Boston University School of Law

Professor Farnsworth

I’m getting out of the habit of working on Civil Procedure in the 12:45-2:30pm window before class because I’m sold on lunchtime talks in Barristers Hall with faculty and visiting professors (and in case Professor Farnsworth is reading this post, let me disclaim that that’s not the ONLY time I’ve been working on your homework…). Since I’m an insight junkie, please let me share some insights from this past week!

Lobbying

It seems the handful of legislative efforts since 1946 have primarily focused on transparency in the sense of registration and reporting requirements. There is a periodic shift in lobbying efforts following new legislation to skirt new requirements, the latest under Obama’s good-intentioned barring of lobbyists from government positions being that lobbyist registration has plummeted while “strategic consultant” numbers have peaked.

One idea to win back Congress to impartiality is to provide a stipend to senators and representatives that refuse lobbyist money, but can we really out-bribe the bribers? Interest groups will just dig deeper into their deep pockets, and forcing the government to lobby for it’s own folks to do what they are supposed to do already just seems ideologically nutty. What’s missing is political will for consistent enforcement, leaving us with transparency toward what??

I’m extreme at times, but I think there is a mums-the-word sensibility among decision-makers that whoever can drop tons of money lobbying might have some sound ideas about policy. Constituents like economic growth, even if it’s only deep down inside. Presumably, flush lobbies make more money than those with less to spend, and we want our GDP to look like a good day on the stock exchange, so maybe we shouldn’t shut off their influence… I want to be part of changing the climate where no one wants to be ethical and slightly less rich when we can just be, well, rich.

U.S. Supreme Court nominations

Public hearings before Senate to confirm presidential nominations to the highest bench could be an opportunity for community education and celebration of character and diversity in the complex work of interpreting legal questions. Instead, the latest farce was Sotomayor’s forced confessions of empty platitudes before a toned-down Inquisition. She could barely get out of her mouth that her Latina background does not render her decisions partial, but quite oppositely, increases her impartiality by including viewpoints that might go overlooked by the dominant culture.

Professor Lahav

As a visiting professor put it, we bypass a healthy debate over originalism vs. a living Constitution for the political opportunism of rule-of-law vs. personal whims. (Side note: three cheers for Constitutional law Professor Lahav advocating along the way that the Constitution is only…the Constitution, we should be respecting it but not worshipping it as a divine revelation!)

There is a real question, over potentially several decades of relative autonomy, of a justice’s accountability: to the nominating President’s ideology, to jurisprudence, to conscience and experience, to an increasingly diverse demography, to the collection of justices itself? I definitely care about personality over platitudes in such an assessment, how about you?