• @chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    44•1 day ago

    “It’s just that — neutrality,” she added. “The government — in this case, our public university — stays out of picking sides, so that, through the marketplace of ideas, you can debate and arrive at truth for yourself and for the community.”

    Some at the law school agree with her stance. In an interview, John F. Stinneford, a professor at the university, said that it would be “academic misconduct” for a law professor who opposed abortion to give a lower grade to a well-argued paper advocating abortion rights.

    This makes sense to me as a principle, but the idea that the paper is genuinely making a good argument seems really questionable.

    Among originalists, though, this interpretation [apparently that “We the People,” refers to white people, and therefore the constitution applies to them exclusively] has been widely rejected. Instead, conservatives have argued that much of the text of the Constitution “tilts toward liberty” for all, said Jonathan Gienapp, an associate professor of history and law at Stanford. They also note that the post-Civil War amendments guaranteeing rights to nonwhite people “washed away whatever racial taint” there was in the original document.

    Sounds like not even other originalists take it seriously. On its face the idea seems really stupid, since the wording of that part of the constitution doesn’t involve race, and whiteness has always been a very loosely defined concept with a lot of ambiguity that wouldn’t be a natural fit for a legal principle. So maybe the paper is getting a high grade and an award is itself a display of personal bias.

      • @chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3•10 hours ago

        Ms. Chatman was struck, in part, by her own experiences at the school in contrast to Mr. Damsky’s award. She had proposed teaching a class during her time there called “Race, Entrepreneurship and Inequality.” But administrators at the law school changed the name to “Entrepreneurship,” she said, before listing it in the course catalog.

        She attributed the change to Florida lawmakers’ crackdown on diversity-oriented language and themes in public education, a push that preceded the Trump administration’s broader war on progressive ideology.

        Sounds like the college agrees, though maybe not about which ones

    • WesDym
      -2•1 day ago

      @chicken Even if that’s what the language could be proven to mean, it would be legally irrelevant. What was true in 1789 is not immutably binding on future generations. The entirely of US law is endlessly amendable. What the Framers may have intended in 1789 does not bind future Americans to their meaning and intent, where the law has been modified since. The Framers surely also rejected women’s suffrage, but so what?

      • @chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6•1 day ago

        The entirely of US law is endlessly amendable. What the Framers may have intended in 1789 does not bind future Americans to their meaning and intent, where the law has been modified since. The Framers surely also rejected women’s suffrage, but so what?

        The constitution can be formally amended, as it has been to guarantee rights regardless of sex and race (which the author of the OP paper seems to discount for unknown reasons). I don’t really like the idea of it meaning whatever judges prefer it to mean though, since that leads to shit like the perpetually expanding authority of the office of the president, in a way that is hardly democratic. The meaning should come from something that doesn’t change, except when a democratic process makes an explicit choice to change it.

        In practice afaik that sort of thing can be legally relevant: https://govfacts.org/explainer/original-intent-vs-textualism-how-judges-read-the-constitution/