WOMEN AND LAW

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is photographed in the ‘Boston Globe’. She recently visited the New England School of Law and gave what appears to be – the ‘Globe’ would never put it thus – the standard PC ‘How I Did It’ speech.

Well, good on her.

However, a few thoughts.

I’ve recently Posted on her Dissent in Gonzales v. Carhart (“Ginsburg and Carhart”, 13 Feb., 2009). As I noted there, she deploys many of the new standard illogicalities, incoherences, and too-shrewd sleights-of-mind in that Dissent.

What got me thinking today? First, the venue: the New England School of Law is not your ivy-league law school (not that of itself that proves anything). It has on its faculty a lawyer by the name of Wendy Murphy, whose opinions are consistently and vividly ‘pro-woman’ and ‘pro-victim’ (and I have nothing against ‘women’ as such or persons victimized (and who isn’t, these days?).

I have been thinking recently that We have not paid enough attention to what is being taught in law schools these days. After all, Murphy is loud, but she’s not particularly original – and she is a faculty member. And Ginsburg is certainly not a ground-breaking – let alone compelling – legal thinker. So they’re getting this stuff from somewhere.

In my Ginsburg Post I had mentioned what I’ll say here again: the terrible and not coincidental synergy between a) Second Wave feminism (especially its “ideological” variant) and b) the judicial ‘philosophy’ of the late John Rawls.

The gravamen of Second Wave legal ‘vision’ (not to say ‘thought’) seems to be this: Whatever has to be done to make it easier for ‘women’ (which by definition means making it harder for ‘men’) is ‘justice’, and neither the Constitution (contaminated by patriarchy, perhaps irretrievably) nor any long-standing justicial practices of Western justice (rules of evidence, statutes of limitations, etc.; all equally contaminated by patriarchy) can be allowed to stand in the way of the ‘revolution’.

This, as you can see, is the old “Law at War” or “Combat Justice” concept of both Soviet and Nazi jurisprudence, utterly antithetical both to Western concepts of Justice and to the very core of democracy and a democratic society. It was later deployed by the Bushist Imperium, as sooo many of the commentariat will (quite accurately) point out nowadays. BUT decades before Bush, Cheney, and the Children of Darkness picked it up, this concept had been inhaled and thoroughly metabolized by the sistern of the Second Wave.

And it was Rawls* who made a career for himself by providing – in the early 1970s – just the legal ‘cover’ that would ‘baptize’ the spawn of Stalin’s and Hitler’s legal ‘vision’ for the use over here of those who did ‘get it’ and wanted very much to share (read: impose) their vision upon everybody else (read: the lumps who ‘just didn’t get it’).

Essentially, Rawls cobbled together a legal ‘philosophy’ that in its time was all the rage: in the interests of ‘justice’ (as Rawls meant it, though he never clearly defined it) it was OK for the “elites” (read: those who agreed with him) to disregard Constitutional principles and practice in order to get that ‘justice’ going. He was especially interested in his approach being taught in law schools, where the genuine ‘elites’ (read: those who agreed with him and with each other) could train for the Bar and the Bench and then go on to put his strategy of imposition into practice in the courtrooms of the nation, and the higher the court the better.

But he was realistic. Naturally, many of the law-school grads would go on instead into a career as a ‘legislator’; they could serve the cause there by passing laws based on his views, whether such laws conformed to the Constitution and established judicial practice or not. (This was in the very early 1970s.)

Can it be a coincidence that We have seen not only the Bushist disregard for the Constitution and judicial practice and authority, but also – long before Bush – the spate of laws that for decades have posed grave Constitutional corrosions? Why Congress now passes laws that it apparently doesn’t even read (the Patriot Act was hardly the first) ?

In the photo of Ginsburg’s talk I have seen, she is framed at a classroom podium in one of those ‘arena’ classrooms you find in colleges; rising behind her are several rows of female students – and one lone male.

I see absolutely no reason why females cannot be attorneys, judges, or legislators and pols. But I most certainly do see a problem if generations of students are being trained to work in the courts or legislatures, having been trained in the legal ‘visions’ of ideological feminism and Rawlsian strategy.

Forget the general university classes and the ‘tenured radicals’ and Theory and deconstruction and all of that. I think the Law Schools have been the key to the corrosion of the Constitution for quite some time. What are they teaching in there? What do its graduates believe?

As I have also said, I do not agree that judicial candidates should be interrogated as to how they would vote on this or that particular type of case. If the candidate is intelligent, competent in Law, and upright, then confirm him or her, and come what may. That’s how the system is designed to work.

