Good luck sissy boy
Posted on 09/30/2005 1:56:19 PM PDT by HarvardHater
LARRY TRIBE GOES NUTS # 2 -- attacks Justice Scalia and FreeRepublic.com
(Excerpt) Read more at zippyvideos.com ...
The Big Mahatma
From the October 4, 2004 issue: Laurence Tribe and the problem of borrowed scholarship
by Joseph Bottum
10/04/2004, Volume 010, Issue 04
http://tinyurl.com/3umlx
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Published on Friday, April 15, 2005
School Won't Punish Tribe
Summers, Kagan will not discipline professor whose book lifted text verbatim
By DANIEL J. HEMEL
Crimson Staff Writer
Harvard will not formally discipline constitutional expert Laurence H. Tribe ’62 in response to revelations that his 1985 book, “God Save This Honorable Court,” contained passages copied word-for-word without attribution from another scholar’s work.
University President Lawrence H. Summers and Law School Dean Elena Kagan, in a joint statement issued early yesterday afternoon, acknowledged that Tribe committed “a significant lapse in proper academic practice” in the composition of the 1985 book. But Summers and Kagan said they are “firmly convinced that the error was the product of inadvertence rather than intentionality.”
The statement from Summers and Kagan comes more than six months after the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, reported that Tribe’s book included several sentences that closely mirrored sections of University of Virginia political scientist Henry J. Abraham’s 1974 “Justices and Presidents,” which is widely recognized to be the authoritative work on Supreme Court appointments.
http://tinyurl.com/a4uw2
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tribe@law.harvard.edu
The Constitution is a living and breathing document-
it's called the Amendment Process.
We, the people, through our elected representatives, make our own laws.
What we need to do now is amend the wording of the Constitution to clarify Eminent Domain so tightly that the SCOTUS has no wiggle room. Let's clarify the RKBA while we're at it, too.
Constitutional Convention, anyone?
Time will tell whether you are a conservative, a lurker, a DU mole, a troll, or what.
Cheers!
snip
President Bush will soon have the opportunity to demonstrate leadership that unites Americans around the shared values of liberty, the rule of law, and the role of the Constitution as described in its preamble: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
If he fails this test of leadership, and chooses the divisive and destructive course of trying to achieve far-right domination of the U.S. Supreme Court, People For the American Way members and millions of other Americans will call on Senators to take a stand for our country and our Constitution.
Endnotes
1 Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt,” New York Times Magazine, 10/17/04.
2 David Plotz, “Chief Justice William Rehnquist: Mr. Efficiency,” Slate (Jan. 11, 1998) (visited Dec. 3, 2004).
3 Laurence H. Tribe, God Save This Honorable Court: How the Choice of Supreme Court Justices Shapes our History, at 37 (1985).
4 Laurence H. Tribe, God Save This Honorable Court, at 37-38 (1985).
5 Laurence H. Tribe, God Save This Honorable Court, at 37 (1985).
So Roberts got a A minus in his constitutional law class. Maybe he made Tribe look bad in class one day.
Well??
If you believe in the Constitution and not the personal opinons of judges and
if you believe it is our Constitution by which our rights and the limits on government are secured, and
if you believe that if those rights and limits are diminished by judges who abrogate the Constitution in order to uphold their personal views, then
it is certainly logical and reasonble to deduce
that judges who use their personal opinon to design a "living constitution" do in fact represent a danger to the Republic, because they abrogate the contractural basis for the Republic's existence, which is the written Constitution, not their personal opinions.
That contract, the Constitution, is not a contract between the Supreme Court and the People. It is not a contract spelling out what the Supreme Court grants and denies. That contract does not begin with "We the Supreme Court, in order to form a more perfect union...".
The Constitution begins....."We the people...." and the concept of a "living constitution" is no more than an excuse to avoid the legal procedures for amending the Constitution and writing a new one, incrementally, one Supreme Court decision at a time.
Published: November 21, 2004
The New York Times Book Review
To the Editor:
It comes as no surprise that Laurence H. Tribe -- who has spent his academic career litigating cases in the United States Supreme Court -- would not like my book, ''The People Themselves'' (Oct. 24). It is, after all, an effort to cast a skeptical eye on the claims of people like him to having a special say over constitutional law. I would, however, have expected something more or better from him than a caricature of my argument. Rather than reviewing my book, Tribe has written a common lawyer's brief, employing the sorts of tricks lawyers use to diminish a position they must attack: overreading, underreading or simply misreading complex arguments; taking snippets of quotations out of context; attributing contrived motives to an author or far-fetched consequences to a position; and so forth. No one doubts that Tribe is a good lawyer, and this stuff may be permissible in advocacy. It is, however, and for good reason, generally treated as inappropriate in serious debate.
