March 30, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:What I’m Reading This
What I’m Reading This Week
The Vote : Bush, Gore, and the Supreme Court
Essays by law professors from both sides on the origin, justification, and ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2000 elections
The best essays in this book are very good; the worst aren’t unreadable, but they tend to state a goal of proving something, wander from minor point to minor point without much direction, and then without warning declare Quod Erat Demonstrandum! and abruptly terminate themselves. The result is that one gathers a lot of small, telling points, but it’s hard to generate an over-arching philosophy about what did happen, or should have happened, from a single reading of this book.
The best essay in the bunch, as far as I’m concerned, is Cass Sunstein’s introduction, which provides a lucid summary of the relevant events, political and legal, which led up to the decision. Sunstein does not, in this essay, attempt to divine which side is right; rather, he concentrates on the sociology of the commentators. He makes the telling observation that it is possible to predict with almost perfect accuracy someone’s opinion on The Opinion simply by finding out who he voted for; it is a welcome grain of salt with which to take essays from both sides.
The conservatives, predictably, ignore the question of just who was harmed by the “equal protection” violations, want to gloss over the possible effects this decision may have on future elections, court opinions, and the legitimacy of the Court; the liberals, with equal predictability, deny that there is anything odd about changing the election rules after the fact, and dismiss the possibility of a constitutional crisis with an airy “Oh, well, that wouldn’t have happened” but offer nothing to back up their a priori assertion. The strongest points offered by both sides, with the exception of Richard Posner’s essay on the mechanics of a recount (which has been made redundant by the newspaper count) are their criticisms of the fallacies and strained construction of the other side. I’ll have to read the book at least once more before I can use it to eke out a workable theory of what went on.
So should you buy the book? Well, it’s slow going in some spots – legal writing is its own little world. But ultimately I think it’s valuable because it gives you an overview of how lawyers think about the case, rather than one person’s extensive interpretation (Alan Dershowitz, Richard Posner). The essayists have something of a dialogue going on between them, which allows you to ask and answer questions about legal constructions within the same book. And while the writers address specific points rather than the whole megillah, this is ultimately I think valuable, both because it keeps the book from degenerating into the kind of “I’m write, you’re wrong” argument that characterized much of the debate, and because it allows a deeper perspective on key issues that shaped the decision. Ultimately, I think the book could have been better. But I think it’s probably the best book out there for understanding the ongoing debate over the Court’s decision.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 30, 2002 02:06 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links