Maybe he thinks he's Clarence Darrow and coal is Leopold and Loeb?
Maybe he's trying to heighten the contradictions? That is a time-honored liberal strategy.
More seriously, I'll bet he either counts on people having short memories because who actually listens to what lawyers say, or has decided that the least important part of "noted liberal Harvard law professor" is the second part.
Of course, he's lying about the money. He's a lawyer, isn't he?
He may be lying about the money, but I'm sure he was telling the truth when he said he wasn't able to answer more questions about the money because he was running out of time.
Anyway, I always liked the guy with the cowboy hat better.
Maybe he just really, really hates mountaintops.
Before clicking on the link, I thought that Ogged was blogging about the Cleveland Indians ("inside baseball"; the mention of Tribe which in my scanning of the OP I read as "the tribe"). Perhaps also because I had previously been on the LGM web page where Lemieux has, prominently posted, his personal forecasts for MLB.
I suppose I have to read his testimony before having an opinion -- I don't really know what he says the constitutional issues are.
I mean, as liberal hero law professors go, this guy is top of the heap.
For the ignorant, how do liberal law professors go?
What I remember is that for a while, every time some country had a revolution and needed a constitution, they'd call Larry Tribe. So he goes the constitution-making way.
Maybe he looked at what happened afterward and decided he wasn't very good at it.
Tribe has been doing work for large corporations for a long time, including both legal representation and (I think) this sort of public engagement work. He certainly does leverage his reputation as a leading constitutional scholar to support that work. Another example that comes to mind is Nike v. Kasky in 2003, where he argued for Nike that the First Amendment protected it from being held liable for allegedly untrue statements about the labor practices used to make its products.
Maybe all that do-gooder liberal stuff that Tribe does is just to enhance his value as an attorney for evil corporations.
I don't think it's a particularly uncommon practice although it may have a little bit of extra unseemliness in Tribe's case because his name still carries a lot of weight. When I was a law student, I worked as a research assistant for a professor who was doing straight-up legal representation (no public engagement, that I ever heard about) on topics related to his research. He eventually gave it up because he said he didn't like the feeling of having to think about conflicts when he was writing an article that was supposed to be just about his scholarly views.
Tribe has a history of taking the industry side in environmental litigation, doesn't he? So probably not a matter of how much he's getting for this particular engagement. Also his liberal hero cred is mainly on ACLU-type things and that's pretty compartmentalizable; the guy's not a socialist or anything dirty like that.
I was prepared to believe that his arguments only looked stupid (not that that would justify working for coal in any case) but after reading his exchange with Freeman and Lazarus, no, they're pretty damn stupid. I suspect he's made a lot of money off the industry.
Can attorneys charge extra for having to make especially stupid arguments?
The quotations in the link make it seem pretty likely that he's letting his name go on top of stuff with large sections written by industry lawyers trying to appeal to right-wing judges and doesn't care what people think of him for it.
Definitely. And get paid in advance for them too.
Can anyone walk me through the merits of the conflicting amendments argument? Reading the linked exchange gets me as far as identifying the issue, but neither side is being explicitly detailed enough about it to convince me. (I could actually put in the effort to figure it out properly for myself, but I'm probably not going to put in the effort, at least not for a couple of days.)
20: Happy to help, but it looks like some of the arguments mght be stupid, so per 19 I'll have to ask for a modest advance.
Sure, and at 25% premium above the standard Unfogged commentslegal advice rate.
Add a space. And I feel personally empowered to make that offer because Internet.
It says something* about liberal lawyering that this isn't considered beyond the pale but taking the badguys' side in the constitutional right to same sex marriage cases (a situation where the consequences are probably less severe given the existence of federalism, and where the badguys' legal arguments are generally better) would be.
OTOH I certainly wouldn't want to be judged by my clients. OTOO and more decisive H, I'm a mediocre hired gun, not an ultra high powered law professor/Supreme Court advocate who can totay freely pick and choose my own docket and is using my reputation not only to help slightly unsavoury clients but to advance really horrible legal arguments with seriously bad consequences.
*actually it's something totally obvious and that we all know, which is that elite liberals are primarily socially liberal.
I'm so not impressed with the argument that the government should subsidize clean coal, carbon capture and whatnot. Like, if the coal industry is convinced those technologies could remediate this existential threat to their business, shouldn't they be standing in line to pay for that shit themselves?
the constitutional right to same sex marriage cases (a situation where the consequences are probably less severe given the existence of federalism, and where the badguys' legal arguments are generally better)
Wow, the arguments in this case must be exceptionally terrible, then.
