Month: April 2019

The theater department of Columbia College in Chicago attempted to stage a production of “HOME/LAND,” which is about the experience of Palestinian and Latino immigrants in America. But no students of Palestinian descent tried out for the play, and so white actors were cast in these roles.

That was just one of the terrible injustices visited upon the minority community by the play’s director, Catherine Slade, according to aggrieved students who told the campus newspaper, “It got to a place where nobody felt safe.” Yes, their very safety was affected by the director’s habit of “being aggressive and speaking badly” about the cast.

Perhaps Slade—a black woman, theater professor, and vocal coach—was critical of the cast members because they were insubordinate and easily offended, quickly bringing their issues with her to the Mosaic Theater Collective, Asian Student Organization, Black Student Union, and Muslim Student Association.

“There was no trying to collaborate with us,” one actress, Sophia Alonzo, said of Slade. “There was no trying to see if [she was] doing the right thing. It almost felt like we were just being used as pawns. It’s hard because these are real stories to our families and our background that were [not treated as] valid.”

It sounds to me like these students objected to being directed at all. They also objected to white actors reciting their lines in Spanish and were offended by Slade’s suggestion that several white members of the cast could pass as Latin or Palestinian.

The paper has more:

The Chronicle contacted Slade on Saturday, April 20 and requested an interview, to which she initially agreed. On Monday, April 23, the News Office intervened and eventually denied interviews with Slade, Theater Department Interm Chair Peter Carpenter and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Scholar-in-Residence for the Theater Department Khalid Long. After repeated requests for a statement, the News Office supplied one Friday, April 26, in the evening shortly before The Chronicle’s deadline.

“The Theatre Department is committed to providing students with opportunities to perform in diverse theatre productions,” the statement read. “The ‘HOME/LAND’ script called for Latinx, Palestinian and Caucasian characters. All students who auditioned were cast in the production. However, not all of the students who auditioned were of the same race and/or ethnicity as the characters identified in the script. Indeed, no Palestinian students auditioned for the play, and as such, non-Palestinian actors were assigned to those roles. Several Latinx students who initially auditioned for the production didn’t pursue participation.”

Recall that for the modern intersectional left, race is a fundamental, immutable building block of identity. This puts the craft of acting in a tough spot—any attempt to depict or portray people of other races is essentially forbidden. My forthcoming book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump (pre-order here), contains several examples of theater professors giving up in frustration after their student actors and actresses object to playing anyone different from themselves and revolt against negative feedback, which triggers their mental health issues.

Hat tip: The College Fix

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Two hundred seventy days. That’s how long the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) of Washington, D.C., said it might take to get around to painting a single crosswalk.

They weren’t kidding. Ronald Thompson of Anacostia told WTTG he made a formal request for the crosswalk to be painted back in October. For months, nothing happened. Then, on Easter Sunday, a pedestrian, 31-year-old Abdul Seck, was hit and killed by a car at an intersection just blocks away.

So Thompson decided he didn’t want to wait anymore. At a vigil for Seck, Thompson met Michael Kaercher, who agreed that road safety was a big issue. “These kids I see, these parents, these grandparents walking their kids to school, they do not have a safe accommodation here,” Thompson told WTTG. This past Sunday, the two men took it upon themselves to do what DDOT wouldn’t, city approval be damned

Kaercher was the one who did the actual painting. “It was such an obvious project that I could do safely, without posing any significant risk to myself and no risk at all to other parties,” he told WTOP. And it’s not like the job required painting expertise or a significant commitment of time and resources. “The most painting I’ve ever done before was my dining room wall,” Kaercher added.

All told, it took about two hours and required $150 worth of supplies.

Amazingly, Kaercher may have been breaking the law. Around the country, it’s generally illegal for residents to paint crosswalks or install traffic signage on public roads. It’s not clear whether DDOT will take action, as the agency declined to answer WTTG’s questions regarding the legality of Thompson and Kaercher’s actions.

“Of all the things to possibly get arrested or fined for, helping to make people’s lives a little bit safer and a little bit less stressful? I’m fine with that,” Kaercher told WTTG.

Now, DDOT did have an explanation for why they hadn’t painted the crosswalk in the months since Thompson made his request. Per a statement provided to WTTG:

The general pavement marking service level agreement is 270 days for turnaround due to marking installation being very weather dependent. The conditions for installation generally only occur from March to November. The agency often installs markings well before the 270 day turn-around time and we are evaluating whether the SLA should be changed. Mr. Thompson’s service request came in at the end of the 2018 pavement marking season. DDOT has his request in cue and expects it to be installed shortly. DDOT has received 417 service requests for pavement markings in 2019 and closed 141 of them. Our safety team will be investigating the location to see if additional markings, signage and speed humps are needed in the area.

This is yet another example of private citizens taking it upon themselves to do what the government is incapable of. It’s not always the government’s fault. As a resident of the D.C. metro area, I know firsthand that the weather can get nasty, and I assume painting a crosswalk in the dead of winter isn’t exactly fun.

The problem is that we expect the government to fix these problems in the first place. Yet time and again, private citizens have shown they’re much more adept at this type of thing. Consider the masked anarchists who took to the streets of Portland in 2017 to patch up potholes. (Amazingly, a transportation bureau spokesperson suggested they might be breaking the law.) And in 2018, Domino’s answered the age-old question: Who builds roads in a libertarian society? The pizza chain helped fix roads in numerous states around the country. It was the perfect solution, as Reason‘s Christian Britschgi noted at the time:

Roads exist to service people’s transportation needs, whether that’s getting to and from work, schlepping freight between cities, or, yes, delivering freshly cooked pizza. Aligning the funding of roads with the purposes they’re used for would make infrastructure more responsive to the end user.

