Usually when a natural disaster hits, I find myself effectively intellectualizing the tragedy, focusing on big-picture issues that call for problem-solving or logical analysis, rather than the person-by-person anguish that has unfolded. So when the tsunami hit in December, I focused on the theological implications, which make for fantastic and important debate, but can sometimes distance us from the ground-level reality. That changed a couple of weeks later when we learned that a close friend of my wife's from college had been swept away by the tsunami in Thailand. The debate suddenly became less vital to me.
There was no chance of intellectualizing Katrina. As a graduate of the University of New Orleans, for four years I lived steps away from Lake Pontchartrain, and still have many good friends in the city. So the impact of Katrina, for me, is not captured by the panoramic scenes of flooding, the gambling barges tossed onto buildings in Mississippi, the skyrocketing gas prices, or even the law students with their futures in limbo. I think of my friends Chuck and Becky, of their beautiful but now uninhabitable home near the lake, and of the fear and confusion faced by their young kids. I also think of their deep family roots in New Orleans, and of sunny February mornings during college standing in the front yard of Becky's childhood home as the Mardi Gras parades went by, a home that is now almost certainly underwater.
I might be speaking for myself (but I doubt it) when I confess that lawyers, and especially law professors, are very adept at using our minds to detach ourselves from suffering. Indeed, I catch myself unconsciously teaching my Torts students to do the same thing as I gloss over (or worse yet, make a joke of) the horrific suffering of plaintiffs that fills our casebook, recasting it without even skipping a beat as a problem to be solved through the application of legal reasoning. I hope that I can teach myself, as well as my students, to make sure that I don't even think about solving someone's problems until I've come alongside and mourned their loss.
Rob
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
I've just finished reading Amy Gutmann's Democratic Education, and while I find myself resisting several of the book's assertions, I've had trouble articulating a response to one of the passages. Here it is:
Many public schools in the mind-nineteenth century were, to say the least, disrespectful of Catholicism. Catholic children who attended these schools were often humiliated, sometimes whipped for refusing to read the King James version of the Bible. Imagine that instead of becoming more respectful, public schools had been abolished, and states had subsidized parents to send their children to the private school of their choice. Protestant parents would have sent their children to Protestant schools, Catholic parents to Catholic schools. The Protestant majority would have continued to educate their children to be disrespectful if not intolerant of Catholics. The religious prejudices of Protestant parents would have been visited on their children, and the social, economic, and political effects of those prejudices would have persisted, probably with considerably less public protest, to this very day. There may be little reason today for Catholic parents to worry that privatizing schools will reinstitutionalize bigotry against Catholics, at least in the short run. But one reason that Catholics need not worry is that [a school system built on parental choice] today would be built on the moral capital created over almost a century by a public school system.
My questions for Rick, Tom, Patrick, Michael S., and others who have written or thought about the importance of Catholic schooling and/or school choice: Do you agree that, as public schools became more tolerant of minority views, they played an essential role in reducing tension and increasing understanding between Catholics and Protestants? If so, would you still advocate for school choice if you were writing in the nineteenth century, or is your support for school choice premised, at least in part, on the availability of the "moral capital" created by public schooling?
Rob
Even if you don't normally keep up on technology-and-law scholarship (and I don't), anyone interested in mediating structures, subsidiarity, civil society, etc. will want to check out Pittsburgh law prof Michael Madison's paper, "Social Software, Groups, and the Law." Here is the abstract:
Formal groups play an important role in the law. Informal groups largely lie outside it. Should the law be more attentive to informal groups? The paper argues that this and related questions are appearing more frequently as a number of computer technologies, which I collect under the heading "social software," increase the salience of groups. In turn, that salience raises important questions about both the significance and the benefits of informal groups. The paper suggests that there may be important social benefits associated with informal groups, and that the law should move towards a framework for encouraging and recognizing them. Such a framework may be organized along three dimensions by which groups arise and sustain themselves: regulating places, of things, and of stories.
And here's an even more intriguing passage from the paper itself:
Law channels social organizations into prescribed forms, fictionalizing the entity for regulatory purposes. Absent the prescribed form, law looks to the individual. Informal social structures are messy and dynamic; formal legal structures are relatively neat, and static. Part of my argument here is that something is lost in the translation. There may be good which comes from informal groups, which may be lost when group activity is channeled into typical legal forms.
(HT: Solum)
Rob
Friday, August 26, 2005
Given our ongoing discussion of Pat Robertson's bizarre behavior this week, it bears noting that he appears to be even less of a spokesperson for evangelicals than we might think, as he is no longer dependent on attracting or keeping viewers with his espoused take on the world. Christianity Today reports that:
Television and televangelism usually work through viewership. A show with few viewers won't stay on the air: On commercial television, no advertisers will buy space. In religious broadcasting, no donations will come in. But Robertson hasn't needed viewers for almost a decade. He has contractual obligations.
Many people have complained about the 700 Club to cable channel ABC Family, which airs it. But ABC Family has no choice. It is obligated under contract to air it. (The FCC may not be able to do anything, either)
In 1988, Robertson sold the Family Network to Fox for $1.9 billion. Not bad, when you consider the channel was originally launched in 1977 through the donations of viewers who had been promised a Christian alternative to "secular" television, then taken public in 1992. CBN got $136 million from the sale. Robertson's Regent University got another $148 million. Robertson personally received $19 million, and the rest went to the Robertson Charitable Remainder Trust, which will fund CBN after Robertson and his wife die.
But the money wasn't the biggest part of the deal: Fox Family was required to air The 700 Club three times a day—and, if Fox sold the network, the obligation to air The 700 Club had to be part of that deal, too.
Cable World reported in 2001 that Robertson turned down hundreds of millions of dollars to renegotiate. Largely due to frustration that the 700 Club had disrupted its programming, Fox sold the network to the Walt Disney Company in 2001 for $3 billion and $2.3 billion in debt. Now ABC Family is obligated to air the program three times a day.
Hopefully reality will give folks pause before they attribute Robertson's "leadership" to the desires and inclinations of evangelicals (much less Christians more broadly).
Rob
