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.”
I'm curious the sense in which you think there is a right answer to questions of law. If you have any interprative methodology that isn't just pure realism then inevitably you will end up with situations in which you end up with contradictions or absurd results if you apply the principles blindly. Once you accept that in some sense you have to use some extra legal notion of reasonability or best fit or something how do you avoid having that just kinda infect the whole endeavor?
To give an example, consider the (constitutional?) clause excepting mathematical discoveries from patent protection. The problem is that taken seriously all of computer science and arguably all inventions should be barred from protection -- the discovery can always be rephrased as a purely mathematical result about the behavior of widely understood models (Turing machines, Newtonian physics). In the case of computer science the line is even genuinely practically blurry. Yet at the same time it seems wrong to let the exception swallow the rule.
So sure, maybe there are facts about what legal arguments are and aren't valid but then do you get to overall facts about the law based on some kind of best overall fit according to some norm?
There are some parts of Calais and Allen III that confuse me in terms of their implications.
1. SCOTUS is telling lower courts to always assume that state legislatures are acting in good faith. Are there any circumstances where SCOTUS would uphold a lower court finding that a legislature did not act in good faith related to an election law?
2. Re the Purcell principle (PP), SCOTUS has said lower courts should not intervene in any election law that is on the eve of an election (which seems to be defined as "any time before an election"). Based on this and SCOTUS being the one judicial level that the PP doesn't apply to, should these cases only be heard by SCOTUS? Challengers can only win at SCOTUS now, as the PP prevents lower court victories.
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.”
I'm curious the sense in which you think there is a right answer to questions of law. If you have any interprative methodology that isn't just pure realism then inevitably you will end up with situations in which you end up with contradictions or absurd results if you apply the principles blindly. Once you accept that in some sense you have to use some extra legal notion of reasonability or best fit or something how do you avoid having that just kinda infect the whole endeavor?
To give an example, consider the (constitutional?) clause excepting mathematical discoveries from patent protection. The problem is that taken seriously all of computer science and arguably all inventions should be barred from protection -- the discovery can always be rephrased as a purely mathematical result about the behavior of widely understood models (Turing machines, Newtonian physics). In the case of computer science the line is even genuinely practically blurry. Yet at the same time it seems wrong to let the exception swallow the rule.
So sure, maybe there are facts about what legal arguments are and aren't valid but then do you get to overall facts about the law based on some kind of best overall fit according to some norm?
There are some parts of Calais and Allen III that confuse me in terms of their implications.
1. SCOTUS is telling lower courts to always assume that state legislatures are acting in good faith. Are there any circumstances where SCOTUS would uphold a lower court finding that a legislature did not act in good faith related to an election law?
2. Re the Purcell principle (PP), SCOTUS has said lower courts should not intervene in any election law that is on the eve of an election (which seems to be defined as "any time before an election"). Based on this and SCOTUS being the one judicial level that the PP doesn't apply to, should these cases only be heard by SCOTUS? Challengers can only win at SCOTUS now, as the PP prevents lower court victories.