Two Excellent Links

First, click here to download transcripts of the first day of the “intelligent design” trial in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Also, see the blog maintained by the National Center for Science Education, where you can find daily podcasts about the trial.)

Second, click here to hear an excellent interview with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer by NPR’s Nina Totenberg. I highly recommend clicking the link titled “The Full Interview (64 minutes).”

First Feedback

Got back my first law school writing assignment tonight. Before he gave them back, the professor gave us a little talk about how we shouldn’t worry too much about our scores, that he failed his first couple law school exams, and so on. The scores on this assignment ranged from the 50s to a couple people in the low 90s, he said, but nobody was on the wrong track.

What was my score? A smooth 94. On the grading sheet he wrote, somewhat humorously, “Reading your issue made me want to cry!” (The “issue,” for the uninitiated, is the particular legal and factual question at stake. A big part of law school is reading “fact patterns” and “spotting” the issues.)

Yeah, I’m happy about that.

Intelligent Design

H. Allen Orr writes in the New Yorker about differences between the two leading “intelligent design theorists,” Michael Behe and William Dembski:

[I]t’s striking that Dembski’s views on the history of life contradict Behe’s. Dembski believes that Darwinism is incapable of building anything interesting; Behe seems to believe that, given a cell, Darwinism might well have built you and me. Although proponents of I.D. routinely inflate the significance of minor squabbles among evolutionary biologists (did the peppered moth evolve dark color as a defense against birds or for other reasons?), they seldom acknowledge their own, often major differences of opinion. In the end, it’s hard to view intelligent design as a coherent movement in any but a political sense.

I had not noticed that ironic incongruity before I read Orr’s article. So that makes one more way these “intelligent design” people really get under my skin.

And why do they get under my skin? Because I’m quaking in my boots that they will succeed in demolishing my precious covert religion of Scientific Materialism? Not likely. The problem is that I like science. It’s an extraordinarily effective method for wringing useful information out of our vast and bewildering universe. Do you catch my drift? The problem here is that science is a method while “intelligent design” is a conclusion. If “intelligent design” were to enter the biology curriculum, the method would be circumvented to favor a conclusion that is dubious at best. (Read the rest of the article linked above to get a handy rundown in layperson’s terms.)

However, I do think “intelligent design” should be mentioned in education. It should come up in the philosophy, rhetoric, public policy, history, and social reasoning classes that ought to supplant “language arts” and “social science.” If we’re going to probe the unresolved questions of biology, then we should also probe the motivations of the “intelligent design” theorists. We should teach the historical context of science, discuss the social ramifications of various philosophies, and let students, even the little ones, have their crack at hard questions like “What if Life really has no meaning or direction?” and “What difference does it make whether God exists or not?” I don’t pose those as empty rhetorical exercises, either. Rather than having worldviews and ideologies foisted upon them by adults who are covertly engineering the society of tomorrow, why not bring children into real life, which is filled with hard, unanswered, perhaps unanswerable questions? “Intelligent design” would be an excellent candidate for such discussions, but it deserves no place in science education, which is about an investigative method used by people of diverse philosophies. There is no reason to suppose that some insidious materialist philosophical proposition lies at the core of science. Rather, what lies at the core of science is the simple and reasonable idea that the only information we can share and use universally is the information we can all percieve. If I can see something but no one else can see it, no one else can understand or use that information. Logically, that does not necessarily mean something no one else can see is something that does not exist; it only means that something no one else can see is something I cannot logically ask anyone else to care about.

In that same vein, science education should teach children how to distinguish between observations and inferences (or, as we call them in law school, “facts” and “fact characterizations”). Observations are things that anyone can see; inferences are subjective (though not necessarly illogical) responses to observations. “That man has a beard,” is an observation that anyone can recognize; “The beard makes him look sinister,” is an inference that will not be universally shared because it depends on other, previous experience, not universally shared, perhaps involving bearded men who were in fact sinister. Unfortunately, distinguishing between observations and inferences is not something Americans do particularly well, so it is not something we teach effectively in our schools. In fact, the idea of teaching children a “worldview,” as many Christians (and proponents of “intelligent design”) would like to do, is a blatant attempt at teaching a set of pre-determined inferences. Learning a “worldview” does not teach a child to be a clear thinker; it teaches a child to see the world not as it is, but as others have told her it is. One would think an “intelligent designer” who actually exists would be readily observable, instead of creatively inferrable. But I’m only trying to be reasonable.

