Less than the Least

One of last week’s less prominent news stories of the past week was Mike Vick’s decision to file for bankruptcy. As everyone reading this post presumably knows, Vick was the Atlanta Falcons’ star quarterback; he was convicted of running a dogfighting enterprise in violation of federal law. His punishment is not only the 23-month prison sentence he is now serving, but tens of millions of dollars in lost salary and endorsements.

Vick’s case raises two problems that our legal system has never solved. The first is how to punish the wealthy and powerful when they commit serious crimes. Equality would seem to suggest that defendants like Vick should serve the same time as defendants who have none of the money and fame he enjoyed. But is that equal justice? Vick has lost much, much more than the typical criminal defendant who has much less to lose. How is equality to be measured in such cases? I don’t know the answer, but I don’t like the answer our justice system gives in cases of this sort. If Vick had not been the celebrity athlete he was, he would never have been prosecuted. Maybe rich celebrities deserve to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us—but if so, I’m not sure why.

Continue reading "Mike Vick--Stuntz" »

I never met Tony Snow, the onetime White House press secretary who died of metastatic colon cancer yesterday. But I wept when I heard the news. Much to my surprise, Snow emailed me a few months ago after he heard about my disease—we must have a mutual friend or two, though there can’t be many: I’m not well connected in either media or political circles. He wrote to encourage me, and to offer some practical advice. The best advice was this: keep living. Cancer and its treatment can occupy every waking moment (while drastically increasing the number of sleeping moments). Don’t let it, Snow said. Live and work and, most of all, love—as much as you can, as often as you can. It was and is terrific advice. And it was an extraordinarily kind thing, the act of an uncommonly good and decent man—coming from one who, even then, was fighting the last stages of this awful disease. My heart and my prayers are with his family. May God bless each and every one of them in this hard time.

I suppose everyone has a favorite tree. Mine as a child was an elm, the only tree in our backyard, that had a thick, sturdy branch just low enough for kids to jump off into a pile of fall leaves. We’re blessed with a number of trees in our yard in the Philadelphia suburbs, but none as memorable as that elm. The tree with the prettiest leaves in our area is the tulip poplar– the leaves are like miniature fleurs-de-lis and cascade down from the tree’s crown– but we have to walk a few blocks to see one.

If I had to name my least favorite tree in our yard, I might well have settled on a tall, crooked, scraggly pine tree that stood squarely in the middle of our view as we looked out from our screened in back porch.

Continue reading "Trees-Skeel" »

We won’t ordinarily celebrate events like birthdays on this blog, but today’s is special enough to warrant an exception: Bill has just turned 50. It’s hard to believe he is fifty years old now, but it is also hard to believe that a scholar who has contributed so much for so long is only fifty. My prayer, to use the terms of Bill’s remarkable reflections on time in his recent blog posts, is that this year will bring not just survival, but a great deal of life.

Happy Birthday, Bill.

Barack Obama’s new faith-based initiative proposal has already been described as a Sister Souljah moment. In a sense it is. It’s a calculated jab at one group (the portion of the Democratic base that cringes at any overlap between religion and government) that demonstrates his bona fides to another (all those Americans who hold less separationist views). But the original Sister Souljah moment was almost purely symbolic. This one could have important practical implications if Obama becomes president.

Obama’s proposal differs from the version President Bush promoted at precisely the point where the Bush program met its Waterloo. President Bush insisted that religious charities should be able to discriminate on religious grounds in their hiring decisions. This aspect of the plan met fierce resistence early in Bush’s first term, both among those who are hostile to any government funding of religious organizations and among those who suspected that the program involved the government so deeply in religion that it would be struck down under the Establishment Clause. The initiative was quickly derailed, and has survived only as a tiny shadow of the original plan.

Obama’s proposal, by contrast, would not permit religious organizations to make hiring and firing decisions based on faith in any portion of the organization that received public funds.

