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The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

the law is a ass – a idiot.

-- Charles Dickens

And yet it was not always so in America. But the confluence of events beginning with Marbury v. Madison has given the judiciary and those who police us far too much power over us. The maze of federal law and the ability of prosecutors to manipulate it to their own ends has resulted in Soviet-style legal machinations that allow the State to charge anyone they choose as a target, regardless of the reality. As has been said many times; the process is the punishment, which is why the conviction rate in federal court approaches 100%. Most people cannot risk the trial and simply plead guilty, in spite of the truth.

But the politicization of our law schools has accelerated the descent into Kafkaesque insanity. Our elite schools no longer teach the law as a bulwark against government power...they teach the law as a tool with which to control and modify society, never mind that the United States Constitution places strict limits on government power over us.

Free speech is no longer an absolute at Yale and Harvard and Stanford and the other elite law schools. It is a quaint holdover from a simpler time, when the people didn't need to be controlled and manipulated. How else can society move on from those antiquated ideas that there are two genders and words are used for debate and are not dangerous? And of course that twisting of our law extends insidiously into every other part of the byzantine legal system.

Statutes of limitations? Hah! Victims of crimes should be protected by the law? Nonsense! The law is now a tool to achieve the political ends of those who wield it.

Judge James Ho's Remarks Announcing a Hiring Boycott From Stanford Law School

The current President of the Stanford Federalist Society put the point well recently: "A lot of us who worked very hard to get to Stanford are kind of feeling like suckers right now. But you get here, you experience this, you see that there’s a mob, there’s a way you’re expected to think. You might have thought the law school was to teach you how to debate with people, and how to make an argument. But in fact, it turns out it’s to teach you how to think a very particular way, to hold a certain set of beliefs. And if you don’t want to do that, then maybe these elite schools are not for you."

So what do we do about it? Well, ask yourself this: What do elite law schools do when they conclude that institutions are failing them? Yale recently called for a boycott of the U.S. News and World Report. And numerous schools have followed suit. Well, imagine that every judge who says they’re opposed to discrimination at Yale and Stanford takes the same path. Imagine they decide that, until the discrimination stops, they will no longer hire from those schools in the future. How quickly do we think those schools would stop discriminating then?

So Lisa and I have made a decision. We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future.

Our Nation’s law schools are failing this basic standard. They’re supposed to make the world a better place. I worry they’re making the world a worse place.

This is exactly how to deal with the catastrophe that is American higher education. Throw the bums out! And extend this to other professions. Medical schools that teach equity in care? Don't hire their graduates, and certainly don't see them for your care. Teachers who graduated from lunatic left-wing diploma mills? Push your school boards to ban them from consideration.

Until we return to a legal system based on rational laws, narrowly interpreted and fairly applied, we will continue down the path to the socialist hellhole that has been the desire of the American left for 100 years.

As Donald Trump is learning today...we are most of the way there.

[Hat Tip: Jack Straw]

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[Hat Tip: Diogenes]

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J.J. Sefton suggested The Folly of Shouting Down Judges We Don't Agree With as a follow-up to Judge James Ho's remarks. I agree!

Surely, I thought, one arrogant, life-tenured lawyer couldn't ignore laws simply because he thought them unjust. Something must constrain judges. Something must stop them from trampling over the democratic processes that gave us the Constitution and the laws.

I could, at that moment, have interrupted Judge Reinhardt to tell him I thought he was wrong. I could, too, have stormed out, determined not to hear anything else I might disagree with. But I stayed, thought about what Reinhardt said, and then began to search for answers to my concerns.

That's the purpose of free speech and our legal protections for it. The orthodoxy can be wonderful, or it can be repellent and evil and destructive. Defending free speech in the face of that orthodoxy is the bedrock of a free society, and the budding apparatchiks at Stanford and Yale are hellbent on destroying it!