Opaque Judicial Prose

Reading old opinions can be difficult, but I find it rewarding. Sometimes I have to read the passage several times and chew on it for a while before the “real world facts” start to appear, but when they do, it’s always fascinating. For instance, take the case of De May v. Roberts, from the Supreme Court of Michigan in 1881. Here is an excerpt:

The declaration in this case in the first count sets forth that the plaintiff was at a time and place named a poor married woman, and being confined in child-bed and a stranger, employed in a professional capacity defendant De May who was a physician; that defendant visited the plaintiff as such, and against her desire and intending to deceive her wrongfully, etc., introduced and caused to be present at the house and lying-in room of the plaintiff and while she was in the pains of parturition the defendant Scattergood, who intruded upon the privacy of the plaintiff indecently, wrongfully and unlawfully laid hands upon her and assaulted her, the said Scattergood, which was well known to defendant De May, being a young unmarried man, a stranger to the plaintiff and utterly ignorant of the practice of medicine, while the plaintiff believed that he was an assistant physician, a competent and proper person to be present and to aid her in her extremity.

Yes, that is all one sentence. To decipher it, here are a few tips:

1. “parturition” means childbirth
2. “unlawfully” does not necessarily mean violently
3. assault does not mean “physically harmful contact”

Now, take what you know of life in 1881, attitudes of women in childbirth, and the opacity of the language, and see if you can figure out what really happened here. One more excerpt to get you started:

[E]vidence was given tending to prove that Scattergood very relulctantly accompanied Dr. De May . . . that upon arriving at the house of the plaintiff [the doctor and his assistant] were bid to enter [by the plaintiff's husband], treated kindly and no objection whatever [was] made to the presence of defendant Scattergood. That while there Scattergood, at Dr. De May’s request, took hold of plaintiff’s hand and held her during a paroxysm of pain, and that both of the defendants in all respects throughout acted in a proper and becoming manner actuated by a sense of duty and kindness.

Starting to get a better idea of what happened? Isn’t that a great name? Scattergood. Sounds Dickensian. Anyway, extra points to whoever wants to comment and say what really happened here, using modern conversational English.

Monday Morning

It is Monday morning. There are 9.5 hours until my next class. This is a study day. My plan originally was to spend the day in the library on campus. But I got up and felt so comfy in my sweats with my cup of green tea on my desk, the gray weather outside and my books and papers arrayed around me, it seemed a waste to drive to the library where I’ll not be nearly so comfortable, nor have my green tea, nor be able to see out the windows, nor have my books and papers arrayed around me. Well, I could have my books and papers arrayed around me, but I don’t feel like packing them all into a crate and hauling them down to the library when they’re all ready to go right here.

So here I stay, to ponder defenses to intentional torts, the “minimum contacts” requirement for personal jurisdiction, and what the Supreme Court might have meant when it used a phrase like “traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice.”

Now if only the neighbors would stop blasting their music through my wall, everything would be perfect. Hot green tea; a breeze rustling through the leaves outside my window; lots of law books. What more could I want? Too bad I’m scheduled to substitute teach tomorrow.

Bits ‘n Pieces

Much as I’d like to say I haven’t written anything here in the last week because I’m just so busy with law school, that wouldn’t quite be accurate. See, yesterday afternoon I even sat down and watched a movie. And it wasn’t even a legal thriller. (It was Conspiracy Theory, in which Julia Roberts’ character is a lawyer for the DOJ. Does that count?) Then I quickly skimmed the reading for my class last night and hit the road.

It turned out that most of us just skimmed the reading, if we read it at all. But that didn’t stop us from having an entertaining, stimulating, and productive class session. It was probably one of the most interesting discussions we’ve had yet, mostly because we refused to follow the guidelines for the hypothetical we were supposed to be considering.

Anyway, since I don’t have much else to say, I thought I’d point you toward an interesting complaint (read: lawyer begging to be heard and paid because client has been horribly, horribly wronged) filed in California Superior Court a few days ago. Someone is suing the “Extreme Makeover” show. The complaint is 31 pages long and fascinating, if revolting. Just read it and see for yourself. (By the way, that’s a PDF, so make sure you have Adobe Acrobat Reader or that you’re using a Mac with OS X, which handles PDFs like they were nothin’.) It will remind you why there are so many movies where L.A. gets destroyed; these people have it coming.

