Clinical, Cynical. You'll never believe what left-wing law profs consider "mainstream."

BY HEATHER MAC DONALD
WSJ, Wednesday, January 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Democratic senators have repeatedly questioned whether Samuel Alito is in the legal "mainstream" during the opening days of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. To see what the "mainstream" means for the legal elites in the Democratic party, look no further than the law school "clinic." These campus law firms, faculty-supervised and student-staffed, have been engaging in left-wing litigation and advocacy for 30 years. Though law schools claim that the clinics teach students the basics of law practice while providing crucial representation to poor people, in fact they routinely neither inculcate lawyering skills nor serve the poor. They do, however, offer the legal professoriate a way to engage in political activism--almost never of a conservative cast. A survey of the clinical universe makes clear how politically one-sided law schools--and the legal ideology they inculcate--are. etc.. etc

Law school clinics weren't always incubators of left-wing advocacy. But once the Ford Foundation started disbursing $12 million in 1968 to persuade law schools to make clinics part of their curriculum, the enterprise turned into a political battering ram. Clinics came to embody a radical new conception that emerged in the 1960s--the lawyer as social-change agent. Ford Foundation head McGeorge Bundy declared in 1966 that law "should be affirmatively and imaginatively used against all forms of injustice." No one can object to fighting discrimination and poverty. But no one elected a Ford-funded "poverty lawyer" to create a new entitlement scheme. If that lawyer can find a judge who shares his passion for welfare, however, the two of them will put into law a significant new distribution of rights and resources that no voter ever approved.

Today's clinical landscape is a perfect place to evaluate what happens when lawyers decide that they are chosen to save society. The law school clinics don't just take clients with obvious legal issues, such as criminal defendants or tenants facing eviction. They take social problems--unruly students in school, for example--and turn them into legal ones. Florence Roisman, a housing rights activist at the Indiana University School of Law, has inspired clinicians nationwide with her supremely self-confident call to arms: "If it offends your sense of justice, there's a cause of action."

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Plenty of litigation still does emanate from law schools, mostly aimed at substituting an unelected lawyer's judgment about the allocation of taxpayer resources for the legislature's. Yale just created an education clinic as a vehicle for suing Connecticut over its school-funding formulas. Stanford's Youth and Education Law Clinic put the East Palo Alto school district under judicial oversight for its special-education policies. Georgetown's Institute for Public Representation has been suing United Airlines for years for its decision to subject a passenger to a heightened security check after 9/11.

Ms. Mac Donald, a graduate of Stanford University Law School, is a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose forthcoming issue this essay is adapted.

Re: Help Me Understand The Ecomonics - So How Is The China Mfg Going To Hurt Us?
 

Neitehr China's nor India's economies will hurt America. I have a trade deficit with a number of businesses locally, still, I'm doing pretty good.

A trade deficit between America and other countries is equally meaningless.

I'll throw some slack as that article wasn't an easy subject to follow. I found it a slow thoughtful read even though it was short.

thx for posting it. I love this stuff.

I would be more concerned with essential goods being unavailable. The current oil situation, while still developing, might prove to be a harbinger of the future.

Becoming too dependent on some other country for basic goods is never a good idea. It has been shown in the past to be a prequel to war. Think of Japan in the 1930s. Needed raw materials, couldn't get some of them. Solution? Take over the countries that had the natural resources. They lost the war basically because their supplies were cut off in the later years of the war.
Once a nation loses the capacity to produce certain goods, it is damn hard to get that capability back. When did you last see a television receiver actually made in America? (not Mexico)

Money is of no value if you cannot purchase what you need to survive because it is unavailable.

Yes, it is true we are currently a society (here in the US) that is very concerned with lawsuits for this, that, etc. (Call 1-800-Vulture). This may change over time like other aspects of society have changed. The people have to demand it; not just here and there, but insistently. The president must be more proactive and in fact this might be a good way for him to do something meaningful with the time he has left in office.

That being said, part of the reason we have lost some industries is not because we are not capable of economically producing goods, it has been the greed of the industries themselves, ever increasing union demands, and the shareholders. The shareholders demanded more and more in dividends and the corporations complied while permitting the infrastructure to age and fall apart. AN excellent example would be the steel industry. The "losers" in WWII didn't have that problem; they HAD to build new infrastructure and the efficiencies paid off. Proof can be found in the manufacturing plants constructed by foreign auto makers that seem to be able to use American labor, pay a decent wage, and produce a superior product.

Lastly, I would not be so sure that the US economy will remain at the "high status" that many perceive it to currently have. As wordwide labor costs increase, the differential between nations will mean less and less. As education increases in developing countries, the need for the intellectual expertise will also be less and less. As a country, we must not trade short term advantage for long term uncertainty.

Just another take on the question.