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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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The GOP Is Ground Zero for American Racism

For a while there have been versions of this saying:  Not all Republicans are racist, but if you are a racist the Republican Party is the party for you.

Now this may be taken in either of two ways in terms of the GOP.   The less consequential–even somewhat anodyne–meaning is that American racists are attracted to the Republican Party because it has long favored tough-on-crime policies and low taxes/small government policies, which have always translated into harsh punishments of and weak federal support for poor people, among whom minority populations figure disproportionately.  This view can seem to insulate the Party itself from charges of racism and racial animus.

The other way of reading the statement is not only less forgiving–it is condemnatory.  This view asserts that the Party itself is racist at its core.  Its basic principles and fundamental operations are racist.  They are dedicated to the protection and strengthening of white dominance–and domination–in the United States.  They are racially exclusionary.  Today, in the 21st century, the Republican Party is the nation’s beating heart of systemic racism at both the national and state levels.  It is the principal mechanism of institutional discrimination against minorities of color.  As a result, whether or not individual Republicans feel that they are racist, supporting today’s GOP while remaining silent on its racist policies is itself a racist act.

Sadly, there is no plausible argument against this second reading.  There is no rational or factual way to challenge this conclusion.  There is only the denial of truth, something else that the GOP has adopted as a routine part of its operations that serves its racist purposes. Continue reading “The GOP Is Ground Zero for American Racism”

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Language Habits II (A Series of Occasional Rants)

Alright, I am going to make a point of this one last time.  Then I am going to bury my revered high school Latin textbook in the backyard, in the sacred ground deep beneath my cat’s ashes.  DATA IS PLURAL!

And that sentence is the only way to say correctly “Data is”!

My former colleagues in the press seem to have long ago given up on the correct usage of “data.”  Even television doctors commenting on the pandemic data, people trained in a science that has long drawn heavily on Latin words and roots, routinely mess up the use of “data.”  You know what the singular word for “data” is?  It is datum which, I agree, does not roll easily off the tongue.  But we don’t need a single datum.  We need an “are.”

So goodbye to “Data are . . .”  RIP with the language of the ancients–and my beloved cat. Continue reading “Language Habits II (A Series of Occasional Rants)”

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Adieu, My First Kiss

I first spotted her while splashing around with friends in the large Elks Club swimming pool.  I still see her strikingly pretty face and that bright pink one-piece bathing suit with the skirt.  She is chatting with friends, waist-deep in the water.  A good swimmer, already with a clutch of ribbons in my drawer from swim races against other area teams, I dive into the water and swim under it, scraping the bottom of the pool.  I take a snaking route and soon go right past her legs, perhaps barely brushing them with my own.   I don’t dare surface.  Holding that long breath, I swim on, still snaking around the expanse of the pool bottom, until I’ve passed many other pairs of legs.  I come up for air only after I am safely shrouded by the other kids’ torsos between me and her.

I am 13 years old, and I am terribly girl-shy.  It is the summer before I begin high school, and God Forbid that I should speak with her. Continue reading “Adieu, My First Kiss”

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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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High School Homeroom

We were sitting around the family dinner table that night in late September when my father called for our attention.  Then, as easily as he might announce a family outing to a movie theater next week, he told his children that we were moving from Indiana.  To another state.  In mid-December.

I was horrified.  This could not be happening.

Dad explained that he had taken a new job at a major architectural firm in Minneapolis, starting in only a few weeks, and that Mom and the kids would follow him to Minnesota at the Christmas school break in three months.  In the interim, he would shop for a house for the family.

I was 15 and I had just begun my junior year in high school. Continue reading “High School Homeroom”

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A Note on Language and Politics

Many of us may recall a subtle shift in political language that began during the last decade, maybe longer ago now.  Prominent members of the Republican Party began to refer to the opposing party as the “Democrat” Party.  We had all grown up knowing it as the “Democratic” party, and its candidates as the “Democratic” candidates.  Now, to the GOP, they are the “Democrat” candidates . . . or it is the “Democrat” position, and etc.  From Republican mouths, the word often sounds as if an epithet is being spit out.  For them, it has come to be a term of derision if not of disgust, much more (and less) than the name of an opposition party.  No matter: some even in the mainstream media appear to have adopted the term. Continue reading “A Note on Language and Politics”

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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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