Every once in a while, even an Ivy League law professor can surprise you by saying something sensible. For years I’ve been quoting Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School on the dangers of using judicial review to circumvent the formal constitutional amendment process:
Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a public safety hazard don’t see the danger in the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.
Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to read this from Stephen Carter at Yale Law School:
On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.
Neither idea is new, but there are a lot of people who don’t seem to be willing to listen to an idea unless it comes from a ‘respectable’ source, so it’s nice to be able to quote these two.
What I’m waiting for now is an Ivy League endorsement of another idea that has been kicking around for a while, and whose time, I think, may finally have come:
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