The whole point of my book -- which is a work of history (though one might not know it from Tribe's review) -- is to show how the American tradition offers a richer understanding of constitutional law and politics than the choices Tribe presents: an understanding that renders unnecessary or unthreatening the sorts of resistance to authority Tribe misleadingly accuses me of encouraging, without at the same time requiring Americans to surrender control of their Constitution to a lawyerly elite. In Tribe's world, popular control over the Constitution is and, more important, should be only ''metaphorical.'' Ordinary citizens are entitled to have views and to seek to influence the course of constitutional law, but only by persuading their wise superiors on the court to change positions, or by waiting for justices to die or get tired of the job. We may criticize. We may implore. In extremis, we may amend. But beyond that, our duty is to defer.
What my book shows is that the founders of our country, and the generations that came after them, fought hard to avoid precisely what Tribe celebrates and deems necessary. Their system of constitutional politics made all three branches coequal participants -- leading and following, checking and balancing, representing and responding to arguments about the meaning of the Constitution. It did not depend on assigning one branch superior authority or a final say.
For Tribe, a system built on any foundation other than judicial supremacy ''takes the law out of constitutional law'' and ''erases'' the Constitution by turning it into ''a vessel into which the people could pour whatever they wanted it to contain at any given moment.'' Overheated rhetoric aside, our Constitution was self-consciously structured to prevent this. Not, however, by moving control wholly out of popular hands. Rather, our founders devised a system capable of sustaining a complex balance of forces within and without the government -- one that included courts -- designed to permit debate about the meaning of the Constitution while ensuring that, at the end of the day, an informed public opinion held sway.
Are there risks associated with this system? Absolutely: risks our founders and their successors fully understood. But the wonder of a democratic system is precisely how it places faith in the polity, and the wonder of our Constitution is how its authors found a way to empower that polity while avoiding the dangers that panic Tribe without cutting democratic deliberation off at the knees. There were, even in the beginning, those for whom the risks were too great: for whom the inevitable appearance of extreme views made overtly undemocratic checks necessary. For most of American history, theirs was a minority voice. Today, it is otherwise. But the debate goes on, and my book is meant to rejoin the argument by reminding readers of an older tradition in American discourse.
The most striking passage in Tribe's review comes at the end, where he writes that my book ''risks playing Pied Piper to a large and potentially impressionable universe of readers and students.'' There, in a nutshell, is the underlying sensibility to which my book objects. I believe readers and students capable of reading a book like mine and making up their own minds, particularly in a debate with those who hold Tribe's views (a very solid majority of legal commentators, I should add). But that debate depends on having both positions fairly presented and on encouraging discussion -- something Tribe's review manifestly does not do. Playing Pied Piper is the farthest thing from my mind. But, then, I respect my readers and students more than Tribe apparently does. His goal, it seems, is to scare them off.
Larry D. Kramer
Stanford, Calif.
A few years ago, Doris Kearns Goodwin refused to quit her post on Harvard’s Board of Overseers (Directors) after being caught plagiarizing rather obviously and later admitting it. But in the tradition of suspected Harvard plagiarists helping suspected Harvard plagiarists, Laurence Tribe himself (at this time a clean man) offered up his reasoning on why the standards that apply to students don’t apply to their famous professors:
I read with great sadness the editorial written by The Crimson Staff ("The Consequence of Plagiarism,” March 11) calling attention to the several inadequately footnoted phrases and passages drawn from a book by Lynne McTaggart, and from another two or perhaps three works, by the distinguished historian and public commentator, Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her 1987 book, “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.” . . . The Crimson staff lectured Goodwin that “she has a long road ahead of her before she restores her credibility as an historian or journalist” and helpfully advised that her “first step should be resigning from the University’s oldest governing board,” its 30-member Board of Overseers. What utter nonsense!
