New Episode: Impregnable Citadel of Technicality
Whitten, Allen III, and Sripetch
The latest episode of Divided Argument, Impregnable Citadel of Technicality, is up:
After puzzling over an interesting follow-up question about Pitchford v. Cain, we unpack a summary vacatur in Whitton v. Dixon. We then spend a while breaking down the latest developments in Allen v. Milligan line, in which we discuss the future of the Purcell principle and whether the Court should be unusually attentive to public appearances in election cases. We finish with Sripetch v. Jarkesy, where the Court rejects a requirement that the SEC prove victims suffered pecuniary loss before seeking disgorgement, with specific attention to the interesting Seventh Amendment question raised in Justice Thomas’s concurrence.
As always, comments are welcome below.
I'm actually really interested in Will's comment that his "bigger project" is "understand the law" and that he thinks only 20% (max) of law professors share this as their main project. In fact, Will, I'd actually like to push you on this: do you not have intellectual priors that drive your interest in the law? I.e. is law important to you for some reason (this is not rhetorical)?
As a hard scientist, this actually reminds me a lot of debates in science funding between pure curiosity driven (blue sky) research vs goal oriented research. E.g. (biased from my own life experience!) is this person studying conformal field theory (physics thing) because it can help us better understand phase transitions and hopefully will one day be important for energy production, or because conformal field theory is just interesting and connects to a lot of other interesting areas of physics. Or e.g., is this person studying genetics because they think it's cool and interesting how little nucleotides pair up, form groups, interact with proteins, etc.--or do they really want to cure breast cancer and they think genetics is the best approach to doing this?
Personally I don't think these things are mutually exclusive. However, I think big jumps in science are more often than not *more* rooted in the curiosity driven explorations because it's actually, really, really, really, *really*, hard to identify which basic science advances are going to have huge impacts.
I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts on where you think the line is in law between "understanding law" and "achieving some goal via understanding law". Do you really not have any higher reason to better understand law than understanding itself (e.g., law is critical for a healthy functioning society)? Do you really think 80% of the legal academy weighs "achieving some goal" of "moving the law" more heavily than "understanding the law"?
WILL - SFFA acknowledged the colorblind Constitution outside of a block quote. In response to Sotomayor’s dissent, the majority in SFFA stated: “For what one dissent denigrates as ‘rhetorical flourishes about colorblindness,’ are in fact the proud pronouncements of cases like Loving and Yick Wo, like Shelley and Bolling—they are defining statements of law.”