Progress—Finally!

Finally all five schools I've applied to have requested my file from LSDAS. The waiting game continues, but at least this is a sign that the application process is moving along...

Posted 11:56 AM | law school

Conspiracy, Death Penalty

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was a lot of talk about "connecting the dots" and there were a lot of questions about why the CIA, FBA, NSA, etc. hadn't been able to make the connections. Well, who needs a bunch of bloated and insidious government agencies to connect the dots when you can do it yourself? Check out Alternet's Top 10 Conspiracy Theories of 2002 for dot-connecting extraordinaire.

In other news, Mark Fiore has some reassuring news for those who are dismayed that the death penalty is under attack after Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the death sentences of everyone on death row in his state: Execution by AmeriCo—Alive and Well!. I tried to say about the same thing the other day (scroll down to the 5th paragraph), but the beauty of cartoons is often their concise eloquence.

Posted 11:48 AM | Comments (1) | general politics

Imaginary Relations

Perhaps it's all the talk of various tax/stimulus proposals, but articles about economic and social class in America seem to be popping up all over. First there was The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest in which David Brooks argued that political movements based on class issues will never be successful in America because everyone so deeply believes he/she either is middle class or will be soon. Brooks contends that this is true because Americans are just so damned hopeful and optimistic—they prefer to believe anything is possible rather than accept some negative idea that they're going to be stuck shoveling crap their whole lives. What Brooks fails to address there is how people become so "optimistic" in the first place, and how they maintain that "optimism" in the face of ugly reality. Then answer to those questions is simple: Hollywood (and the media more generally) is a great teacher and reinforcer.

To help explain how this works, check out Scenes from the Class Struggle on Fox, in which Carina Chocano takes on "Joe Millionaire," Fox's little ditty wherein a $19k/year construction worker pretends to be worth $50 million while 20 women vie for his affections. She's right—the show would be ten times better if it featured the truly rich; only then would the show be able to emphasize the social inequalities and injustices created by class difference. But that's surely something Fox would never want to do since one of TV's major functions in our society is to reinforce the dream and myth that we can all be rich someday, or at least middle class.

Even better is Caryn James' Upward Mobility and Downright Lies, which takes on movies like "Maid in Manhattan" and "Sweet Home Alabama" to make the same point: Hollywood narratives repeatedly argue that upward social mobility is an easy, everyday occurrence in America. However:

that persistent idea ignores the realities of today's economy and research about social mobility. The aristocratic politician Ralph Fiennes plays in "Maid in Manhattan" precisely fits the profile described by the Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger in a November article in The New York Times, which said that new studies show it takes an average of five or six generations to change a family's economic position, and that wealth tends to linger in families. Such inherited wealth helps create political dynasties like that of the Bushes and of the Fiennes character — an assemblyman, a senator's son running for his father's seat, and not the kind of guy likely to take up with a maid. As Mr. Krueger added in an interview, "Recent trends in income distribution have made upward mobility less likely" than it was even 20 years ago.

And such research isn't brand new. As Kevin Phillips says in "Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich," published last year, the increasing gap between the median American family income and the richest 1 percent has been "a point of national discussion for over a decade." By the turn of the 21st century, he writes, the United States "had also become the West's citadel of inherited wealth."

"Aristocracy," he adds, "was a cultural and economic fact."

The people who are perhaps most resistant to this message are those few who really have moved upward—the nouveau riche—and boy do they get mad when anyone questions their social position. [link via Slactivist] The kind of militant self-absorption shown in such rants is perhaps the extreme form of what's motivating the current Bush position on affirmative action—both arguments are founded on the idea that people should earn what they have in life, rather than having it given to them. I mean, that's what Bush did, right? But the logic behind those arguments is that we should live in a fair, just, and equal world—if one person has to work for what he/she has, others should also have to work for what they have—and this is exactly the point: People who argue for real tax relief for poorer Americans or for affirmative action programs are not asking for handouts and free rides, they're also asking for a more equal and just world. The difference is that the social conservatives believe they got wherever they are on their own, while progressives recognize that we are interdependent, social animals who don't live in our own personal vacuums.

