Remembering a once Iron Lady, long rusted

Excellent overall, though it could’ve been clipped here and there so it had proper bookends, like so:

“What’s going on there, mate?” John asked a nearby chippy loading his white van.

“Maggie Thatcher,” he said. “Comes here every week to water them flowers.”

The three of us watched as the gentle horticultural ritual was feebly enacted, then regarded the Iron Lady being helped into the back of a car and trundling off. In this moment she inspired only curiosity, a pale phantom, dumbly filling her day. None present eyed her meanly or spoke with vitriol and it wasn’t until an hour later that I dreamt up an Ealing comedy-style caper in which two inept crooks kidnap Thatcher from the garden but are unable to cope with the demands of dealing with her, and finally give her back …

When I was a kid, Thatcher was the headmistress of our country. Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring — I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in …

Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had “broken the glass ceiling for other women”. Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism …

Thatcher’s time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most. I know from my own indulgence in selfish behaviour that it’s much easier to get what you want if you remove from consideration the effect your actions will have on others …

The blunt, pathetic reality today is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there’s no such thing as society, in the end there isn’t.

Whose prose needs a little editorial pruning here? I know, right? I didn’t believe it either.

Trust Us!

Adam Serwer has a good follow-up to Jeff Toobin’s article about D.C. Circuit Court nominee Sri Srinivasan.   The key question — is there any particular reason that Democrats should consider him a desirable Supreme Court nominee?

The White House has been pushing Srinivasan’s nomination to the DC Circuit Court harder than any non-Supreme Court pick. Srinivasan has more bipartisan legal muscle behind him than any other federal court nominee in recent memory. Legal elites of all political stripes consider him one of the best lawyers in the country. But no one really knows what he believes.

Admittedly, the fact that Srinivasan has generally been part of the Democratic team is a kind of evidence for his general worldview. Nominating Srinivasan, like nominating Kagan, is unlikely to lead to a debacle on the level of Souter for Republicans. When Sununu vouched for Souter as a “conservative,” he wasn’t even exactly wrong; it’s just that Souter represented forms of conservatism (New England Republicanism, Harlan-style common law incrementalism) that had nothing to do with conservatism as it existed at the national level in 1990. Souter wasn’t part of the national Republican team. To the extent that Bush I cared at all about getting conservatives on the court, it was just a mistake that’s unlikely to be repeated by anyone.

Even so, as long as Democrats believe that their Supreme Court nominees shouldn’t have any real paper trail — even though Republicans can nominate people with lengthy paper trails demonstrating their total commitment to conservative orthodoxy — there’s going to be a negative surprise eventually. If not the equivalent of Souter, at least the equivalent of O’Connor or Blackmun.

“These are Our Rocks”

At the Diplomat this week, some strategic lessons from the Falklands:

Lyle Goldstein, Christopher Yung, andThe Diplomat’s James Holmes have all gone over the many lessons the PLA Navy (PLAN) may have drawn from the Falklands War. Unlike many countries, China is in a position to draw lessons from both the British and the Argentine experiences during the war.  The effectiveness of British naval aviation surely impressed upon the Chinese the need for intrinsic air support for maritime operations, while at the same time providing grist for the need to improve the anti-access system of systems. Submarines had long played an important role in PLAN doctrine, but the destruction of General Belgrano by HMS Conqueror put an exclamation point on the vulnerability of surface ships to undersea attack.  Perhaps more importantly, the sinking deterred the Argentine Navy from any further serious sorties during the conflict. The Argentines were unable to reply in kind due to their small and obsolescent undersea force.

A few thoughts regarding how we should think about the Falklands War today…

1. The people who lived on the Falkland Islands were committed to remaining British in 1982, just as they’re committed to being British today.
2. Argentina’s claim is based on an argument of questionable validity dating from 1833.
3. While Argentina’s case for “just war” is based on the kind of squishy logic that you often find in specious just war arguments, the United Kingdom’s case is iron clad.
4. I suspect that any British Prime Minister would have fought to keep the Falklands in 1982; Thatcher is not particularly special in this regard.
5. While negotiations continued over the course of the conflict, Argentine success (interpreted as sovereignty over the islands) depended on two questions; will Britain fight, and can Britain be beaten. Argentina had no reason to withdraw prior to the point at which the first was decided, and Britain had little incentive to negotiate after committing the task force. Both sides were constrained by public opinion.
6. The war was conducted, on both sides, in fairly strict accordance with the Laws of Armed Conflict. With regard to the General Belgrano, there is no serious case that the sinking represented a war crime.

