The Alito hearings are bringing some strange confessions out of the legal woodwork. I've long wondered what Alan Dershowitz really believes about the law. Dershowitz is routinely trotted out on CNN, PBS, and the alphabet channels as the Harvard Law professor who can comment on just about any legal issue. He is reliably a leftist, but always with some legal rationale.
Now we know what he really thinks. In a Forbes piece called "What Kind Of Justice Will Alito Be?" Dershowitz tells us the law is an ass. As you might expect, he is talking about his own approach to the law, which he has no doubt been passing on to generations of bright Harvard Law students.
"Almost all justices vote almost all of the time in accordance with their own personal, political and religious views. That is the reality, especially on the Supreme Court... Though ... judicial nominees loudly proclaim that justices should merely apply "the law" in a neutral manner, every experienced lawyer understands that the best predictors of a justice's actual votes are his or her personal, political and religious predilections." ...
"It was biography rather than precedent that determined the entirely predictable votes of the justices in Bush v. Gore (the 2000 presidential election case), Roe v. Wade (the abortion case), Lawrence v. Texas (the gay rights case) and so many other critical cases decided by the High Court. ..."
So Roe v. Wade has nothing to do precedent, law and the facts. Neither does the Bush 2000 election case, and all the gay rights decisions that are even now changing marriage laws all around the country.
So next time we see Harvard Law's Professor Dershowitz on national TV, telling us the legal rights and wrongs of some controversy, we will know how his mind really works. There is no law. There are no relevant facts, and precedent means nothing.
Moral relativists like Dershowitz can rationalize anything, since their self—indulgent reasons are the only things that matter. They can create their own morality and reality on the spot. But they mustn't give away the game, or the rest of us will know what's really up.
Well, Professor Dershowitz has just given away the game. His article is a straight confession of the Left's simple arrogation of legal power. This is everything the US Constitution was not supposed to be.
Isn't it past time for a total intellectual revolution at our top law schools?
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