Together with Senator Jim DeMint and Congressman Steve King, I'll be one of the questioners of Republican candidates for President at the South Carolina Presidential Forum on Monday, September 5, 2011. The Forum will be sponsored by the American Principles Project. Here is the announcement:
Palmetto Freedom Forum to Feature Top GOP Candidates
Columbia, SC – U.S. Senator Jim DeMint has announced a Presidential Forum – The Palmetto Freedom Forum – to feature the top Republican candidates for President. The Forum is being sponsored by the American Principles Project and will take place on the afternoon of Labor Day (Monday, September 5, 2011) in Columbia, South Carolina, at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center. South Carolina ETV will broadcast this innovative event live on the South Carolina channel. Informational letters will be sent to current and prospective candidates and formal invitations will be extended based on objective polling criteria (see below).
The Palmetto Freedom Forum will follow a unique format, designed to allow invited candidates to engage in a thoughtful, substantive discussion of their stances on the critical issues facing our country. Candidates will be featured on stage one-at-a-time and will engage in a question and answer session with three panelists: U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), U.S. Representative Steve King (R-IA), and Dr. Robert P. George, founder of the American Principles Project and a professor at Princeton University. The event will be moderated by David Stanton, a veteran of South Carolina presidential events and former local news anchor.
“I am pleased to be part of this exciting event that will help Republican primary voters make their choice for president,” said Senator DeMint. “America faces enormous challenges in the years ahead, and primary voters must thoughtfully select a candidate with the courage and conviction to fight to save it.”
“This event will present a vital opportunity for the 2012 presidential candidates to discuss their positions on a number of key issues and to outline their vision for the future of our nation,” said DeMint. “Instead of looking for ‘gotcha’ questions and sound bite answers, this event will offer candidates the opportunity to deliver their message directly to undecided primary voters in South Carolina and beyond.”+
Representative Steve King (R-IA), who will join Senator DeMint on the panel, said, "Thirty second responses do not allow the candidates to properly spell out their understanding of our founding and their vision for our way forward. I appreciate Senator DeMint creating a venue that will let the candidates separate themselves on the issues."
A Palmetto Freedom Forum Advisory Committee has been formed to facilitate the event and is comprised of key South Carolina leaders including former SCGOP Chairman Barry Wynn, Columbia businessman Peter Brown, leading SC Republican Election Law Attorney Kevin Hall, former Public Policy Director for the South Carolina Baptist Convention Joe Mack, and former DeMint State Director Luke Byars. It will be sponsored by the American Principles Project (www.americanprinciplesproject.com).
Founder of the American Principles Project, Robert George, said, “The South Carolina presidential forum rests on a conviction---the belief that the way forward for our country is a renewed fidelity to the foundational principles of our civilization and the constitutional principles of our democratic republic. The forum will give those aspiring to the presidency an opportunity to demonstrate the depth of their understanding of our nation's core principles, and the strength of their commitment to governing in accordance with them.”
Participation Criteria: The Palmetto Freedom Forum Advisory Committee will invite those individuals to participate who have achieved a 5% threshold in the realclearpolitics.com 2012 Republican Presidential Nomination RCP Average as is posted on that site on August 22, 2011 at 1PM Eastern Daylight Time.
Rod Dreher, on the RealClearReligion site, observes how Muslims in Great Britain have responded to the riots with community solidarity and cooperative efforts to protect neighborhoods and businesses. He notes a study of teenagers in an impoverished neighborhood in Birmingham and how differently Muslim kids saw the world and their future:
In 2009, Britain's Learning for Life project released a study of the beliefs and attitudes of 14-to-16 year olds living in the impoverished Hodge Hill neighborhood of Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city and a target for looters. The contrast of views of Hodge Hill's Muslims and non-Muslims is remarkable, and instructive.
Though everyone studied lives in the same neighborhood, and in relative poverty, the character profile of Muslim kids was far different. The report found that Hodge Hill's Muslims took religion seriously (unlike the others, who had no real engagement with religious thought or practice), and come from strong families guided by engaged fathers. Among the Muslims, parents and children alike are optimistic about their futures, with their aspirations "often centered around responsibility to the family."
The Learning for Life researchers found that Muslim students were more engaged with their communities, "get on better with their neighbors," and that "there is a strong sense of Islamic solidarity within the community."
And there's this, from the Learning for Life report:
Muslim students tended to think that Britain was fairer. One remarked that 'it's what you make of it innit? Seems fair to me' -- suggesting that they had a higher level of self-control than other groups. Non-Muslim students were more critical of Britain, commenting that it had done little for them.