Just last month, I wrote about Monte Scott, a 12-year-old Michigan boy who used a garbage can full of dirt to fill at least 15 potholes near his family’s home last week. Scott told the Muskegon Times he’d wanted to fill potholes for months, and finally did so following a half-day at school. “People complain and complain, and the city never fills them up,” he said. “And I feel horrible because they never do it. They should fix the streets.”

If there’s one takeaway from these stories, it’s that while local governments may struggle to ensure the roads are safe, private citizens are getting real results.

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My long-in-the-works article Finding Law has now been published online in the California Law Review. The article takes on about a century’s worth of legal prejudices, nowadays associated with the Supreme Court’s decision in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins. Instead, it defends a view of unwritten law as something that can be found by the legal system, rather than only being made by judges.

From the abstract:

That the judge’s task is to find the law, not to make it, was once a commonplace of our legal culture. Today, decades after Erie, the idea of a common law discovered by judges is commonly dismissed—as a “fallacy,” an “illusion,” a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.” That dismissive view is wrong. Expecting judges to find unwritten law is no childish fiction of the benighted past, but a real and plausible option for a modern legal system.

This Article seeks to restore the respectability of finding law, in part by responding to two criticisms made by Erie and its progeny. The first, “positive” criticism is that law has to come from somewhere: judges can’t discover norms that no one ever made. But this claim blinks reality. We routinely identify and apply social norms that no one deliberately made, including norms of fashion, etiquette, or natural language. Law is no different. Judges might declare a customary law the same way copy editors and dictionary authors declare standard English—with a certain kind of reliability, but with no power to revise at will.

The second, “realist” criticism is that law leaves too many questions open: when judges can’t find the law, they have to make it instead. But uncertain cases force judges to make decisions, not to make law. Different societies can give different roles to precedent (and to judges). And judicial decisions can have many different kinds of legal force—as law of the circuit, law of the case, and so on—without altering the underlying law on which they’re based.

This Article claims only that it’s plausible for a legal system to have its judges find law. It doesn’t try to identify legal systems that actually do this in practice. Yet too many discussions of judge-made law, including the famous passages in Erie, rest on the false premise that judge-made law is inevitable—that judges simply can’t do otherwise. In fact, judges can do otherwise: they can act as the law’s servants rather than its masters. The fact that they can forces us to confront the question of whether they should—and, indeed, whether the Erie doctrine itself can outlive its mistaken premises. Finding law is no fallacy or illusion; the brooding omnipresence broods on.

And from the conclusion:

This change in attitude toward the common law seems to be rooted in a giant intellectual mistake. According to [Larry] Kramer, the removal of limitations on judicial lawmaking “results not from doctrinal changes, but from changes in our beliefs about the nature of law and the lawmaking process.” It’s only because “[w]e have come to see that even the fundamental principles of the common law were ‘made’ by judges” that “the ‘natural’ limits of pre-modern common law disappear, and the potential for making common law becomes as broad as we are willing to let judges go.” Surely the judicial process could have used some demystification; surely the history of the common law, under Lord Mansfield as well as others, is replete with examples of judges playing fast and loose with unwritten law. But the real motive force here seems to be a simple error about the nature of law: that it’s a “fallacy” or “illusion” to suppose “that there is this outside thing to be found.” And such errors, once made, don’t restrict themselves to unwritten law: cavalier judicial attitudes toward the common law have seeped into statutory and constitutional arguments as well.

Again, nothing in this Article addresses the actual norms of actual legal systems—whether in Blackstone’s England, New York State, or the United States as a whole. Maybe today’s legal norms really do empower judges, federal or state, to trade in their black robes for superheroes’ capes, or to play “junior-varsity Congress” with unwritten law. But in light of Holmes’s own reticence, it’s important to remember that this is not the only possible approach; that history and legal theory do offer alternatives; that different polities can choose, through their own constitutional systems, the powers they want their judges to enjoy. To make this choice, we need to restore, at least at the level of possibility, the consensus that such a choice exists. …

More on the specifics of the argument later this week.

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Politicians and reporters often rail about “the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.”

But as John Stossel explains, it’s not true.

In fact, the incomes of poor and middle-income Americans are up 32 percent since the government began keeping track several decades ago.

Yes, that increase is adjusted for inflation.

Another misleading claim, says Stossel, is the idea that the U.S. “no longer has economic mobility.”

But a paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that most people born to the richest fifth of Americans fall out of that bracket within 20 years (Table 2). Likewise, most born to the poorest fifth climb to a higher quintile. Some climb all the way to the top.

Another claim is that inequality itself is a huge problem.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warns: “There’s inequality in this country right now that is threatening to tear us apart.”

Stossel says that it might tear us apart—but only if people come to believe that all inequality is evil.

But it isn’t, he says. It’s just part of life. Some people are better singers than others. The best athletes are just physically different.

Society doesn’t try to equalize those things—or many others—for good reason.

Former investment banker Carol Roth tell Stossel, “I have two kidneys. There are people out there who need one, don’t have one that functions. Should the government be able to take my kidney because somebody else needs it?”

“There’s inequality in everything,” she adds. “There’s inequality in free time. There’s inequality in parents. I don’t have any parents or grandparents. Life is unfair…unfair is a feature. It’s not a bug.”

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The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.

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