the side of anyone except a murderer or a terrorist (or both simultaneously).

The question is what can be done about it.  I have two suggestions, although I'm not that confident either will work.  First, remember that just about everyone on the faculty of these "elite" law schools thinks of himself/herself as a future federal judge, if not Justice.  But they know that there will be a Senate hurdle to clear, and that Republicans will have a say.  Thus the smart ones know it's in their interest to have a few conservatives on the faculty to speak up for them at crunch time.  This worked, in a way, with Justice Kagan, when she was Dean at Harvard.  She developed a reputation as being more open to hiring conservative faculty, and that reputation tamped down the intenstity of opposition to her when she was nominated to the Court.  A similar phenomenon is happening with Goodwin Liu, who has fellow Berkeley professor (and "torture memo" author) John Yoo saying that, for a Democratic choice, Liu isn't that bad.

The other strategy, also based in faculty self-interest, is in adjusting your alumi financial support to the school's willingness to hire faculty from both sides.  Mistaking me for a rich man (either that or just being on its mailing list), Stanford keeps sending me requests for donations.  I wrote back that I wouldn't be sending any dough until I saw more balance on the faculty.  Shortly thereafter, Stanford hired Judge Mike McConnell, a renowned conservative thinker.  I will bet good money that my letter had zilch to do with it, but I suspect that a batch of similar letters at least might have.

I expect the law school pro-defendant bias to last a long time, but there is a source of hope: students.  My students at Georgetown last semester made up their own minds, and seemed to regard the opinions of faculty as something other than Holy Writ.

John McGinnis has this review in the WSJ of Walter Olson's book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America.  He especially likes the part about legal clinics:

Mr. Olson superbly describes the rise of legal clinics, the law-school component ostensibly designed to give students hands-on training. He notes that the charitable foundations that first funded these clinics were more concerned with creating turbines of social change than with educating students. These days, many more clinics engage in public-interest litigation (defined by a rather predictable liberal agenda) than devote themselves to matters like the legal ordeals of small businesses, though thinking about a deli's contract dispute with a supplier would be more relevant to a law student's future working life. Some of these public-interest litigation shops have substantial funds. Mr. Olson observes that the budget of Brennan Center at New York University alone comes to roughly 80% of that of the Federalist Society, the national organization of legal conservatives that is routinely vilified by Democratic politicians for its inordinate--and, of course, pernicious--effect on our legal culture.

An online ad for the book has this blurb from Chief Judge Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit:  "Every year I hire as law clerks some of the best and brightest law students in the country, and spend a year wringing out of them all the wrong-headed ideas their law professors taught them.  Now I know why."

Of course, in light of his opinion today in the Stolen Valor Act case (an opinion that will be greeted warmly in legal academia), Judge Kozinski needs to wring some wrong-headed ideas out of himself.