Continue reading "Obama's Faith-Based Initiative Proposal--Skeel" »

Four months ago, on February 27, doctors removed a large tumor from my colon, along with a fair chunk of the surrounding abdominal tissue. The tumor had broken out, but they didn’t know how far the cancer had spread. Last Friday, June 27, four months to the day afterward—a different set of doctors took out two smaller tumors, one on each lung. The doctors also took out two even smaller growths that were too small to show up on films. But these other growths turn out to have been benign. So far as anyone now knows, my lungs are cancer-free.

It’s possible the news will turn out to be less positive. Once it breaks free of the organ where it finds its first home, cancer is like the proverbial bad penny: it tends to keep popping up. Eventually, metastasized cancers like mine usually kill their patients. Eventually, but not always—and not always soon.

That’s why cancer patients think differently about time than most other people.

Continue reading "Another Surgery--Stuntz" »

I agree completely with Bill’s comments about (non) bias against evangelicals in the university. My own experience is very similar. Like Bill, I’ve always been up front about my faith, and it has never hurt me in any discernible way at the law schools I’ve been associated with (Penn and Temple on a full-time basis, three others as a visiting professor). To the contrary, I’ve often gotten the impression that my being an evangelical is viewed positively, as a source of diversity.

I have only one caveat to add. Christian scholars (not just an evangelicals but Catholics and main line Protestants as well) seem to have more difficulty persuading top law reviews to publish work that they write from an identifiably Christian perspective, than work that looks more like traditional scholarship. I suspect that there may be a similar dynamic on many tenure committees: scholarship from a Christian perspective doesn’t carry quite as much weight as scholarship that looks more like the other, secular scholarship in the scholar’s field. This doesn’t necessarily reflect any bias: it may be the scholarship is simply unfamiliar or seems hard to evaluate. But when young evangelical scholars ask me for advice about faith and scholarship, I encourage them to write both kinds of scholarship: some scholarship from an explicitly Christian perspective, but also more traditional scholarship that directly engages the best secular scholarship in their field on its own terms.

Are secular university faculties prejudiced against evangelical Christians?

The folks at Volokh [link here] are having an interesting discussion about that question. The conversation was kicked off by a study that, I gather, shows that 53% of university faculty members view evangelicals negatively. Todd Zywicki says that figure suggests a measure of bigotry among those who teach in secular universities.

Having been a part of the secular university world for almost thirty years (counting my student days)—and having belonged to evangelical churches for more than twenty years—I’m quite sure that anti-Christian bigotry exists, and that its targets extend beyond evangelicals. But bigotry is not an on-off category; differences of degree matter. And while I have only my own experience to go on, my impression is that the amount and depth of hostility have declined sharply in the last couple of decades, and especially in the last several years.

Continue reading "Secular Universities and Evangelical Christians--Stuntz" »

Why do we work? And how do we choose our jobs?

Last weekend, I had the surprising pleasure of giving the graduation
speech at my son's high school: a Christian high school in Lexington,
Massachusetts. The two questions above are the speech's subject. The
text is here.

Suppose that one of the candidates needs to shake things up a bit in the coming weeks, to take a surprising position that could unsettle his base a little but offers promise with other constituencies. What might the candidates propose, consistent with their own values? Here’s one possibility for each.

For Obama, my pick would be school vouchers. Obama is heavily dependent on the teachers unions, as are the Democrats generally, so it’s very hard to imagine him supporting vouchers. But suppose he endorsed a voucher proposal that combined vouchers with increased funding for public schools, perhaps a dollar per student in increased funding for every dollar per student in vouchers. The teachers unions wouldn’t be happy of course, but the increased funding for public education would soften the blow; and a proposal like this might be attractive to Catholic and evangelical voters, and more generally to the lower middle class voters that Obama had trouble attracting in the primaries.

Continue reading "A Radical (?) Idea for Each Candidate--Skeel" »