Category: General

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Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion

For more than 30 years I taught the sociology of law to both undergraduate and graduate university students.  We considered how American law developed, how it was applied to persons and groups, and with what effects on them and on the broader society.

When discussing the U.S. Supreme Court, I emphasized that the traditional law school approach to its decision-making was wrong.  There, students have been commonly trained that legal reasoning is a learned skill much like that in scientific work.  It is based on principles of deduction, according to which judges make decisions about laws by logically figuring out how the principles established in earlier court decisions–precedents–apply to the current dispute before them.  In this perspective, judicial decision-making–especially in the higher courts with the best trained lawyers–is a matter of technique.  It produces the correct legal answers based on facts and reason, free of bias and personal belief.  Competent practitioners, therefore, should reach the same, right, answers.

Although the American legal establishment placed a lot of faith in this account, and asked the nation to do the same,  it was never a true story.

Of course, if it were, how could the Supreme Court issue so many decisions with 5-4 votes?  More dramatically now, how could it be that today’s Supreme Court appears to be little more than a radical Right redoubt, one on the verge of retracting a basic right finally granted to women by the Court almost 50 years ago? Continue reading “Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion”

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“Are we safe here?” Remembering 9/11 in a College Classroom

It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, sunny and warm, when I reached my faculty office at 7:45 to complete preparations for my first lecture of the new semester.  As always, I was excited for a new year of teaching:  who would my students be, how would they surprise and inform me, how would my teaching evolve as I learned their personalities and levels of engagement.  Having introduced the course and myself to the class at our first meeting a few days earlier, I felt ready for my initial lecture at 9:30 that morning.

It was September 11, 2001, and I was in Boston.  Less than five miles away, planes were leaving Boston Logan International Airport on their routine schedules, many of them heading as usual to New York City.  As they lifted off the runway, these planes would fly low over my son’s new school, where he was in his first week as a high school freshman.

Classical music played on the radio as I focused on reviewing and making small changes to my lecture notes.  I became only vaguely aware at some point that the music had stopped, and that some news–of a crash or an explosion somewhere?–was being reported.  I worked on. Continue reading ““Are we safe here?” Remembering 9/11 in a College Classroom”

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Will Freedom Kill Liberty?

You may recall the now-iconic phrase that emerged during the Tea Party rise in our national politics around the 2010 elections:  “Take your government hands off my Medicare!”   Now there was a valid point to it–Republicans in Congress were threatening to pass a budget that would end “Medicare as we know it.”

But the directive also betrayed a deep confusion about the role of the national government in citizens’ lives, suggesting that a major social safety net program was not a program of government.  Indeed, political science research published in 2010 found that 40 percent of Medicare recipients surveyed denied that they had ever benefitted from a government social program.

Laughable as this level of civic ignorance struck many of us at the time, in fact it poses a significant threat to the stability and security of American society.  If citizens badly misunderstand their basic relationships with government, then they are more vulnerable to the distortions and appeals of demagogues. Continue reading “Will Freedom Kill Liberty?”

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Whither Racism in the Land of the Free

He enrolled in my seminar on law and society as a graduate student.  Being in his 50s, he was an unusual enrollee, but his experiences could not have been more relevant to such a course.  He was a long-serving, full-time police officer in the oldest police department in the nation, the Boston Police Department, and he had patrolled some of the city’s highest crime rate districts.  He was also African American, serving in a city long troubled by racial animus.  This animus wasstranger-fruit especially evident in the 1970s hostilities around the effort to use busing to integrate students in the city’s public schools, and later appeared in the Charles Stuart murder case in 1989-90, in which Stuart–who was white–framed a black man for the murder of Stuart’s wife, whom he himself had killed.

I will call the police officer “Hal,” not his real name.  Because the seminar combined undergraduate students with graduate students, every week I asked the grad students to come to my office after class to further discuss the day’s assigned topics with me.  Walking to my office after one seminar meeting, Hal offered that he really loved the reading we had been discussing in class.  The reading by an eminent sociologist of law had argued convincingly that, everywhere and always, law enforcement has come down more punitively on members of lower status groups than on those of higher status groups, even if the offenses were the same.

