Author Archives: Peter Levine

Justice O’Connor on the independence of the judiciary

Last night, I attended Streetlaw’s first annual awards dinner. As chair of the awards committee, I had the honor of presenting the Teacher of the Year award to Fred Cole from Marquette, Michigan, a fine social studies instructor who brings the Constitution alive in his classes.

Streetlaw’s Chesterfield Smith award went to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who gave a speech about the rule of law. She emphasized the importance of civic education (in general) and Streetlaw’s programs (in particular) as a foundation for a strong system of impartial justice. Before she took the podium, the American Bar Association President, Robert J. Grey, Jr., had given the evening’s keynote address, in which he had explicitly criticized elected officials for trying to put pressure on the judiciary in the Terri Schiavo case. (Grey is quoted in today’s New York Times on the same subject.) Justice O’Connor paused in the middle of her written defense of judicial independence to say (I paraphrase her closely): “And thank you, Robert Grey, for your earlier remarks on that subject. It’s been a little troublesome lately in that respect.”

When Congress passes a bill of attainder, attempting to coerce the judiciary to reach the conclusion it prefers, and then members of Congress explain the killing of judges as a reaction to public frustration with the judiciary, it’s obvious what the true “conservative” response should be. Justice O’Connor provided it last night, in her pointed and rather tart defense of judicial independence, separation of powers, and rule of law.

(Senator Cornyn’s full speech that caused all the controversy included some coveats and qualifications–and overlooked the Schiavo case completely. But there was an inflammatory passage that he must have expected to be noticed and quoted:

“Finally, I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country–certainly nothing new; we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that has been on the news. I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds and builds to the point where some people engage in violence, certainly without any justification, but that is a concern I have that I wanted to share.”)

New York’s aesthetic

I went back to New York yesterday, to hear former Governor Jim Hunt, Federal Judge (and Pennsylvania First Lady) Midge Rendell, Wendy Puriefoy of the Public Education Network, and others speak in support of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools.

As a child and a young adult, I spent a lot of time in New York City, and it left a powerful imprint. However, I don’t get there much these days. With the benefit of distance, I decided yesterday that the city’s distinctive aesthetic can be captured by three simple concepts.

First, it is a strongly rectangular place, on account of the famous Manhattan street grid and the vertical rectangles of the buildings. Second, everything seems to be covered with fine, intricate patterns. That’s because you can see a long way in Manhattan: far along the straight streets and up the sides of the buildings (or down them, if you’re inside). In a city like Washington, you can’t get far enough away from a window or a car to see it as a shiny point in a pattern. If you do get a distant view of a building, it lies low on the horizon, so that most of your visual field is sky and trees: lumps of color. But in New York, the distant windows and balconies etch regular patterns on the massive rectangles all around you, patterns that are complicated by tree limbs, wires, cornices, fire-escapes, and signs. The rows of buildings make thin vertical stripes as they recede toward the vanishing point; and the cars on Park Avenue or the FDR Drive are numerous enough to form their own mosaics. Even human crowds turn into patterns.

Third, New York is huge. Even if you?re moving quickly in a car down a long avenue, you’re conscious that there’s much, much more of the central city than what you can see. In this respect, it’s different from the densest and tallest sections of Chicago or Philadelphia.

Rectangularity, delicate pattern, and vast scale: these three concepts combine to give New York (and especially Manhattan) its distinctive look. Within this structure, more concrete and idiosyncratic aspects of the city awaken my oldest memories: the quick double-taps on car horns, the smell of chestnuts and hotdog-water from vending carts, the deadened roar of traffic heard from 20 or 40 stories up; the surge of pedestrians jay-walking at the first break in traffic.

high schools in a high-risk era (2)

Here’s another take on an issue that I’ve written about recently, the “rat race” in our high schools:

We live in an era of expanded opportunities. There are more careers and lifestyles to choose from. Some people have confidence that they can innovate successfully, realizing their private ideas and goals. The “dot-com” expansion of the late 1990s was just an example of that opportunistic spirit.

The other side of the coin is individualized risk. We don’t have as many strong, tight-knit neighborhood communities as we used to. The array of voluntary associations has changed; fewer groups provide guaranteed support in return for long-term commitment. The government’s safety net is weaker, and fewer people belong to unions. Corporations don’t even pretend to offer long-term job security. Public-sector careers are less desirable than in the past.

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sticks and stones …

Civility is important. When public figures attack individuals and their motives rather than ideas and policies, they can make it harder to work together–even on completely unrelated issues. Furthermore, politics as a whole can become unpleasant, in which case some citizens will avoid participating.

Tom DeLay and his friends have certainly not been “civil” in their response to the Schiavo case:

‘The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today,’ said Mr. DeLay. .. Saying that the courts ‘thumbed their nose at Congress and the president,’ Mr. DeLay, of Texas, suggested Congress was exploring responses and declined to rule out the possibility of Congressional impeachment of the judges involved.

[…]

Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, said the judges who would not stop the removal of Ms. Schiavo’s feeding tube were ‘guilty not only of judicial malfeasance’ but of the cold-blooded, cold-hearted extermination of an innocent human life.”

I am not going to defend these statements, but I will propose some reasons not to take them overly seriously.

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possible break in “service”

I’m moving my site to a new host today—so that I can install new software to defeat various forms of spam. Once the process is complete, everything (including this blog’s address) will be exactly the same, from a visitor’s perspective. However, during the process, the site may be “down” for a time. Since anything I post today may disappear in the transition, I’m not going to write a substantive contribution. I should be able to post safely tomorrow.