Friday - October 07, 2005

Category Image Einstein and Basic Math. and Lawyers and Law


President Bush has nominated Meirs to the Supreme Court. This is cause for alarm, Bush like his father has a terrible track record for these things. I think she will be horrible, but the moonbat ravings against her have me thinking twice. The strongest arguments against her have been focused not on her ideology but on the fact that she went to SMU for law school. In fact both Ann Coulter and Virginia Postrel have revealed themselves to be nakedly snobbish and tell us that only someone who went to an Ivy League school should be on the Supreme Court. For some reason this is now part of the job description in their minds.

A friend of mine had a similar argument when discussing her merits as a justice. He told me that being a Supreme Court justice requires an intelligence well beyond what he, or even I possess. Of course he mistakenly believes he's smarter than me, so I had to take a bit of a liberty in how I said that.

Both these arguments suffer from what I call the Einstein's math fallacy. Einstein is often called a brilliant man and I don't doubt his intellectual abilities. But Einstein was a dunce about many things. Just because he was good at math doesn't mean he was right about everything, or that his thinking was infallible. You don't need to be Albert Einstein to know that 2 plus 2 is four, and had Einstein argued that it was five wouldn't make it true.

The same goes with the law.

Law is not complex. Efforts to complicate it serve only one interest group, lawyers. There are a lot of complex issues in law and a certain amount of sense is needed to argue cases, and determine how to bill your client, but for the most part the challenges of becoming a lawyer are a result of law schools creating an elitist system to become a lawyer. You can't practice law until the law schools and the Bar say you can. Lawyers have a vested interest in keeping the law complicated, convoluted, and easily manipulated. Lawyers create a system that allow OJ Simpson to be acquitted, silicon breast implants banned, and tobacco growers enslaved.

In this malconstructed world of legal arguments, the truth is that the issues are rarely that complex. As a judge, you don't need to know how to create arguments to confuse and muddle justice, you only need to know right from wrong and cut to the heart of the matter.

Law schools don't teach wisdom. Ivy league law schools don't teach right and wrong. They teach how to create and maintain labyrinths of logic so that either side in a legal dispute can win. To a lawyer, justice goes to the best arguer, not the best argument. And seemingly to Coulter and Postrel, only those attending an Ivy League law school are clever enough to argue well.

But what have Ivy Leaguers given us? People who think that free speech is sacrosanct for pornography but punishable for political speech. People who think that property rights extend only to those who convince city governments to give them other people's land. People who think that equal opportunity means that companies should be forced to hire less qualified minorities, and that "minorities" really mean only those who aren't truly minorities, but includes only the largest distinguishable groups (Hipanics benefit as a minority while smaller groups like the almost otherwise indistinguishable Portuguese are not).

The main requirement to be a Supreme Court Justice is not to go to an Ivy League school, it is to be able to know right from wrong and have the moral backbone, the dedication to truth, and the ability to understand that freedom means less government intrusion, not more.

I don't know if Meirs will be a good Justice, but only an Ivy League snob can put forth the absurd argument that only an Ivy Leaguer is possibly qualified for the job.

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