As we entered the office I asked Hal why he loved the reading.  He answered, “Because (the author) is right,” he replied.  That alone was very interesting to hear from an experienced police officer.  But I wanted to delve further, so I presented Hal with a scenario.  I said, “So if you confronted a young black male who had committed a minor crime (a misdemeanor), and later a young white male who had done the same thing, would you be more likely to arrest the black male and take him in, and more likely to take the white male home to his parents or give him a warning and let him go?”  And Hal said, “Yes.”  I asked why so, and he replied, “Because that is what the community wants.” Continue reading “Whither Racism in the Land of the Free”

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An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Common Sense is Not Yet Dead in America, So Don’t Kill Truth and Civility

Dear Mark (if I may):

Recently in a Fox News interview, you said that your company, Facebook, would not fact-check any of the President’s lies, as Twitter has begun to do. You said that, “I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general private companies shouldn’t be, especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

Many–likely many millions–of Facebook users are upset, even outraged, at your position, including many of your own employees, especially in the face of the President’s posts inciting law enforcement and other violence against the current nationwide protests of police murders of African-Americans. And it’s not only politicians’ speech that you are allowing to run rampant over the truth and divisiveness. Since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week, Facebook and other social media have disseminated nonsensical conspiracy theories that Floyd is not dead, that the police assault on him was faked, and that George Soros was funding the protests around the nation. Continue reading “An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: Common Sense is Not Yet Dead in America, So Don’t Kill Truth and Civility”

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The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President

That is why Obama stays on the tip of Trump’s tongue. The invocation of him is a hot-wire shorthand that gives an emotional charge to his statements that his audience receives intuitively. The racism is coded, received, without the burden of delivery.    Charles M. Blow, Oct. 13, 2019

[Dear Reader:  While this is not a short essay, there is a 90-second version embedded in it.  For that version, just follow the bold-faced portions of the essay. –PCY]

Told by a new friend, several weeks after I had entered a new public high school in a new state my junior year, that the first friend I had made there was Jewish, I was shocked.  He couldn’t be Jewish, I said.  Then an even more shocking thoughtRacismGraphic(2) occurred to me:  Where did the first thought come from?  To that point in my life, I had never, to my knowledge, met a Jew, having attended only Catholic schools and lived only among Christians before our family moved to the new state.  Yet I clearly had imported into my subconscious some ugly stereotypes against which I had unwittingly measured the normalcy of my friend Alan.

Continue reading “The Pyramid of Hate and Violence: On Race, Bigotry, and the American President”

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To Impeach or Not to Impeach

This is the question that has pushed to the fore in the wake of the release of the (redacted) Mueller Report last week.  Given the array of presidential misconduct described in the Report, the question has given rise to more debate than one might have expected.

The impeachment question does not arise for Congressional Republicans.  As with all of the President’s misconduct since he took office, they are largely silent.  Only Senator Mitt Romney has condemned the President’s and his campaign’s behavior after reading the Mueller Report.  But he misread it to say that Mueller found insufficient evidence to bring charges against the President.  That is not the case.  Instead, Mueller decided not to reach conclusions about whether obstruction crimes had been committed because of the Department of Justice’s policy not to indict sitting presidents for crimes.
Continue reading “To Impeach or Not to Impeach”

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Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report

The much-anticipated (redacted) Mueller Report was released today by the U.S. Attorney General, William Barr. Here are five brief initial observations on it.

I. There is a very important distinction in American law between decisions not to prosecute crimes and whether or not crimes were in fact committed. Decisions not to prosecute potential criminal cases are commonly NOT based on prosecutors’ judgments that the suspects are innocent of crimes. Continue reading “Five Cliff Notes on the Mueller Report”

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The GOP Abandons Democracy

Democracy is a fragile form of government.  It consists of humankind’s loftiest principles supported only by rules created and monitored by altogether fallible beings: us.  And we have proven over time to be unreliable and inconsistent caretakers of this precious system, at times even setting aside some of its central requirements in the service of very undemocratic impulses.

Both major American political parties have participated in these insults to democracy.  We need only recall the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the gaming of Congressional voting districts (gerrymandering) to favor one or the other party.   But never has a major party assaulted the premises and requirements of democracy so consistently, deeply and on so broad a front as has the current Republican Party. Continue reading “The GOP Abandons Democracy”

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What Does the Flag Stand For?

Our American flag has long been a complex symbol.  First created in 1777, it has inspired patriotic unity in times of war and it has flown proudly over a nation that denied slaves their very humanity and women their full rights of citizenship.  It has unblinkingly blended these disparate traditions when African American soldiers fought for the Stars and Stripes in segregated military units in World War II, during which it also flew over the internment camps in which Japanese Americans were incarcerated.

Today, long past the eradication of slavery and the extension of citizenship rights to women and minorities of color, the flag still registers the nation’s deep cultural and political divides.  Its power as a unifying symbol of national values is regularly demonstrated in Fourth of July parades in towns both red and blue across the country.  But presently it is also used as a political cudgel by the American president to condemn African American football players who take a knee at the national anthem to protest the denial of basic civil rights by racial inequality and police brutality.  And refugee children forcibly separated from their families at the country’s southern border are required to stand and pledge allegiance to the flag while incarcerated in Texas.

Continue reading “What Does the Flag Stand For?”

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