20: So, I doubtbless missed some nuance when I was looking at the briefs last week, but basically: pre-1990, Section 111 of the Clean Air Act required EPA to establish standards for any air pollutant not already regulated under a couple other provisions, including a particular subsection of 112(b). In 1990, Congress rejiggered 112 is various ways, in the process of which it deleted the subsection in question. Both the House and Senate bills amended 111 to deal with the obsolete cross-reference, but they did so in different ways, both of which made it into the actual statute somehow. If you follow the House amendment, you get Section 111 now giving EPA authority over any pollutant that is not emitted from a source regulated under 112; if you follow the Senate, you get Section 111 now giving EPA authority over any pollutant not regulated under 112(b). The Senate amendment was labelled a "conforming amendment" in the statute, so the folks who put together the U.S. Code basically treated it as lower priority and followed the House one.
There are of course a bunch of arguments on each side about how this happened and what if anything it reflects about Congress's intent. Industry says that Congress wanted to avoid overlapping regulations so if a source is being regulated under 112, it shouldn't also be regulated under 111. (111 is in some respects broader than 112, which gives EPA authority to set standards only for "hazardous" pollutants.) EPA's very sensible argument is that it wouldn't make sense for Congress to prevent EPA from regulating "nonhazardous" pollutant X from source Y simply because it already regulates source Y for hazardous pollutants. But even if Industry is right about the better way to deal with the conflicting provisions, they still have a lurking Chevron problem and that's why they brought in Tribe to make the truly stupid backstop constitutional arguments.
Ah, that makes sense. What I was getting from Tribe's linked posts made his argument look much stronger, and I didn't follow the refutation at all, really.
The basic constitutional issues are horrendously stupid. This law intended to deal with pollutants generally can't possibly be read to cover a particular pollutant if regarding as such would be a big enough hassle for industry is what it comes down to, AFAICT without having paid much focused attention.
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Semi-OT (treating this as the thread for environmental issues) one of the guest-bloggers* for Kevin Drum inadvertently references an unfogged hot-button issue (emphasis mine).
My grandfather, B. Abbott Goldberg, was the deputy director of California's Department of Water Resources from 1961 to 1966. He was one of the legal architects of Gov. Pat Brown's California Water Project, the massive, contentious undertaking that built the infrastructure that currently supplies 25 million people and 1 million acres of farmland. ...
He was proud of his work, whose effectiveness was evident in Californians' unquestioning expectation of plentiful, cheap water. When the state went through the big drought of 1976-77, he noted, "There wasn't a murmur about a shortage of domestic water in Southern California...I didn't find anybody beating the doors down to thank us for what had been done. The fact that it took some forty years to achieve it was just forgotten." Later in his life, he read Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner's critique of the growth-at-all-costs mentality embodied in the Water Project. He wasn't a fan.
Not that he couldn't see the other side. In his oral history interview, conducted in 1979, my grandfather admitted to some conflicted views about California's relationship with water. Sounding like a good Northern Californian, he mused, "Someplace along the line, the idea began to dawn on me that really Southern California was an environment essentially hostile to human occupation...[B]ut what are you going to do about the millions of people already down there?" And: "I do remember saying to someone that really, the only solution to the water problem was birth control."
* Ogged probably wasn't available.
Do we know how many gallons of water it takes to make a condom?
I haven't re-read Cadillac Desert in years, and don't know what I'd think of it today. That book quotes extensively from Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, which does hold up. I'm probably likely to like CD still, but whatever I'll credit it with leading me to Stegner, and beyond him to Powell himself.
The obvious solution is the forced resettlement of most Southern Californians to areas of country with more water and an insufficient tax base.
35: You don't think they'll bring their insufficient taxation system with them?
I have a now-standardized spiel that Cadillac Desert made itself obsolete. It was released in the 1980s and forced farming to change. It is fun as a screed, but I don't think it should be directing policy anymore.
The forced-resettlement people will enforce a strict baggage limit.
"As this will be a completely full forced-resettlement flight, your taxation system must fit under the seat in front of you."
"We know you don't have a choice in airlines when you are undergoing forced resettlement, so we don't have to appreciate your business. However, in compensation for the inconvenience, you can tamper with, but not destroy, the lavatory smoke detector."
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NMM to The Bold Italic, an irritating local blog featuring sort of the hipster-precious tone of This American Life combined with the locavore solipsism of San Francisco residents. I haven't read it much because it tends to be full of insights like "people here have a very unique dialect and say 'hella'," but it was occasionally fun full-on hate-reading for things like "Broke-Ass Stuart" talking about the gentrification of San Francisco purely in terms of how sad he is for his friends who sell out and get jobs.
Posted on this thread because it's over 40.
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That rule doesn't count when 40 was off topic anyway.
Since this is now the official off topic thread:
A number of amazon.com gift certificates for various holidays were sent to the wrong email address, but that just got sorted out and they've all landed in my amazon account at once. I'm open to book suggestions. History, horror/weird fiction, philosophy of science are of particular interest, but any suggestions are welcome.
