Speech

George Will on law professorisms...

"The court has held that "judicial deference . . . is at its apogee" when Congress legislates under its enumerated power to raise and support armies, so Congress could have directly mandated access for military recruiters rather than doing so "indirectly" with incentives - conditioning spending on recruiters' access. And the law at issue, Roberts said, "regulates conduct, not speech. It affects what law schools must do - afford equal access to military recruiters - not what they may or may not say."

Suppose, Roberts wrote, an individual announced that he intended to express disapproval of the IRS by refusing to pay taxes. That would not mean that the tax code violates the First Amendment.

The court has held that freedom of speech prohibits government from telling people what they must say - that schoolchildren must salute the flag or that New Hampshire motorists must display the state motto "Live Free or Die" on their license plates. But those cases concerned government dictating the content of speech, which the law on recruiters' access to law students does not.

The court has held that state law cannot compel a parade - which is a form of expression, not mere motion - to include a group whose message the parade's organizer does not want to express. Similarly, the court has held that compelling the Boy Scouts, an "expressive association," to accept a homosexual scoutmaster would "significantly affect" the Scouts' right of expression. But the law schools are in no way inhibited from - or bashful about - proclaiming their message of disapproval about "don't ask, don't tell."

"Accommodating the military's message," Roberts wrote, "does not affect the law schools' speech, because the schools are not speaking when they host interviews and recruiting receptions. Unlike a parade organizer's choice of parade contingents, a law school's decision to allow recruiters on campus is not inherently expressive." Recruiters are obviously not components of law schools; they are outsiders on brief visits for a limited purpose. "Nothing about recruiting," Roberts wrote, "suggests that law schools agree with any speech by recruiters."

Besides, "We have held that high school students can appreciate the difference between speech a school sponsors and speech the school permits because legally required to do so, pursuant to an equal-access policy." Then, Roberts' tartness: "Surely students have not lost that ability by the time they get to law school."

The law schools and faculties earned that sip of the chief justice's vinegar by bringing this case to court. The professors deserved - no, let us just say they needed - better legal advice than they were able to give themselves."
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The lawsuits were nothing more than the very same sort of nuisance litigation brought by ambulance chasers the country over. Law professors were pissed, and gathered en masse to institute a formal snit. On a wing and a prayer. I do not believe them to be incredibly dumb enough to feel they had a snowball's chance in hell of winning, even though they ARE lawyers and answer to a different standard of morality and basic common sense.

It didn't take a Solomon to see that these practioners of everything base were forced to try SOMETHING, or lose favor with the whinging nanny's of the world. Their failure is actually the sort of victory old lefty's simply adore. They are now martyrs. They fought the good fight, but The Man beat them down. They can go back to complaining, each and every day (look at any website or blog run by a lawyer and the general tone is one of constant bitching about one thing or another), but now there's a notch on their belt. The world done done them wrong, but they got a scratch or two in before the inevitable beatdown.

There can be no doubt as to why these cretins are the object of our disdain.