To be clear, my sadness came not simply from the fact that I have known Doris Kearns Goodwin for decades and am proud to count myself among her friends as well as her admirers. Nor was I sad to see that Harvard undergraduates remain devoted to the highest standards of scholarly integrity and simple honesty; that devotion heartens me. Rather, I was sad to see how eagerly these bright young people piled on to heap self-righteous condemnation on a scholar whose too-close-paraphrasing of a few passages even the Crimson editors had to acknowledge was “unintentional". . . I was sad to see how mindlessly, to be frank, students of the college I attended and for which I still feel the greatest fondness were willing to mimic all these presumably sage elders–by overstating what Doris Kearns Goodwin did in being admittedly sloppy with her sources in a minuscule part of her truly extraordinary body of work a decade and a half ago. And I was sad to witness what seems to me the students’ lack of any real sense of proportion or, for that matter, much sense of decency.
. . . There can be no doubt that, unlike the student who turns in someone else’s work as her own and hopes the instructor won’t notice the cribbing–the student for whom the Harvard disciplinary rules to which the Crimson editorial referred were principally written–Goodwin, who cited the very sources she has been accused of not crediting, had not the slightest intention to deceive, to claim originality for thoughts that were unoriginal, or to appropriate another’s deathless prose in hopes that she might be credited with a literary gift that belongs in truth to someone else. . . .
. . . My only purpose here is to help set the record straight by speaking up, as one scholar who values his own integrity and reputation for meticulous attribution as much as anyone could, for one of the truly outstanding historians of our time . . .
. . . The Harvard Board of Overseers would be greatly diminished without her presence[,] and the students who undertook to judge her–as well as their parents–would be proud if one day they managed to achieve a fraction of what she has achieved, with as little sacrifice or compromise of their personal integrity.
Laurence H. Tribe
http://tinyurl.com/a6lct
I cannot tell you how proud I am to be a member of this extreme right. Tribe, the time for you America haters is drawing to a close. It must be tough on you. Keep ranting, we'll keep laughing.
I'd prefer to avoid a Constitutional Convention.
Once it starts, there's no guarantee of what shall emerge.
Considering how likely it is that professional politicians and lawyers would dominate such a Convention, the odds are not in favor of a result you or I would find meet.
well stated.
BRAVO.
Tribe is a blankety-blank!
Considering that the intent of the first Constitutional Convention was to amend the Articles of Confederation, I'm inclined to agree with you.
But I thing a reasonable remedy to the SCOTUS' recent idiocy is to overrule them by making appropriate changes to the Constitution, in such a way as to make the will of the people clear.
Since when does the law apply to the left..... /sarcasm
The other time I faced off against Tribe was in 2000 in the Bush v. Gore case out of Florida concerning the Presidential Election. Tribe urged the Supreme Court to "affirm the Florida Supreme Court decision." I urged the Court to "strike the Florida decision from the record." The Court did exactly as I suggested (in Round I of that case) and did so unanimously. Tribe is a partisan for the Democrats, not a neutral expert. He feels, correctly, that he is under attack. And like a true lib-Dem, he attacks back not with facts or logic, but with ad hominum insults. I give him an "F" for intellectual achievement, here, and suggest that he rewrite his comments from the beginning.
John / Billybob
Seven states had already appointed "Commissioners" to go to Philadelphia, when the Congress (then meeting in New York) tried to jump on the bandwagon and steer the Convention. Congress passed a Resolution stating that "In the opinion of Congress" the new Convention should be "restricted to amending the Articles of Confederation." (The amendment article of the Articles gave Congress no role in the amendment process.)
Only three states limited the power of their Commissioners (which we now call "delegates"). New York and Massachusetts used the "Articles of Confederation" limitation language. Delaware required that its Commissioners insist on the preservation of one vote per state, which was done in the creation of the Senate to go with the House.
New York was absent from the Convention after 10 July, 1787, when Robert Yates and John Lansing left never to return, having failed to defeat the Virginia Plan. Although Alexander Hamilton left with them, he later returned at Madison's request to participate as an individual. Laking a quorum of its delegation, New York was officially absent after 10 July, and cast no more official votes.
It is true that two delegates from Massachusetts, Rufus King and Nathanial Gorham ignored the instructions from their legislature and voted for the new Constitution. They also ignored the advice of Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, the third member of their delegation.
Contrary to the premise of your post, there was no "run away Convention." There were exactly two "run away delegates," namely King and Gorham.
Trust me on this. I wrote the Introduction to the facsimile reprint (in 1988) of Robert Yates' Secret Proceedings and Debates of the Convention to Form the US Constitution.
John / Billybob
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