The ABA already has rules that keep judges from belonging to organizations that think there are differences between men and women that matter in personal and social interactions and that adjust their practices accordingly (that “discriminate based on gender”). Now they’re talking about extending that rule to organizations that believe sexual oddities and perversities could ever matter in human relations: “Judges may have to quit groups that discriminate against gays”.
Supposedly litigants will have more confidence in the court system if they know that judges have to bend their knee to left-wing cultural radicalism. I’m sure that’s true of some litigants, for example the litigants who are trying to get the rule adopted. Personally, though, I’d rather judges were all required to go to church every week and give money to pro-life organizations. Why would that be less justified as an interference with the judical system? We know that a quarter of American whites hate fundamentalists as much as the the most anti-semitic 1 percent hate Jews. So as a weekly mass-goer how can I have confidence in any judge who doesn’t decisively distance himself from the radically secularist views of organizations like the ABA?
Mr. Kalb,
Given how much y
Mr. Kalb,
Given how much you hate what goes on in modern society, you must have had an incredibly hard time practicing law in the very heart of the modern world; New York. No wonder you quit.
Ignorance of Law
The commentator’s premise is lawyers that believe some laws are unjust cannot deal with the unjustness and therefore quit practicing law. This ignores the facts: all lawyers, just as all laypersons, surely believe some laws are unjust; and all lawyers don’t quit. There is so much injustice in the world, lawyers should not exist if one accepts the commentator’s premise.
Lawyers I imagine take laws as they find them just as physicians take natural laws as they find them. One would not say that all physicians frustrated with the coldness of natural law quit because of this frustration. I’ll bet the same holds for lawyers faced with the coldness of man-made law. As U.S. Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wheeled around and said to someone that told him to do justice: “I don’t do justice; I follow the law.” Justice Holmes practiced until a ripe age. P. Murgos.
Ignorance
Mr. Murgos,
Please don’t put thoughts into my head. My comment had nothing to with the law per se, but had to do with the “legal atmosphere” (for lack of a better expression) in New York. Mr. Kalb strikes me as a very conservative man, and I would think that he would be rubbing up against very many people much more liberal than himself.
I am a lawyer and am familiar with a great many laws I wish I could change.
Law
While practicing law I spent most of my time worrying about things like the tax treatment of weird complex financial arrangements. It wasn’t unpleasant, the pay was very good, and the hours (surprisingly) weren’t at all bad, so I have no complaints. As to my fellow lawyers, I found one-upsmanship, competitive vacations and so on much more annoying than political and social views, which stayed very much in the background.
Rem tene, verba sequentur.
Matt
Thank you Mr. Kalb, that is exactly what I was asking about.
Ignorance of Law
Nominalists are people that have secret meanings for expressions that they spring on anyone calling on them to account for their usage. Nominalists also usually accuse others of doing to them exactly what they have just done to someone else. As a blogger named Matt once pointed, rational discussion is extremely unlikely with people that exhibit these behaviors. So I’ll give the gentleman the last word. P. Murgos.