Horwitz responds to Alvare

MOJ-friend (and my Prawfsblawg colleague) Paul Horwitz has an as-per-usual thoughtful post responding to the Helen Alvare lecture to which I linked recently.  He says (read the whole thing):

. . . asserting that the standard liberal prescriptions for social problems "just don't work" strikes me as an unwarranted strong statement.  It is certainly one that cannot be met with a nostalgia for periods in which other mechanisms of dealing with social problems were employed, unless one is willing to fully consider and count the often serious side-effects that accompanied those prescriptions.  Maybe that should make both sides more willing to see both liberal and non-liberal efforts at social reform as an ongoing, evolving, iterative and potentially cooperative process of social learning, instead of a forced, once-and-for-all choice between one or the other mechanism for addressing social concerns.