TRO, how is "Ring of Steel" holding up?
I assume 44.last is asking for a sex toy review.
I noticed 29.last as well. Given the date of the referenced oral history, it occurred to me that Megan might have been echoing insider CW with that argument.
Oh no. I've never heard agency staff talk like that.
44. Manuscript found in Saragossa if you've never read it. True Meaning of Smekday was a fun read, only slightly distracting for being aimed at kids. Seemed similar to Terry Pratchett's work to me in mood and successfully executed playfulness.
I picked a recent academic biography Francis Bacon about whom I knew nothing but was curious, enjoyed it. Perez Zagorin is the author of the one I read. Sebald's Austerlitz is history, horror and weird fiction all in one.
47: They are perfectly willing to cull the existing population.
Weird fiction, on the Dunsany/Smith model? How about Robert Aickman, if you're unfamiliar with his work?
It took until comment 27 for me to realize this might finally be the thread discussing the things I asked the lawyers here to discuss a year ago, after I went to a talk by some other Harvard law people about the possible challenges to the EPA regulating greenhouse gases. Now if I could only track down the link to that talk again.
44: Have you read Monster of Florence?
Here's the talk from October by Freeman and Lazarus, who it turns out are the ones currently sparring with Tribe online.
Tribe is a first amendment/free speech absolutist, not a liberal. Liberalism and free speech absolutism coincided in the 1960s, but since then the first amendment has generally been a right wing tool, plaintiffs being abortion protesters, neo nazis, billionaire political donors, and large corporations. Tribe took the corporate side in the various campaign contribution cases, consistently with his first amendment beliefs. So naturally his clients come back to him With their other constitutional issues. And naturally he sides with his clients.
Anecdata: a distant cousin of mine idealistically decided to specialize in first amendment out of law school in the 1960's. His first clients were pornographers. Before long, it was apparent that there wasn't much pure free speech business, but his clients had enough other legal business, mostly involving drugs and mob connected assaults and murders, to make a thriving practice.
Oh jeez, seriously pwned trying to do links on a phone.
No, it's good to see the earlier thread, since you and teo had relevant comments there.
I also rather liked the recent book on Kim Philby (modulo a bunch of stuff).
I don't read much genre fiction but I just read The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey, which falls somewhere on the horror/science fiction/fantasy spectrum, and I thought it was a lot of fun.
I look forward to the Court ruling that CO2 emissions are speech.
That's terrifying. I mean, just try to speak without emitting CO2. I bet you can't!
60: I liked it a lot! I've been attempting to bully people into reading it.
I read it knowing literally nothing about the plot, which I think helped, because the opening chapters draw you in more if you're confused. So now I want to recommend it without actually explaining anything.
Thanks all. Keep the suggestions coming!
I don't think I've had this much money locked into "no excuse not to spend it on something frivolous" for a long time, so I don't want it to go to waste.
50: Pretty much. The whole Bierce, Lovecraft, Smith & etc. lineage, including modern descendants like Caitlin Kiernan and others.
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To continue the ongoing discussion- I think police shooting video doesn't get much more incriminating than the latest. Although I'm sure some people might argue the video doesn't show whatever altercation occurred that led to the use of the Taser.
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65 - Listen to essear and oudemia: The Girl with All the Gifts is fun. On the weird fiction tip, I liked The Wanderer -- self-consciously modeled after weird fiction of the Manchen period with the gore ramped up, with an overlay of The Purple Cloud -- although it fizzled towards the end. (It was originally written as someone's thesis, possibly as separate stories rather than a unified work.) The Rook, which came out a couple years ago, is total popcorn but enjoyable. The French comics artist David B. had a weird one that I dug, The Armed Garden, with three magical realist stories about heretics: one about Al-Muqanna and two about Hussites. Station Eleven, On Such a Full Sea, and (non-sf-ly) A Brief History of Seven Killings are on my Kindle but I haven't gotten to them yet. And I finally followed up on Coates' exhortations and got a copy of Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought?.
Oh right, Station Eleven is somewhere on my coffee table buried under a pile of paper and physics books and I should excavate and read it.
62: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
police shooting video
I was considering a post about that. Even in not-so-llberal South Carolina, they indicted the cop for murder. Wonder what would have happened without the video.
There's a new Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr.
I still think he might be acquitted because the video starts with the fight and the Taser somehow being tossed aside, not clear by whom. So he could play the card of he's a violent criminal fighting with me, I had to shoot him in the back to protect the community from him escaping and going on a rampage. Planting the Taser on the body was fucking idiotic though especially since it looks like he picks it up again later. I guess in the end it will depend on the race of the jurors.
44 -- I'd definitely recommend Ring of Steel, great and interesting. But if I had to recommend one book from my WWI/violent 20th century deaths history binge it would be The Deluge by my man-crush Adam Tooze, totally tranformative (at least for me) in terms of how one thinks about the entire period.
think he might be acquitted
You might well be right, but I will be genuinely surprised if he is.