Put differently, the Falklands War is pretty much all on Galtieri, not Thatcher.  I find it odd that for a time during the 1980s (and this has certainly faded) displaying anti-colonialist cred meant supporting the (mostly specious) claims of a vile right wing dictatorship over a Western democracy (notwithstanding who headed that democracy).  The best case against Thatcher is simply that the Falklands were not worth the risk.  There’s a certain merit to that, even if you’re skeptical (as I am) that Argentina could ever have been convinced to hand back the Malvinas without a fight; some war just aren’t worth fighting, just or no.  But then I suspect that if the Malvinas had remained in Argentine hands, even if victory hadn’t extended the lifespan of the military junta more than a year or two, that the situation of the British population on the islands would remain a significant human rights concern today, and would continue to poison Argentine relations with Europe.

The NFL Concussion Suit

It’s not clear from yesterday’s hearing whether it will be allowed to go forward or whether it will be sent to arbitration, but obviously it will bear watching.   Make sure to read the linked article about Ralph Wenzel too.

The Right to Privacy and the Rule of Law

One of the strangest arguments people make against the right to privacy established in Griswold v. Connecticut is that judicial intervention was unnecessary because a ban on contraception could not be enforced in most circumstances. But to state the obvious, it’s bizarre to use the fact that a statute could only be arbitrarily enforced as a point in a law’s favor. (Which is one reason why the even more common argument against Griswold is to say “penumbras and emanations nyuk nyuk nyuk” although Douglas’s phrase expresses a point so widely accepted as to be banal.)

Kate Sheppard’s post on Ken Cuccinelli’s attempt to restore Virginia’s unenforceable sodomy law provides an excellent illustration of why having largely unenforceable privacy-violating statutes lying around like a loaded weapon is a terrible idea. Cuccinelli’s desire to violate the rule of law by ignoring Lawrence v. Texas is predicated on his attempt to engage in another violation of the rule of law. Admittedly, the target in this case — a man in his late forties who engaged in consensual oral sex with young women aged 16 and 17 — is not particularly sympathetic. Nonetheless, what the man did in the case, however creepy, was not illegal under Viriginia law. If Virginia wants to raise its age of consent, or to modify it by limiting the definition of “consent” for women who are over the age of consent but not yet adults to consensual partners of similar age, it’s free to do so – Lawrence applies only to consenting adults.* But the essence of the rule of law is that actions cannot be made retroactively illegal even if an official of the state considers them immoral. The fact that sodomy statutes can be used to target people who offend state officials don’t like for an independent reasons is an excellent illustration of why Griswold and Lawrence were right.

*As a commenter notes, this actually appears to the case — the age of consent of 15 in Virginia seems to apply only to cases where the partner is under 18.   At any rate, either the action was not illegal, or it should be prosecuted under the applicable statute, not under a general ban on “sodomy.”  And he should not be charged with a felony if the appropriate law categories the crime as a misdemeanor.

Ozick v. Mailer

This is pretty awesome:

Paolo Soleri, RIP

The legendary architect is no more.

Radical pedagogy

I couldn’t agree with these recommendations more strongly if I’d made them myself:

First, you need to read good books. To get the most out of those books, you need to talk about them with other people who are also trying to work their way through them. In addition, you need to write about them in a disciplined and focused way. Both of these tasks require supervision and guidance by more experienced learners—preferably those who have already gone through an educational program that takes both discussion and written analysis to the highest level.

You owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.

Southern Heritage

…can, in fact, be celebrated without celebrating treason in defense of slavery:

Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King’s birthday, to celebrate a Southerner’s contribution to the world of democracy. He could rock a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner’s Light In August, and celebrate the South’s immense contribution to American literature. He could preach about the contributions of unknown Southern soldiers like Andrew Jackson Smith. He could tell the world about the original Cassius Clay. He could insist that Tennessee raise a statue to Ida B. Wells.

But this kind of thing is not what people tend to mean when they invoke “Southern Heritage.”

