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Yes, it turns out that professional vetting institutions have biases. If those biases appear partisan, it may be the case and that they are partisan for a reas

Yes, it turns out that professional vetting institutions have biases. If those biases appear partisan, it may be the case and that they are partisan for a reason having to do with the nature of the professional expertise that and the lack of said expertise on the other side of a partisan divide.

rayiner 4y ago
A disproportionate share of the intellectual horsepower in the legal profession is on the right. Which is why the conservative legal movement is so effective even though liberal lawyers outnumber conservative ones 10:1.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I don't think I've seen evidence of this in my lifetime. If anything, legal decisions in the federal court system have been pretty liberal until recently. My generation saw the legalization, nationally, of gay marriage as well as the protection of personal property rights regarding firearms against government attempts to circumvent those rights for law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, an attempt to modify the census (a fairly broad executive power) failed to pass muster in the court because someone wrote down basically the only way such a modification could be illegal (blatantly attempting to disenfranchise states along racial lines)... Was their actual intent. And we probably shouldn't go into the absolute debacle that was the attempt to override the electoral will of the 50 states in the 2020 election.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    See: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6793&context=lawreview https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti.... Go back and compare judicial decisions from the 1940s to 1970s to ones today. The ones today are much more grounded in statutory text, constitutional history, etc., and less reliant on policy arguments, notions of justice and fairness, etc. Even “liberal” legal decisions are far more conservative today than they were in the 1970s. Compare Roe and Obergefell (both written by socially liberal Republicans). Roe has lots of high minded hand waving about rights and dignity and whatnot. Obergefell meanwhile starts from deeply rooted traditions and spends a tremendous amount of ink making the case that gay marriage is sufficiently like traditional marriage that it should be covered by the same constitutional protection. This became starkly apparent when Roe was overturned. By that point, the ground had shifted so much that even liberals had a hard time defending Roe on the merits. They had instead retreated to stare decisis. Because even a lot of liberal lawyers today have a hard time swallowing the idea that judges should be in the business of inventing new rights to implement their vision of what’s just.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      That says very little about the legal progression as a whole and a lot about the nearly-statically-insignificant, structurally-supreme sample of nine judges with life appointments generated via an extremely political process. Yes, there are a lot of textualists on the Supreme Court right now (thanks to a concerted political effort to put them there). That doesn't imply they represent the "intellectual horsepower" of the legal profession as a whole. They might represent the political savviness and luck of the GOP, to have managed to appoint so many from a minority-populace-support footing by maximally gaming the non-representative quirks of the US political system. But I wouldn't classify political savvy as legal "intellectual horsepower;" the ABA doesn't rate voters.
      - rayiner 4y ago
        The article isn’t just talking about the Supreme Court. Yes that’s where this has had the most prominent effect, but the influence of textualism (and concrete legal analysis in general) has filtered down throughout the courts and even those bastions of liberalism, law schools. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of lawyers are liberal, and indeed the majority of very smart lawyers are liberal. But legal conservatism punches way above its weight in shaping the turf everyone is playing on.
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        Yes, because it is popular among GOP politicians (since it supports interpretations of the law that are positively archaic by modern standards... In some cases, ignoring decades of jurisprudence is the only way to get the outcome they want short of controlling enough of Congress to pass laws, which they find harder to do year over year as the demographics of America shift) and through their efforts we've got a few true believers on the Supreme Court and several in the lower courts now. That doesn't imply it's good law that well-trained lawyers believe is correct. If anything, the prevalence of lawyers who aren't on board with it indicates the contrary. But the federal legal system itself is not a democracy, and when we change a handful of key operators in the courts, the timbre of the law can change quickly.

rayiner 4y ago

A disproportionate share of the intellectual horsepower in the legal profession is on the right. Which is why the conservative legal movement is so effective even though liberal lawyers outnumber conservative ones 10:1.

shadowgovt 4y ago
I don't think I've seen evidence of this in my lifetime. If anything, legal decisions in the federal court system have been pretty liberal until recently. My generation saw the legalization, nationally, of gay marriage as well as the protection of personal property rights regarding firearms against government attempts to circumvent those rights for law-abiding citizens. Meanwhile, an attempt to modify the census (a fairly broad executive power) failed to pass muster in the court because someone wrote down basically the only way such a modification could be illegal (blatantly attempting to disenfranchise states along racial lines)... Was their actual intent. And we probably shouldn't go into the absolute debacle that was the attempt to override the electoral will of the 50 states in the 2020 election.
- rayiner 4y ago
  See: https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6793&context=lawreview https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti.... Go back and compare judicial decisions from the 1940s to 1970s to ones today. The ones today are much more grounded in statutory text, constitutional history, etc., and less reliant on policy arguments, notions of justice and fairness, etc. Even “liberal” legal decisions are far more conservative today than they were in the 1970s. Compare Roe and Obergefell (both written by socially liberal Republicans). Roe has lots of high minded hand waving about rights and dignity and whatnot. Obergefell meanwhile starts from deeply rooted traditions and spends a tremendous amount of ink making the case that gay marriage is sufficiently like traditional marriage that it should be covered by the same constitutional protection. This became starkly apparent when Roe was overturned. By that point, the ground had shifted so much that even liberals had a hard time defending Roe on the merits. They had instead retreated to stare decisis. Because even a lot of liberal lawyers today have a hard time swallowing the idea that judges should be in the business of inventing new rights to implement their vision of what’s just.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    That says very little about the legal progression as a whole and a lot about the nearly-statically-insignificant, structurally-supreme sample of nine judges with life appointments generated via an extremely political process. Yes, there are a lot of textualists on the Supreme Court right now (thanks to a concerted political effort to put them there). That doesn't imply they represent the "intellectual horsepower" of the legal profession as a whole. They might represent the political savviness and luck of the GOP, to have managed to appoint so many from a minority-populace-support footing by maximally gaming the non-representative quirks of the US political system. But I wouldn't classify political savvy as legal "intellectual horsepower;" the ABA doesn't rate voters.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      The article isn’t just talking about the Supreme Court. Yes that’s where this has had the most prominent effect, but the influence of textualism (and concrete legal analysis in general) has filtered down throughout the courts and even those bastions of liberalism, law schools. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of lawyers are liberal, and indeed the majority of very smart lawyers are liberal. But legal conservatism punches way above its weight in shaping the turf everyone is playing on.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        Yes, because it is popular among GOP politicians (since it supports interpretations of the law that are positively archaic by modern standards... In some cases, ignoring decades of jurisprudence is the only way to get the outcome they want short of controlling enough of Congress to pass laws, which they find harder to do year over year as the demographics of America shift) and through their efforts we've got a few true believers on the Supreme Court and several in the lower courts now. That doesn't imply it's good law that well-trained lawyers believe is correct. If anything, the prevalence of lawyers who aren't on board with it indicates the contrary. But the federal legal system itself is not a democracy, and when we change a handful of key operators in the courts, the timbre of the law can change quickly.