Brown, Rehnquist and Contemporary Politics

[Volokh, Eugene]

Well, we've seen lots of posts -- on gay rights and more generally -- where left-of-center posters are airing their moral views on subjects they feel strongly about.  Rick Duncan's post illustrates that we also have right-of-center posters who are willing to do the same.
 
I would second Mark's advice, and suggest that people should decline to post on subjects on which we've reached diminishing intellectual returns, especially when they suspect that the arguments in those posts will indeed be familiar to everyone on the list.  I'd also go further and suggest that people try to stick with specific legal points, rather than just general moral philosophy, not because the latter is entirely off-topic -- for instance, the moral propriety of abortion is surely relevant both to arguments about constitutional abortion rights and about the constitutional structure that yields abortion rights -- but because it's likely to provide relatively little marginal benefit to list members.
 
But this has hardly been the rule on the list, especially in recent weeks, and I surely don't see why Rick Duncan should forbear when others have not.
 
Eugene

 
________________________________

From: conlawprof-bounces at lists.ucla.edu on behalf of Mark Graber
Sent: Mon 9/12/2005 9:47 AM
To: nebraskalawprof at yahoo.com
Cc: conlawprof at lists.ucla.edu
Subject: Re: Brown, Rehnquist and Contemporary Politics



I'm not sure what the argument is here.  If the point is that list
members did not know Professor Duncan is pro-life, I confess to have
guessed that already.  If the point is that any sensitivity to the
Holocaust warrants a pro-life position, well a great many of us who have
relatives killed at that time support Roe.  One might note in this vein
that Eastern European Jews, Hitler's major victims, tend to be among the
most pro-choice constituencies in the United States.  The same is true
for gays and lesbians (I do not know the tendencies of Romanis on this
matter).  Of course, statistical tendencies do not prove philophical
points, but they do suggest that morally decent people of equal
intelligence disagree on this one.  May I suggest that on abortion and
gay rights, we have reached the point of intellectually diminished
returns, so that unless anyone has anything truly new to say
philosophically, we might do without posts that do little more than
announce well known positions in ways probably intentionally designed to
provoke people to intempered responses.

Mark A. Graber (who is still waiting to hear of a contemporary elected
official whose electoral success has largely been based on very early
support for Brown)

>>> Rick Duncan <nebraskalawprof at yahoo.com> 09/12/05 9:28 AM >>>
Well said, Jim.

Justice Blackmun's Holocaust both drew me to work in constitutional law,
and poisoned constitutional law in my heart. Roe's existence makes it
impossible for me to respect the Court, or to love my country. More than
30 years after the decree in Roe was handed down, I find it difficult to
believe that the City on the Hill has become a death camp for so many
millions of innocent, vulnerable human beings. I don't know whether
Harry Blackmun told fetus jokes, but his judicial legacy is one of
spilled innocent blood.

Rick Duncan


_______________________________________________
To post, send message to Conlawprof at lists.ucla.edu
To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/conlawprof

Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private.  Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.