New Episode: Proximity Mines in the Facility
Passports, SNAP, and a recap of the tariff arguments
The latest episode of the Divided Argument podcast is up:
After a predictably unpredictable set of detours through Latin grammar, parenthing philosophies, and 90s video games, we catch up on the latest shadow (interim?) docket activity and recap the oral argument in the tariffs cases.
As always, feel free to comment below, or offer your own thoughts on the tariff arguments.
What's with all the hating on Justice Jackson? Your Advisory Opinion friends went off on her a week or two ago , accusing her of trying to destroy the Court. She's bringing a more confrontational approach, has a different judicial philosophy and dissents a lot. Aren't all those things within her rights as a Justice? The (subtle) message seems to be she should just shut up and go along with what the conservative Justices want.
While I don't always like her approach to questions at oral argument, I appreciate the perspective she brings and like having someone on the court that is willing to call out the majority's inconsistencies, unbalanced reasoning and intellectual dishonesty.
Well, you asked for it. I didn’t love the five minutes spent nit-picking Justice Jackson’s writing. A bunch of responses presented seriatim.
It’s fine to say that she is no Justice Scalia. I agree that, when it comes to a certain kind of adversarial writing, his powers are unmatched. But he is not the only comparator. Justice Jackson inherited her role from Justice Sotomayor who inherited it from Justice Ginsburg. By those standards, her writing is quite good.
And I don’t know if I buy the implied claim that Justice Scalia’s rhetoric is what made his dissents effective. The Zeitgeist shifted, and I don’t know how much his deployment of “argle-bargle” and “applesauce” contributed to that shift. If the goal was to delegitimize the Court as an institution, well Chief Justice Roberts seems to wear the champion in that competition, based on public opinion polls. Bush v. Gore is nothing compared to what I still prefer to call the shadow docket.
Perhaps the Will who was persuaded by Justice Scalia’s opinions was more persuadable than the Will of today. More generally, it is increasingly hard to find persuadable consumers of our legal culture.
Everybody misuses “begs the question.” It’s not really worth commenting on anymore. Philosophers should get over themselves. Language follows usage, and the philosophical meaning of “begs the question” is now a term of art confined to the discipline. Not that it doesn’t bother me too, but not nearly as much as the senseless murder of wonderful, unique words like “fulsome” and “plethora,” both now routinely used to signify their opposites (more or less).
It’s your podcast and you can address what you want to address, but this just seemed needlessly snide, especially when you (well, Dan really) began fantasizing about the Circuit to which Justice Jackson should be relegated. That was downright ugly, especially when Steve Vladek has provided such a compelling argument for why her actions in the SNAP case were brilliantly strategic.