Muslims in America are very similar and distinctive in this regard. As reported by the Pew Research Center in 2007, in its comprehensive study of Muslims Americans, a larger percentage of Muslims (71 percent) than the general public (64 percent) has internalized the American work ethics and believe they can move ahead through hard work. Overall, 78 percent of Muslims in the United States report that they are either happy or very happy. A very recent new Gallup poll found that, among all religious groups, Muslim Americans are the most optimistic about their future.
Not only do these studies confirm, contrary to stereotype, that Muslims in the West are mainstream, involved in their communities, and good neighbors, but these studies show again the vital importance of faith for building strong communities and instilling healthy values in the next generation. As I read these reports about Muslims in Great Britain and the United States, it's hard not to think of the same being true of Catholics and Catholic communities in the United States in decades past.
We as legal scholars and political commentators are apt to think that our law reform and public policy efforts are important and hold the answers to our social problems. But I continue to think that our parishes and parish schools are likely to be making a bigger difference for our communities and our future. As our Muslim neighbors are showing us, we should not be waiting for government and new social programs to fill the hole in the soul of our community. We need to renew our own commitments to our parishes and Catholic schools, which are teaching our children how to thrive and how to build satisfying lives grounded in Catholic faith and moral values. God/Allah bless our Muslim neighbors for reminding us of these first principles.
In this piece, Where Do Partners Come From?, Professor Theodore Seto traces which law schools do best with respect to producing partners in the National Law Journal's 100 largest law firms. The study has nothing to do with Catholicism, right? Well...if you look at those schools which most grossly outperform their US News ranking (see page 5), with one exception (Miami), they are all Catholic institutions. In order of outperformance: St. John's [tooting horn noise], Villanova, DePaul, Catholic, and Loyola Chicago (and Georgetown, too, seems hugely to outperform its US News position). Explanations? Network effects? Alumni stickiness? Divine intervention in response to the errors of all-too-human US News rankers?
Via Larry Solum, I see that Dan Kahan has posted a draft of the Harvard Law Review Foreword for the fall, Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law. Readers here will know that neutrality is a currently favored family of approaches to religious liberty, and Professor Kahan even quotes a tract from the McCreary County case as one of the piece's epigraphs. I say family of approaches because there are all kinds of theories of neutrality, substantive and formal, and I know that there will be new and quite sophisticated theories of neutrality in the offing soon enough. Neutrality of one kind seems to be the position demanded by Employment Division v. Smith; neutrality of another represents the current position of the Court on establishment issues of school funding. Neutrality of yet another kind characterizes the position of the European Court of Human Rights in various cases involving issues of religious liberty (one in which proselytism figures prominently). And neutrality, of course, has its keen critics.
Professor Kahan is critical of neutrality talk. He believes that it is actually counterproductive to the Court's perceived legitimacy (and that perceived legitimacy seems to be a very important concern for Kahan in the piece). He says that neutrality talk exacerbates the sense in which we engage in and perceive others to be engaging in "motivated reasoning" -- "the tendency of people to unconsciously process information -- including logical and empirical arguments, oral advocacy, and even their own sense impressions -- to promote goals or interests extrinsic to the decisionmaking at hand." (6)
I have not read the whole piece yet, but it seems to me that it should be interesting to people who think about the religion clauses. I did read the following statements in the introduction, though:
Abstract: This paper explores the possibility that the principle of basic equality might be explicated by reference to the idea that humans constitute a "single-status" community. It explores some difficulties with the idea of status in its original legal habitat. These difficulties include skepticism about status fostered by John Austin and others. The paper attempts to answer this skepticism, and it concludes (along with Jeremy Bentham, who in this respect disagreed with his disciple) that once one takes a dynamic view of a legal system, the idea of legal status is not an eliminable idea. The paper then examines the distinction between what I call "sortal-status" and "condition-status." Sortal status works from the idea that law recognizes different kinds of human being: racist and sexist legal systems are characterized by sortal-status concepts. Condition-status recognizes that persons may get into various scrapes, situations, conditions, and vicissitudes, or pass through certain stages, that are marked by status distinctions. (These include infancy, alienage, felony, bankruptcy, matriage, military service etc.) Once one makes this distinction, then the idea of a single (sortal) status society becomes a promising vehicle for expressing ideas about moral equality.
There's an interesting conversation, here, at the Dappled Things blog, about capitalism, distributism, economics, and the "Catholic vision of the Good Life." Specifically, the question posed is whether "capitalism" or "distributism" is the "economic system that is most compatible with a Catholic understanding of the good life." Profs. Robert Miller and John Medaille respond. Check it out!