But if a candidate is actually ‘trained in’ and ‘committed to’ a philosophy whereby ‘elites’ impose their vision on the country, regardless of what the Constitution or the common weal indicate, then I think such a person is per se and prima facie and in radice and ab initio unqualified to hold judicial office in the American system. And, hell, I’d advise voters to ask their legislative candidates too, because the same point applies to the Congressional as to the Judicial.

We can see where the Executive recently decided – no doubt having watched the lethal whackery of the previous few decades – that the Constitution was ‘quaint’ and that legal restrictions, even the most stringent and clear, were ‘fungible’ and could be ignored with impunity ‘in a good cause’.

The only difference between Left and Right now lies in the definition of just what constitutes that ‘good’ that automatically justifies overriding the Constitution and democratic process and politics.

We are in a frakking heap o’ trouble.

NOTES

*The book to read is David Lewis Schaefer’s “Illiberal Justice: John Rawls and the American Political Tradition”, Columbia (MO), University of Missouri Press, 2007. It should be noted that Professor Schaefer had detected the lethal dangers to the American political tradition hidden in Rawls’s ‘philosophy’ as early as the late 1970s and published on it. This book is an expansion prompted by the extent –ominously ‘bipartisan’ – of the corrosion so brutally evident by the mid-2000s.

DUKE NOT LEST YE BE DUKED

Just when you think it's all been discovered ... Cathy Young (of the estimable "Reason" magazine) had an Op-Ed in the "Boston Globe" over the weekend (April 16, page A11) in the matter of the Duke case.

She reinforces the impression - and I think it's hugely accurate, and ominous for Us all - that (a) from the very outset (b) a synergy of academics, the media, and feminst rape advocates (c) "were quick to tailor the still-unfolding case to a narrative of sexual abuse of a downtrodden black woman at the hands of privileged white males". Young then marvelously quotes one of these academics, a Duke literature professor (!), who characterized the accused players as "the politically dominant race and ethnicity [and] the dominant gender". Y'know, reading this type of stuff - just its style - is like plowing through tomes of Soviet 'thought'; but the similarities, alas for The Republic, do not end there.

As you can see from (a), (b), and (c) above, and as the feminists themselves have been trying to say for decades, a gang-bang is an ugly thing. And dangerous. And as I mentioned in the preceding Post about this case, it is the hugely insidious and destructive and dishonest paradox of this aspect of the feminist revolution that such gang-banging has to be instituted AND called a Good Thing in order to reach the desired broad, sunlit uplands of a crimeless, non-violent, tasteful, refined, but sexually vibrant and satisfying world.

The self-abasing and professionally 'trahisant' complicity of academics and the mainstream media in all of this stuff is now well-established. But Young also draws back the curtain on lawyers, and I think that this element of the revolting synergy is still not fully illuminated.

She quotes one Wendy Murphy, "a Boston-based, former sex-crimes prosecutor" AND "an adjunct professor at the New England School of Law". (They have special prosecutors for these shows now? I know they want to have 'special' courts for them - hardly out of keeping with a Western anti-tradition that includes Star Chamber and special Gestapo and SS courts.)

Sez Lawyer Murphy (on MSNBC): "I have never, ever met a false rape claim ... My own statistics speak to the truth." Wahllllll ... she says so much here. That she has never met a false claim - of anything - indicates either a very unwide experience or a very inadequate perception; that she reinforces her lack of knowledge with "never ever" indicates a penchant for confident exaggeration that does not speak well for a Member of the Bar or for a Professor - and in a law school to boot! And that she assumes that her own (grossly limited) experience or the perception thereof is - as the lawyers say - 'dispositive' and definitive and conclusive ... she's either not well or not competent or she is being very untruthful toward Us.

But of course, it would all be for the Cause, and in that Cause - or in any 'revolution' - the public are merely the bit-player extras, the anonymous heads of cattle in the herd that the vanguard trail-bosses of the Cause must whip along to the desired objective (so often in the 20th century, to an actual slaughter-house).

They are teaching this sort of stuff in law schools? It is considered worthwhile professional preparation for attorneys? And so there are now attorneys 'out there' who actually believe this stuff and that Murphy's way is the Way to proceed? The Way to practice law? And for how long has this been going on? May we now fear that there are judges out there who were professionally 'formed' by this sort of stuff and are now on the bench?

