THE EVOLUTION OF JUDICIAL TYRANNY IN THE UNITED STATES:

"If the judges interpret the laws themselves, and suffer none else to interpret, they may easily make, of the laws, [a shredded] shipman's hose!" - King James I of England, around 1616.

“No class of the community ought to be allowed freer scope in the expression or publication of opinions as to the capacity, impartiality or integrity of judges than members of the bar. They have the best opportunities of observing and forming a correct judgment. They are in constant attendance on the courts. Hundreds of those who are called on to vote never enter a court-house, or if they do, it is only at intervals as jurors, witnesses or parties. To say that an attorney can only act or speak on this subject under liability to be called to account and to be deprived of his profession and livelihood by the very judge or judges whom he may consider it his duty to attack and expose, is a position too monstrous to be entertained for a moment under our present system,” Justice Sharwood in Ex Parte Steinman and Hensel, 95 Pa 220, 238-39 (1880).

“This case illustrates to me the serious consequences to the Bar itself of not affording the full protections of the First Amendment to its applicants for admission. For this record shows that [the rejected attorney candidate] has many of the qualities that are needed in the American Bar. It shows not only that [the rejected attorney candidate] has followed a high moral, ethical and patriotic course in all of the activities of his life, but also that he combines these more common virtues with the uncommon virtue of courage to stand by his principles at any cost.

It is such men as these who have most greatly honored the profession of the law. The legal profession will lose much of its nobility and its glory if it is not constantly replenished with lawyers like these. To force the Bar to become a group of thoroughly orthodox, time-serving, government-fearing individuals is to humiliate and degrade it.” In Re Anastaplo, 18 Ill. 2d 182, 163 N.E.2d 429 (1959), cert. granted, 362 U.S. 968 (1960), affirmed over strong dissent, 366 U.S. 82 (1961), Justice Black, Chief Justice Douglas and Justice Brennan, dissenting.

" I do not believe that the practice of law is a "privilege" which empowers Government to deny lawyers their constitutional rights. The mere fact that a lawyer has important responsibilities in society does not require or even permit the State to deprive him of those protections of freedom set out in the Bill of Rights for the precise purpose of insuring the independence of the individual against the Government and those acting for the Government”. Lathrop v Donohue, 367 US 820 (1961), Justice Black, dissenting.

"The legal profession must take great care not to emulate the many occupational groups that have managed to convert licensure from a sharp weapon of public defense into blunt instrument of self-enrichment". Walter Gellhorn, "The Abuse of Occupational Licensing", University of Chicago Law Review, Volume 44 Issue 1, September of 1976.

“Because the law requires that judges no matter how corrupt, who do not act in the clear absence of jurisdiction while performing a judicial act, are immune from suit, former Judge Ciavarella will escape liability for the vast majority of his conduct in this action. This is, to be sure, against the popular will, but it is the very oath which he is alleged to have so indecently, cavalierly, baselessly and willfully violated for personal gain that requires this Court to find him immune from suit”, District Judge A. Richard Caputo in H.T., et al, v. Ciavarella, Jr, et al, Case No. 3:09-cv-00286-ARC in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Document 336, page 18, November 20, 2009. This is about judges who were sentencing kids to juvenile detention for kickbacks.


Monday, June 5, 2017

Self-serving grandstanding by timid law professors. Disgusting.


I always cringed at various anti-discrimination stances taken by law professors when it was apparent that such stances were self-serving.

Unfortunately, my own constitutional law professor Stephen Clark put himself into this position recently, when he selectively chose for his anti-discrimination complaint the "Women's only" viewing of a movie "Wonder Woman" at a theatre in Texas, of all states( Stephen Clark teaches in Albany Law School, New York) - while refusing to fight discrimination instilled by the community that he belongs to, the LGBT community.

Professor Clark, who is an openly gay man, as he advertised in his complaint and subsequent interviews to the press, considered it a violation of men's equal protection rights that a theatre would hold a "women's only" movie viewing - and made a big thing out of it.