The SCOTUS Blog is running an online symposium on Perry v. Schwarzenegger and Windsor v. United States, the cases challenging state and federal provisions limiting civil marriage to opposite-sex couples. My contribution is here (more are coming from a variety of contributors). Although I express sympathy for same-sex marriage as a matter of wisdom and policy, I argue that "[t]o say that same-sex civil marriage should be recognized does not mean, of course, that judges should require it under the Constitution":
In making that distinction, one could raise arguments about proper methods of constitutional interpretation, or warn about political blowback that aggressive judicial decisions can trigger (as even some pro-choice observers have remarked about Roe v. Wade). I focus, however, on a different reason for the Court to tread gently in Perry: the religious liberty of traditionalist objectors to gay marriage, and how legislative recognition of marriage may be a better vehicle than judicial rulings for balancing religious liberty and gay rights.
I recap my argument (made at greater length here) that the strongest arguments for same-sex marriage--respect for conduct central to personal identity--themselves call for strong religious-liberty accommodations. I argue that judicial declarations of same-sex marriage, as in California, have been (and are likely to be) a less hospitable context than legislation for factoring in countervailing religious-liberty limits. This provides a reason to prefer legislative handling of the marriage issue, and for voters in California to overturn same-sex marriage until they could be confident the religious-liberty concerns would be addressed.
One of the many gifts that have come my way, thanks to my position at Notre Dame, has been the chance to work with, learn from, and get to know one of our time's truly great scholars, Prof. John Finnis. To mark the occasion of the publication, by Oxford University Press, of a new five-volume (!!) collection of his essays, Notre Dame Law School is hosting an all-day conference to celebrate John's life and work. More info is here. And, why not buy the books?
by Jeff Blumenthal -- Philadelphia Business Journal
Mark Sargent certainly left an imprint on Villanova University School of Law. But that appears to have taken the form of two black eyes.
Sargent, the school’s dean for 12 years, resigned in June 2009 after being linked to a prostitution ring. Then Monday, an American Bar Association American Bar Association Latest from The Business Journals Villanova Law censured by ABANakasone picked to replace McKenna on First Circuit CourtAmerican Bar Association censures Villanova LawFollow this company investigation indicated that Sargent “directed” three other law school administrators to knowingly report falsified admissions data. The report doesn’t specifically name Sargent, but it says a “former dean” directed the misreporting and that dean and the three other administrators are no longer employed by the school. Sargent was dean when the alleged false reporting occurred from between at least 2002 to 2009. Villanova Law said it could not speak about any former employees but confirmed that the responsible administrators are no longer working at the school.
When longtime Villanova Law professor John Gotanda was elevated to dean this past January, he immediately inherited the false reporting scandal that was uncovered that month through an internal investigation. Already burdened with succeeding Sargent, Gotanda had to spend the next six months trying to get to the bottom of the reporting discrepancies while trying to preserve the school’s reputation and openly communicate with its various constituencies.
Gotanda told me Monday afternoon that the wrongdoing was committed by a “small group of people in secret. There’s no question there was wrongdoing, but we hope people see that once it was uncovered, we stepped up and did the right thing by self-reporting [to the ABA] and taking steps to not just remedy the situation but set up a compliance program equivalent to Sarbanes Oxley.”
The ABA said that is what saved Villanova Law from a more serious penalty such as probation or removal from the list of approved law schools. Instead, it received a public censure that must be posted on its website and the ABA’s Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar for the next two years. The school is also required to issue a public statement of correction approved by the ABA and hire a compliance monitor for at least two years.
Villanova Law hired accounting firm KPMG to assess and recommend improvements to all of its procedures revolving around ABA compliance and law firm Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan to develop and monitor all ABA compliance matters and serve as independent compliance officer for the next two years.
Villanova Law students and alumni I’ve interviewed over the past several months said Gotanda was very open with them during course of the investigation. While he took some heat for not speaking publicly on the matter until yesterday, Gotanda said the ABA had asked the school not to speak publicly while the investigation was ongoing.
In addition to seeing its reputation disparaged, Villanova Law also incurred a financial hit. Gotanda said its investigation and compliance remedies cost more than $500,000. Gotanda said he knows the mess is not behind the school.
“It was really damaging to the institution,” Gotanda said. “Once you lose your integrity, it’s hard to regain it. But the entire [Villanova Law] community came together to try and restore our reputation and right the wrong. Students could have abandoned the school but 120 of them helped recruit. And so did alums.”
Gotanda recognizes he still has work to do when it comes to repairing Villanova Law’s reputation. While the school’s most recent U.S. News and World Report ranking fell. Gotanda said the Villanova Law still attracted “high achieving” students whose bar exam passage rates increased in recent years. But only time will tell if the scandal produces any lingering negative residue.