Posted 10:09 AM | general politics

Failure of Courts

Larry Lessig's candid meditations on the recent Supreme Court decision against the public domain in Eldred v. Ashcroft offer a fascinating look into the mind of a Constitutional lawyer of international repute. Lessig is understandably disappointed in the Court's decision, and it seems he's doing some soul-searching to reassess how he feels about the law, the courts, and the principles that have motivated him thus far:

But as I read these opinions, I realize the hardest part for me is elsewhere. I have spent more than a decade of my life teaching constitutional law—and teaching it in a particularly unfashionable way. As any of my students will attest, my aim is always to say that we should try to understand what the court does in a consistently principled way. We should learn to read what the court does, not as the actions of politicians, but as people who are applying the law as principle, in as principled a manner as they can. There are exceptions, no doubt. And especially in times of crisis, one must expect mistakes. But as OJ’s trial is not a measure of the jury system, Bush v. Gore is not a measure of the Supreme Court. It is the ordinary case one needs to explain. And explain it as a matter of principle.

I’m not sure how to do that here. I don’t see what the argument is that would show why it is the Court’s role to police Congress’s power to protect states, but not to protect the public domain. I don’t see the argument, and none of the five made it. Nor have any of the advocates on the other side identified what that principle is.

As someone who plans to start law school in the fall (if someone would just let me in ferchrissake!) and who has read Lessig's The Future of Ideas, it's a little difficult to watch Lessig's disillusionment. He talks about being naive, but could anyone really think the law was a matter of principle and not, at the same time, a matter of politics? Do Constitutional lawyers really teach (and believe) that the Supreme Court somehow functions on a higher plane than the rest of the world, a plane where there is always a valid and just reason for all decision/actions? I suppose something like that is necessary if people are going to accept that the Court's decisions are pretty much the last word on the contentious issues in our society, but it seems pretty clearly to be another in the many fantasies that compose our national self-narrative (i.e.: "Everyone has an equal chance to succeed in America!" "America is always working for greater peace, justice and democracy in the world! "The Supreme Court makes decisions on principle, not politics.")

The comments to Lessig's post help put it into context. Since the individual comments don't have permalinks, I'll post a bit from my favorite here: After reminding us that we live in a country in which the President can declare a "Sanctity of Life Day" despite Roe v. Wade, a country in which citizens can become "enemy combatants" and lose virtually all of their rights simply on the government's say-so, and a country whose President was installed by this very Supreme Court, this poster connects the dots:

All along, you’ve treated Copyright as an issue separate from encroaching fascism. But it isn’t: fascism is the union of state and corporate interests.

And that’s the real message of this decision: corporate interests won out over a perfectly valid and good constitutional argument, and this is perfectly in keeping with the times we live in.

Prof., it’s time to come off of the fence: the problem is political, not legal, and it goes far further than just copyright.

This battle is lost. You could turn around and say “well, that was the war, and we lost, and it’s over until the next copyright case”. And that would be ok, valid as far as it goes.

Or you could say “That was the battle, and we lost because the Supreme Court no longer serves the interestes of the people, but has been corruped as have most other branches of our government: by corporate interests and big money. And so, for justice to ve served, we must continue the battle against those interests, until our democracy is restored“.

You’re good enough to make a difference. Rest a while, and then get to work.

Think about that for a minute: "Fascism is the union of state and corporate interests." Does that seem like the world you live in? Why is Bush pushing "tort reform"? Is it to help corporations, or citizens? Why does Bush refuse to participate in the Kyoto Protocol on global warming? Does that help corporations, or citizens? Why have Republicans pushed "deregulation" of nearly everything for years? Does deregulation help corporations, or citizens? Hmmm...

On the question of faith in the legal system, see also the recent case of Bush v. Kucinich, or another case decided by Bush-appointed Federal Judge John Bates in which Bates rejected the General Accounting Office's attempt to subpoena the records of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force. Bates appears to be saying that there's almost no way to use the legal system to hold the executive branch accountable for its actions. Imperial presidency, anyone?

But, of course, there's always a vocal contingent in support of the good old American way. According to Jeff Jarvis, the Eldred side in Eldred v. Ashcroft was the "communist" side. I wonder if people like Jarvis have ever considered that an enormous amount of the technology they use to produce their web content is available to them only because it was released to the public domain. Right.

UPDATE: Do you Want to Believe?

Posted 09:05 AM | law school