Law school is now for rich kids

While looking over the latest debt numbers for law graduates, it’s striking how high these numbers have gotten; conversely, it’s also how many people are graduating with no law school debt at all. Nationally, about 15% of the class of 2012 graduated with no law school debt, but this percentage varied widely between schools, from a high of 30% to a low of 0% (32% of UC-Irvine’s initial class graduated with no debt, but this is a special case as the entire initial class paid no tuition).

You don’t have to be an ethnologist to detect a certain pattern in the distribution of these percentages as they relate to, among other things, matters of socioeconomic status. For example, here’s a half dozen schools with especially high percentages of graduates who incurred debt:

Thomas Jefferson 98%
Phoenix 97%
Western New England 96%
Regent 98%
Appalachian 96%
Texas Southern 100%

Now here are six schools that had relatively low percentages of graduates taking out any law school loans:

SMU: 70%
Penn: 71%
Fordham: 72%
Texas: 74%
Emory 76%
Vanderbilt: 76%

Note that the estimated cost of attendance at the schools with lots of debt-free graduates is on average quite a bit higher than that at the schools where essentially everyone is graduating with law school debt. So how is it that, for example, nearly three out of ten graduates of Fordham manage to graduate without taking out any law school loans?

The answer, of course, is that lots of really rich kids go to Fordham (and SMU and Vanderbilt, etc.). These schools have become staggeringly expensive to attend: For instance, Fordham now charges just under $50K per year in tuition and fees, and has a nine-month estimated cost of living of over $25,000. (Federal loan programs only allow people to borrow living expenses when they’re enrolled in school, so summer expenses aren’t covered for most students.

Fordham also gives out very little in the way of scholarship money: two-thirds of the class gets nothing, and the median grant for those who do get tuition breaks is $10K, meaning that the school’s effective tuition rate is around $46K per year.

Yet three out of ten Fordham grads are coming up with $240K in cash to pay for three years of tuition and cost of living expenses in mid-town and environs. What happens to the rest?

The 72% of the 2012 graduating class that took out loans during law school took out an average (mean) total of $134,350 over the course of law school. But this total is misleading. First, a significant minority of that 72% are borrowing only minimally. From what I’ve seen at various schools, about 10% to 15% of the graduating class takes out relatively small loan totals, to cover for example part or all of their living expenses, while parents pay the full cost of tuition. In addition, until last summer it was possible to get $25,500 in interest-free subsidized Stafford loans over the course of law school — the government paid the interest pre-graduation — and I know some people who took out such loans purely for the arbitrage opportunity, and then paid them off at graduation.

So probably about 60%, roughly speaking, of the Fordham class took out really large loan amounts. This means the median amount borrowed among the 72% of the class that borrowed was quite a bit higher than the mean. And as of last year, all such loans accrue interest as soon as their issued, and average rate of about 7.5%. What this means is that the median amount owed in law school loans by the more than half of Fordham grads who took out significant loans was probably more on the order of $200,000 — and this doesn’t include other educational debt, or consumer debt.

Now it’s true that one third of Fordham’s 2012 class got high-paying big firm jobs (how long they’ll hang on to those jobs is a different question). But for what should be obvious reasons, it’s unlikely that the distribution of such jobs was random between the 60% or so of the class that’s incurring massive debt totals, and the 40% that’s incurring no or relatively little debt.

This back of the envelope calculation leads to the conclusion that around half of the 2012 class at this highly-ranked school is basically screwed (100 of the class’s 466 graduates were either completely unemployed nine months after graduation, or working in short-term and/or part-time “jobs” funded by the school itself, to pump up the school’s putative employment rate). And that half is likely to largely overlap with the three-fifths of the class that doesn’t come from major money.

A very similar story can be told about the graduating classes at Emory and Vanderbilt and Texas and SMU — hyper-expensive schools catering in large but all too limited part to the children of the one per cent, where the large majority of the graduating classes don’t get anything close to a high-paying entry level job, or in some cases any job at all. (A commenter points out that UT is not hyper-expensive relative to these other schools, at least for in-state residents. Although even for in-state residents annual COA is $53K a year, which will produce nearly $190K in debt if fully debt-financed. Out of state COA is $70K per year).

And, comparatively speaking, these are among the best law schools out there, in terms of “investment value.” Compared to Thomas Jefferson et. al., these schools feature good outcomes — in the sense that breaking your ankle is a good outcome relative to getting your leg amputated.