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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • “It’s just that — neutrality,” she added. “The government — in this case, our public university — stays out of picking sides, so that, through the marketplace of ideas, you can debate and arrive at truth for yourself and for the community.”

    Some at the law school agree with her stance. In an interview, John F. Stinneford, a professor at the university, said that it would be “academic misconduct” for a law professor who opposed abortion to give a lower grade to a well-argued paper advocating abortion rights.

    This makes sense to me as a principle, but the idea that the paper is genuinely making a good argument seems really questionable.

    Among originalists, though, this interpretation [apparently that “We the People,” refers to white people, and therefore the constitution applies to them exclusively] has been widely rejected. Instead, conservatives have argued that much of the text of the Constitution “tilts toward liberty” for all, said Jonathan Gienapp, an associate professor of history and law at Stanford. They also note that the post-Civil War amendments guaranteeing rights to nonwhite people “washed away whatever racial taint” there was in the original document.

    Sounds like not even other originalists take it seriously. On its face the idea seems really stupid, since the wording of that part of the constitution doesn’t involve race, and whiteness has always been a very loosely defined concept with a lot of ambiguity that wouldn’t be a natural fit for a legal principle. So maybe the paper is getting a high grade and an award is itself a display of personal bias.





  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoHumor@lemmy.worldThe "coin boys"
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    1 month ago

    At my school there was a group of students who would steal unattended pencils and hoard them in a huge pile in a hole in the woods behind the school. Eventually they got caught but for a while it was easy to make the excuse that you couldn’t do schoolwork because the pencils were gone.



  • It’s not quite the same thing as deploying soldiers against protesters, but technically all of those things are done ultimately through the use of coercive and violent force. Don’t want to go to school? Your parents will make you, because if they don’t they could be imprisoned. Slightly inconvenience drivers by walking across a busy street not at a crosswalk? Could be fined or arrested for jaywalking. Pose a hazard to rocket launches by flying a makeshift aircraft in federal airspace with no flight plan? You know the drill. That’s not to mention the funding for all those things, the violence inherent in which doesn’t stop at taxes, but also is a central factor in maintaining the value of a currency in a variety of different ways.