And - why not take all the bad news in one gulp? - have a number of these attorneys gone into the JAG corps? And if you haven't had any nightmares recently, imagine that they are now JAG prosecutors, where their deformed sex-0ffensive training is blended with the fundamental deformity of military 'justice' itself? And - if your pacemaker is up to it - imagine that one of these attorneys is assigned to defend a male service-member accused of a sex offense ... And we wonder where the treacherous and reprehensible Unitarium got the idea that the Law and Justice were up for grabs and could be twisted to any purpose that Power might choose?

Flaks like Murphy and her academic collaborators (and their name is Legion) and the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are presently trying to spin the Duke case as usefully as they can. Jackson prays that we can just all move on and give thanks that more damage wasn't done - as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Others are going to try to focus on the Duke lads as the unlovely fratboy lumps that they surely do seem to be (but that's not a crime). Others are going to try to defend the whole sex-offense approach as 'revolutionary justice', wherein - if we recall our Soviet Thought and Praxis 101 course - the purpose of 'justice' is to embody and symbolize the outrage of the victimized masses against a particular class (any of whose members will do for the day's target, and the specifics of their guilt or innoncence be damned). So while the bhoys may indeed be "louts", the revolutionistas have made them kulaks as well. And that's - not to put too fine a point on it - not only 'unAmerican but anti-American and anti-Western.

Yes, yes - the aforementioned Rev Jackson said Western Civ had to go (the same Western Civ that grounded the gravitas portrayed in the film "Judgment at Nuremberg"). But by the Year of Grace 2007 We see that letting Western Civ go like an old and expensive employee has led to a moral chaos that has undermined not only Our domestic societal and cultural life and Our 'character' as a People but has also undermined Our Constitutional ethos and morally deranged Our government and - the bloody top-off on it all - the military that that government controls in Our name.

In emergency room parlance, a patient with this many interacting, synergistic problems is on the way to becoming a 'train wreck'.

As if to reinforce the alarm, Dr. Trudy Bond has an article on the Counterpunch site (www.Counterpunch.com/bond04142007.html) limning how senior Army psychologists and the governing level of the American Psychological Association are collaborating in the infliction of torture while simultaneously denying it and spinning it as professionally meritorious behavior.

Military chaplains flag-waving and exhorting like old-time Soviet 'political officers' while claiming to do it for Jeezuzz, military lawyers railroading doomed defendants while claiming it's all on the up-and-up, miiltary doctors under-diagnosing wounded vets in order to duck having to care for them while claiming to 'do no harm', military psychologists advising how best to torture while claiming that it's a good thing they've been hired to 'advise' ... and do We think that We are not accountable? What is happening to Us? How have We lost so much so quickly? Our decency, Our honor, Our integrity? Our ability to value the foregoing? Our ability to recognize - to admit - what We have lost? What We have allowed to be done?

However all that has happened, the brazen and disreputable imbecilities perpetrated by assorted synergistic revolutionaries in the sex-offense mania have certainly paved the road. Whether that road will lead Us all the way to hell is still within Our power to determine. But the road itself already reaches that far.

UPDATE

Stuff keeps coming out. Today up in Boston, Wendy Murphy the lawyer/law school prof/victimiste advocate goes on record in the "Boston Herald" as opposing a $700,000 incease in state funding for public defenders at the expense of the hugely tangled sex-offender registry board and district attorneys.

The money, she wails, "should hardly go to give even more money to the people causing some of the problems." Here, I say again, is an example of the Soviet-era roots of this particularly American lawlessness: An attorney and law professor shows no appreciation for, maybe no awareness of, the overriding Constitutional concern for ensuring the individual citizen some level of protection from the arbitrary imposition of the criminal law and the government power.

For Murphy and her ilk (and their name may be not simply Legion but Official Legion) the 'defendant' - being a 'man' and a 'sex-offender' - is a member of an objective-enemy class and is thus guilty as well as beyond redemption even before the trial that - with whatever integrity is left to trials in these matters - will declare his guilt or innocence. This is a soviet attitude; it is not an American attitude; it is an un-American attitude; it is an anti-American, anti-Constitutional attitude. And it is a firebell in the night warning us of just how profound and pervasive (from the Left as well as the Right) is the damage done to Our sense of the rule of law.

And again: who can be suprised that Cheney and Rove, ever alert to possibilities and far far more vigilant than the children of light, saw their way clear to embarking on the war in Iraq? The USSR went away in 1991. Eerily, its praxis and its philosophy had by then just reached the point of breaking into the bigtime in American legislation ... We are not haunted by the spirit of sovietism. We are infected by it.