Yet, the timing of the complaint is interesting.

The complaint came at a time when colleges across the country, colleges that receive public funds and are prohibited to discriminate on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, are holding separate LGBT graduations - but the good constitutional law professor Stephen Clark is not seen anywhere close to fight that type of discrimination.  Is it because he belongs to the LGBT community himself, and one does not foul one's own nest, even if the criticism is fair and necessary?

Is the requirement by black students that white people are absent from college campuses for one day (even though they either have to report to work there, or paid money for their tuition there, or simply want to come to the campus, funded by tax money, as any person has a right o do) not discriminatory?  Is it not unlawful?

Wouldn't it be close to home for a white male college professor Stephen Clark?



Why does not professor Clark fight discrimination on campus - discrimination becoming adamant in:



Why doesn't professor Clark criticize Harvard for holding separate graduations for black students - instead complaining against a "women's only" viewing of a movie? 

This country has a long history of discrimination against women - and against women in the law, too, and it still continues (even in the U.S. Supreme Court, against female justices), so the theatre could also, same as colleges do, hold separate movie viewings for women, "celebrating their accomplishments", same as colleges do when holding separate graduations for black and LGBT students?

Wouldn't it be on the same grounds that such conduct would be deemed or not deemed illegal discrimination on the basis of gender, race and/or sexual orientation?

Why not fight discrimination against women in your own profession, Professor Clark instead of fighting supposed discrimination against men in a remote movie theatre?  To do that would be too close to home?  You will lose your job over that?  Fighting it in a movie theatre in the remote Texas is safer?

Professor Clark clearly shows that his complaint was not a little bit self-serving and attention seeking when he puts on the pedestal gay bars that, according to him, are an example of tolerance and acceptance of all genders and sexual orientations, even to their own detriment.

Once again, Professor Clark would not see that LGBT community, to which he belongs, is becoming quite aggressive in now not just fighting against discrimination against its members, but insisting on discriminating against everybody else - by arranging for separate graduations for public money, by insisting that toddlers must now be taught about "LGBT issues", for taxpayers' money, which is a direct infringement on parents' constitutional rights to care and control of their kids education.

If you are a parent and teach your child about sex - you may be dragged all the way to court for child abuse by social services, and then be fired from your job, if you work with children or people with disabilities, and blackballed for life.

Yet, if you are teaching those children, for public money, against the wishes of their parents, about "LGBT issues", you are a hero now?

Professor Clark is not the first law professor who is apparently selling his soul to the devil, so to say, endorsing political agenda of the social group he belongs to under the guise of protecting the law and fighting against discrimination.  And not the first Albany Law School professor either.

Albany Law professor Ray Brescia's





(who was also my professor, of "legal ethics", a fantastical topic, as I found out later) "advice" to Uber to engage in the "kind of regulation" to avoid the "real regulation" - just as lawyers do, as Professor Brescia advises Uber - was clearly meant to not only advise to Uber, but also to support the ruse of attorney regulation that is presented as protecting consumers, while in fact is keeping the "real" regulation for protection of consumers off bay.

Albany Law professor Timothy Lytton (my professor in Torts),




who is Jewish, extensively writing on sex abuse by Catholic priests as an "institutional failure", while completely ignoring the identical problem of sex abuse in Hasidic schools, or the targeting of the person who exposed such sex abuse in Brooklyn (same as New York lawyer John Aretakis, who was the first lawyer to sue Catholic priests for sex abuse, was suspended, illegally, for the contents of his motion to recuse a judge - and law professor and the advocate anti-sexual abuse by Catholic priests did not publicly take a stand in his defense).

It is disheartening to lose respect to people who were your own former law professors - good professors, as I thought at the time I was going to law school. 

It is disheartening to realize that a Constitutional Law professors succumb to the hype of safe self-advertisement to advance a political agenda while cowardly refusing to address issues of discrimination under their own noses, in their own profession and in social groups to which they belong, through their own religion or sexual orientation.

Law professor who are preparing new generations of advocates for the people should not be self-serving cowards.



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