Here’s a great post over at Stuart Schneiderman’s blog.
The topic of the post is a high-profile meeting of lawyers and law professors at NYU Law School to discuss the recent Supreme Court decision that allow businesses to make political donations to candidates in the same way that trial lawyer organizations and teacher unions and abortion providers do. The meeting was supposed to be an open and honest debate on the issues. Was it?
Excerpt:
The most disturbing aspect of the meeting was that everyone took for granted that the the decision had been wrongly decided. There was no free trade in ideas about the correctness or incorrectness of the decision; only a discussion about how to overturn the decision.
In their modus operandi the assembled lawyers were ignoring the marketplace of ideas in favor of their own dogmatic beliefs. These defenders of the marketplace of ideas were constitutionally incapable of finding any merit whatever in an opposing viewpoint.
If you refuse to allow an idea (whether a policy or a belief) to be tested against reality, then the question becomes who has the strongest faith. True believers are willing to fight and die to prove that their strength is strongest, thus, most true.
[…]Why were the assembled liberal lawyers so lathered up about the Citizens United decision. Simply, because they believed, dogmatically and unthinkingly, that corporate money was fundamentally corrupt and corrupting. Corporations were sinners; they had acquired their money by less than idealist means; they had no right to try to influence the democratic political process.
Again, dogmatic belief leads to a fighting faith. Why? Perhaps they wanted to maintain their own monopoly control of correct opinion. The greatest enemy of free trade in ideas today is the monopoly on dogmatic belief that is maintained by the educational and media establishments.
Surely, opposing views are aired, through conservative talk radio and through Fox News. But these engines of the free market in ideas are often subject to attack. Those who prefer a more mercantilist, monopoly control over the marketplace in ideas, want to invoke the fairness doctrine to shut down much of conservative talk radio. They often try to discredit Fox News for trafficking in hate speech.
As several of the commenters on the Times site pointed out, none of these great legal minds seem to have the least problem with the influence that labor unions exert on elections through their political advertising. At a time when the political power of labor unions has brought states, cities, and counties to the brink of bankruptcy… lawyers are about to go to war to stop corporations from spending money on political advertising.
This post highlights a change in my own views. I once wanted to be a lawyer, you see. And my judicial philosophy was one of idealism and judicial activism. But after reading Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions” three times, I am now a strict constructionist, while respecting rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Legislating from the bench now seems to me to be the wrong point of view. Injustices need to be fixed by legislators elected by the people, not by an appointed oligarchy of out-of-touch judges. So don’t ever say that I don’t change my mind when confronted with the evidence! It happens all the time. Well, sometimes.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
We should respect the original authors’ intent, not a redefinition of what we’d like them to have meant.
It disturbs me that there was no disagreement vocalized concerning the idea that the decision was wrong.
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I am afraid that this is the feminization of western civilization: people don’t think anymore; they “feel”; rationality has been overturned in favour of “intuition” and mystical notions about right and wrong that are arrived at by getting in touch with one’s inner self (or green self, or by praying to mother gaia, or by consulting noam chomsky, or by reading the manifesto of the main liberal political party of one’s country….et cetera, et cetera) are the default positions for many supposedly learned people in our culture who would much rather reinforce their own views than reconsider them. As someone who had the misfortune of attending a canadian university, I can attest to the fact that this sort of close-mindedness, this sort of hostility to free and open debate, is par for the course in most (if not all) university departments; it is especially overpowering in the social sciences and in the nation’s mediocre law schools (and I have noted this fact to friends many times).
One of the most terrifying things about canadian society is that people of a certain type – authoritarian, narcissistic, dogmatic and imperialist control freaks with axes to grind (like lori andreachuk, jennifer lynch, barbara hall and others) – tend to gravitate towards the law. If they are white and female (and moderately capable) they can quickly ascend the judicial heights and legislate from the bench, imposing their own blinkered, self-serving notions of right and wrong upon the rest of us. We see this in the outrageous decisions of human rights commissions, in the bizarre jurisprudence of rosalie abella, and in the general insanity of canadian political correctness. For these lawyers, its not so much about getting it right as it is about compelling the rest of us to obey their quaint (and often misguided) notions of what constitutes right and wrong.
Now, seriously: does that not sound like a lot of women in our society? I almost pray for the caliphate to come quickly so as to rescue us from the torment that is the canadian left.
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