Bits ‘n Pieces

Much as I’d like to say I haven’t written anything here in the last week because I’m just so busy with law school, that wouldn’t quite be accurate. See, yesterday afternoon I even sat down and watched a movie. And it wasn’t even a legal thriller. (It was Conspiracy Theory, in which Julia Roberts’ character is a lawyer for the DOJ. Does that count?) Then I quickly skimmed the reading for my class last night and hit the road.

It turned out that most of us just skimmed the reading, if we read it at all. But that didn’t stop us from having an entertaining, stimulating, and productive class session. It was probably one of the most interesting discussions we’ve had yet, mostly because we refused to follow the guidelines for the hypothetical we were supposed to be considering.

Anyway, since I don’t have much else to say, I thought I’d point you toward an interesting complaint (read: lawyer begging to be heard and paid because client has been horribly, horribly wronged) filed in California Superior Court a few days ago. Someone is suing the “Extreme Makeover” show. The complaint is 31 pages long and fascinating, if revolting. Just read it and see for yourself. (By the way, that’s a PDF, so make sure you have Adobe Acrobat Reader or that you’re using a Mac with OS X, which handles PDFs like they were nothin’.) It will remind you why there are so many movies where L.A. gets destroyed; these people have it coming.

Christian Pseudo-Thinking

Mark Earley of Prison Fellowship delivered today’s “BreakPoint” foolishness, in which he claimed that because a recent study showed that less than 10% of the population is homosexual, we can therefore conclude scientifically that homosexuality is unhealthy. Huh? By that logic, I think we could also conclude “scientifically” that being a U.S. Senator is unhealthy, being an American Jew is unhealthy, and owning a Macintosh computer is unhealthy.

He says, “If sexual orientation is a choice, then we’re free to choose. But this study implies that we’re wired a certain way, for heterosexual relationships.” In other words, we can assume from a statistical survey of behavior that if more than 90% of the population behaves a certain way, the rest of the population can’t possibly be “wired” that way. So it’s impossible for less than 10% of the population to have a particular genetic component? How does that work?

I don’t know if homosexuality is genetic or not, and I really don’t care. But I do care that influential Christians get to spout this kind of nonsense and pass it off as “scientific.”

In per-what-am? Ex who-te?

While reading an important case (Pennoyer v. Neff) in my Civil Procedure (that’s “civ pro” to initiates) book, I came across the following sentence:

If, without personal service, judgments in personam, obtained ex parte against non-residents and absent parties, upon mere publication of process, which, in the great majority of cases, would never be seen by the parties interested, could be upheld and enforced, they would be the constant instruments of fraud and oppression.

I read it once and thought, “Wow. I think I know what all that means.” So I read it second time and thought, “I did, I did see a putty tat!” You get the gist. I was surprised. A month ago, the first half of that sentence would have been gibberish to me without my handy-dandy Black’s Law Dictionary. In another month, I’ll probably stop being surprised that I understand sentences like that.

My civ pro professor mentioned the other day that learning law is like learning foreign languages and algebra, and people who are good at those things tend to be good at the law. One can only hope. And this morning at a “survival skills” seminar put on by a 3rd year student, I managed to spout correct definitions of intent (desire to cause the consequence or knowledge to a substantial certainty that the consequence will occur) and assault (a volitional, unauthorized act with the intent to cause reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive touching and the apparent ability to carry it out) before I’d had coffee. Just hope I can keep it up when this stuff actually gets difficult.

Succeed on the Merits, Please

On July 4, 1876, Robert G. Ingersoll gave an oration in Peoria, Illinois during the celebration of the national centennial anniversary. Here is an excerpt:

You might as well have a government united by force with Art, or with Poetry, or with Oratory, as with Religion. Religion should have the influence upon mankind that its goodness, that its morality, its justice, its charity, its reason, and its argument give it, and no more. Religion should have the effect upon mankind that it necessarily has, and no more. The religion that has to be supported by law is not only without value, but a fraud and curse. The religions argument that has to be supported by a musket is hardly worth making. A prayer that must have a cannon behind it better never be uttered. Forgiveness ought not to go in partnership with shot and shell. Love need not carry knives and revolvers.

Just food for thought.

(You may read the rest of Ingersoll’s “Centennial Oration” by following this link, or you may visit me in the bookstore and I shall gladly sell you a copy of What’s God Got to Do With It?, which is a collection of Ingersoll’s writings on the separation of church and state—for the low, low price of $10!)