OT: TELL HER YOU FUCKED THE SKY AND THE CONCEPT OF REGRET BOTH AT THE SAME TIME.
I want to work that into a journal article.
If you get charged after shooting a black guy in South Carolina you know you done fucked up.
73: Thanks, gonna read the Tooze
Y'all remember I have been saying for years that the threat of North American resources and genocidal ambition ( and a lot else, geographical centrality etc) was a driving force in Global history, I say since before the Civil War. It was fucking inevitable.
Russia also, in a way that doesn't work for Brazil or India.
China is wealth. Unspeakable wealth.
France and Germany on their continents. Britain (Dutch), a nation of shopkeepers.
65: I literally just finished The Rook this afternoon. Definitely recommended, but yes, total popcorn.
75 is funny but the cover lines of virtually any single copy of a checkout womens gossip magazine are infinitely weirder. DOCTORS MADE ME NEW LIPS OUT OF MY VAGINA sticks in the memory for some reason.
81: I have the book on my reading list as well, but I'm curious, is the summary I read in college basically true, that he deliberately manipulated the economy to put and keep Hitler in power?
DOCTORS MADE ME NEW LIPS OUT OF MY VAGINA sticks in the memory for some reason.
So many wonderful ways to misinterpret this.
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20% of the way, the Tooze Deluge is indeed very good.
Trotsky characteristically cast the scene in rather less exalted terms. If it was true that domestic politics and international relations would no longer be separate, as far as he was concerned, both could be reduced to a single logic. The 'entire political life', even of states like France, Italy and Germany, down to 'the shifts of parties and governments will be determined in the last analysis by the will of American capitalism . . .' With his usual sardonic humour, Trotsky evoked, not the awesome solemnity of the pyramids, but the incongruous spectacle of Chicago meat-packers, provincial senators and manufacturers of condensed milk lecturing a Prime Minister of France, a British Foreign Secretary or an Italian dictator about the virtues of disarmament and world peace. These were the uncouth heralds of America's drive toward'world hegemony' with its internationalist ethos of peace, progress and profit.
Churchill, Hitler, and Trotsky and their interpretations of Post-WW I is a critical thematic to the Tooze. My guess is that he will mention it, but it would have been nice if he added the interwar Kyoto School of Philosophy to that, Nishida or Nishitani, tho of course that work is very hard, and even harder with the difficulty of extracting what is useful from the pragmatics of nationalism in a repressive state.
Cause:
Wilson's reluctance to become involved in the European conflict derived in part from his belief that wider issues were at stake. As we shall see in chapter 5, in the spring of 1917 the President was deeply preoccupied with events in China. Japan's role as an ally of the Entente disturbed him greatly. Over the winter of 1916-17 the strategy of American leadership that lay behind his call for a peace without victory was explicitly spelled out in racial terms. Given China's vulnerability and the dynamic expansion of Japanese power, what was at stake for Wilson in suppressing the self-destructive violence of European imperialism were not just the petty quarrels of the old world, but nothing less than the future of 'white supremacy on this planet'. As the US cabinet met to debate the news from Europe in late January 1917, one witness recorded Wilson's thought as follows: The President was 'more and more impressed with the idea that "white civilization" and its domination in the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact, as we would have to build up the nations ravaged by the war. He said that as this idea had grown upon him he had come to the feeling that he was willing to go to any lengths rather than to have the nation actually involved in the conflict.' When Wilson said it would be a 'crime against civilization' for America to allow itself to become sucked into the war, it was 'white civilization' that he had in mind. In Britain there were plenty who shared Wilson's racial vision of world history. But it was precisely so that Britain could concentrate its main force in Asia, they believed, that Germany must be tamed. The war in Europe was not a distraction from the worldwide struggle, it was an essential part of it.
The Kyoto School partly was based on the idea that the 1905 Japanese victory over Russia was the turning point of 20th century history, and most of what followed was an effort, as Tooze says, to maintain white supremacy in the face of a serious non-white competitor. The immigration restrictions of the US in the 20s only solidified the concept of a global race war in the minds of some Japanese.
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With Tribe--some $. But I bet also some attention seeking. Being "even the liberal law professor X says horribly non-liberal thing Y" is a nice ticket to being relevant and influential and talked about.
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The Tooze...got worse. There remains a supply of relevant facts and honest analysis that makes the book worth reading.
But there is also the moralistic counterfactualism that has pretty much ruined a generation of New Lefty identity historians.
De Ste Croix ain't laying bullshit on me like:"If only the Spartans or Crassus had just been nicer people..."
This generation, having checked their fucking privilege, and knowing social injustice is entirely a matter of personal fault, thinks it is in a position to judge everybody else.
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