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Today in History (1862) - The U.S. government forbids all Union army officers from returning fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation. On the same day in 1865, the Confederate Congress voted to enlist 300,000 black troops, granting them freedom with the consent of their owners. Lee surrendered a few weeks later. |
Despite Armen's exasperation with the Saturday night witch hunt for the Boalt student who posted a hoaxed threat against UC Hastings on AutoAdmit, and his annoyance at classmates who take their opposition to John Yoo's political views to the point of peitioning for his firing (isn't keeping someone from a job in his field for such a reason called McCarthyist blacklisting? no wonder Armen found the two seemingly disparate incidents coming together in a single post)...
... he still has the best law school community online since Wings & Vodka graduated. Though I'd say he's working with superior material: who else but Berkeley law students would take the nationwide Restore Habeas campaign and turn it into a rally against a professor? It's the sort of thing that makes me sad not to have applied on the assumption that I wouldn't have gotten in.
One person, a law student, jokes about his maybe shooting up a law school; another person, a law professor, wasn't joking about President Bush's being able to crush a child's testicles, in the name of national security. Which person displayed worse judgment? Who deserves expulsion more?
Posted by: Compare and contrast at May 1, 2007 01:31 PMWhat was the law student's justification for joking about shooting up a law school?
I'm not in favor of crushing testicles (except when he asks for it), but Prof. Yoo was putting forward a legal argument. I don't agree with much of his legal argument, either, but he was not advocating testicle-crushing for the pure joy of it any more than CJ Roberts advocated arresting kids for eating french fries on the Metro because it's fun to watch them cry.
The hoaxer, by contrast, apparently thought that creating fear among the Hastings community was worth it if he could get his jollies and amuse his AutoAdmit buddies. Call me reactionary, but I consider national security -- even if I disagree with Yoo on how best to pursue it -- to be rather more important.
If we want to avoid having children ever face the possibility of their testicles being crushed by U.S. agents, perhaps we should put more effort into ending the worldwide scourge of child soldiering (although thankfully our direct enemies haven't stooped too far into this) than we do into trying to get a tenured professor expelled.
Posted by: PG at May 1, 2007 02:06 PM