Category: Politics

The US as a borderline case of law

Les Green9 Comments

Legal theorists often wonder what we should think about things that are quite a lot like  law but are not, in fact, legal systems.  I’m not thinking  of the rules of board games or the Mafia, but of cases where the similarities are more compelling: soft law, indigenous law, Masonic law, and so on.  These have some features of the paradigm case of law and are missing others.  But, as HLA Hart pointed out long ago, it would be silly to say they are ‘not law’: the term ‘law’ is quite open and flexible.   Anyway, it is too late to say that ‘soft law’ is a misnomer.  There are books about it, courses in it, and no doubt someone will soon start to offer degrees in it.

Moreover, such forms of social order can over time come closer to the paradigm case than they used to be.   International law, for instance, is now more systematic and (a bit) more efficacious than it was when H.L.A. Hart said, in the 1950s, that it is more like ‘set’ of rules than a ‘system’.   As things stand, these are still borderline cases of law, but some of them are on the move.  My own preference is to call them ‘para-legal systems’.

Just as a form of social order can become more law-like over time, it can also become less law like.   Some jurisprudents think that can happen when law fails to live up to certain moral ideals, such as democracy, liberalism, or human rights.  My own view is more parsimonious.  I count Roman Law and Canon Law as paradigm cases of legal systems, even though neither of them has much interest in democracy or liberalism, and both are overtly hostile to important human rights.  Yet law they are.

But even on the more parsimonious view, other kinds of decay can cause law to unravel.   The law can cease to be generally effective.   Under this heading we usually  think of ‘failed states’, but even when state power  gets its way it may nonetheless escape the regulation of law, that is, the positive law of the land.   Is there anyone who believes that the widespread use of terror and violence against African-American men is generally in accord with state and federal law in the US, and that their mass incarceration simply reflects their just deserts, legally speaking? Whole social groups in the US  live in conditions of near lawlessness, and not because they disproportionately violate the law.

A different kind of decay results when the most basic ground rules of a legal system crumble.  I don’t just mean the (formal) Constitution–though in the US that is looking pretty shaky too.  Beneath every Constitution there is a constitution: a set of norms, standards, principles and practices that, together, identify the formal Constitution and regulate how it should be applied by judges and others.  These norms have always been much less settled in the US than in countries at comparable levels of development: the more extreme American ‘legal realists’  wondered whether there was any settled law or convention at this level.   No doubt that was an exaggeration, but there was some  truth in it.  When the highest officials are deeply divided on the relative importance of text, history, and principle in interpreting a Constitution, the most basic parts of a legal system are in rickety shape.

Now critical observers have a fresh worry, focused on the evident corruption of the Presidency and the Senate.  Commentators of all political convictions (though not all commentators of all convictions) agree that they are being  badly damaged by their incumbents.   Not (just) because of probable unchecked violations of the  Constitution, but also  because of the toleration of grotesque assaults on the norms that make that document binding as law.  American commentators lament a lack of ‘civility’ or a rise of ‘tribalism’ in their country, but a legal system can survive  both.  What it cannot long survive is official contempt for the informal norms that underpin the Constitution itself, and that is where the US seems to be heading.

It is not only  apex officials that are responsible for the basic norms of a legal system.   Ordinary lawyers and even, to a lesser degree, law professors and law clerks also play a part.   We read that over 2,400 American law professors signed a letter urging Senators to do their duty in good faith and refuse to confirm an accused sexual harasser, a proven liar, a bully,  a lickspittle, and a man who is said to choose female clerks who have a certain ‘look’.  (Which appears, coincidentally, to be the same ‘look’ that the President prefers among his female attendants and wives.)  Like many law professors, I read that list.  (I was as surprised by the names that were absent as I was by some of those that were present.)  The letter proved pointless.  Anyone willing to do to Dr Christine Blasey Ford what President Trump was willing to do, and anyone willing to do whatever Trump wills, is beyond reason or shame, never mind the constraints of law.  But I think the existence of the letter shows that one vital sign  remains near normal limits.  The bar, or at least some influential members of it, understand well what is now at stake and are pushing  back.   But should they give up, or be sidelined, it will not be long before we should move the US over to the category of ‘para-legal systems’.  Quite a bit like law, in several respects, but not actually a legal system.

 

 

 

 

A Gay-free Law School?

Les Green3 Comments

On August 14th, Trinity Western University, a small Evangelical college in British Columbia, announced that, given the choice between (a) creating an unaccredited law school that prohibited its members having sex outside heterosexual marriage and (b) creating a fully accredited law school open to lesbian, gay, and bisexual students  it would prefer accreditation to orthodoxy.  Its choice was prompted, no doubt, by reflection on  a pair of cases that TWU had argued up to the Supreme Court of Canada, claiming that the law societies of British Columbia and Ontario had, in denying accreditation, violated TWU’s freedom of religion.  The Court reaffirmed the broad authority of law societies to regulate the profession in the public interest, including the interest in diversity and equality, and held that the law societies’ decisions were reasonable on the applicable standards of review.

The cases are of significance to the relationship between administrative law and human rights, but my interest is in their handling of freedom of religion.  I deny that the accreditation process was even a prima facie infringement on freedom of religion.    The Court’s misapplication of its own standard of ‘sincere belief’, and its unworkable view of the boundaries of religious liberty, set misleading signposts in the increasingly politicized field of freedom of religion.

Religious schools and colleges often have restrictive codes of campus conduct, and many of these are, and should be, tolerated in the name of religious freedom and social diversity.   But TWU’s ‘Community Covenant’ was different.  TWU required all law students and staff, of whatever religion or sexual orientation, to abstain from all sexual intimacy outside heterosexual marriage, not only on campus but also off it, not only in term time but even at home, and over the vacations.  The comprehensive ban on extra-marital sex (along with some other restrictions) applied to straight students as much as gay ones; but straight students could, if they wish, enter a heterosexual marriage—the only kind acknowledged by TWU. Thus, although gay students were not prohibited from studying law at TWU, they would be effectively prevented from doing so.  No romance on campus—but also no going home at the end of a long day, in anticipation or relief, to the embrace of a partner, or to a night at the club with friends.   To speak plainly: as far as it lay within its power, TWU wanted to create a gay-free law school.  This is the ‘freedom of religion’ that a university asserted in court.

TWU did not, of course, assert a religious right to create a law school, let alone an accredited one.   Had their claim been discrimination on grounds of religion, this would not have mattered.  You can discriminate against Jews by refusing to hire them in your firm, even though being a lawyer is no part of the Jewish faith.  But TWU was not taken primarily as a discrimination case.   TWU (or more probably, its lawyers) played the American gambit of ‘weaponizing’ freedom of religion as a way to resist policies they oppose on many grounds: policies of social inclusion, diversity and gender equality.   Such opposition is ideologically consonant with many conservative religions; but that fact no more brings it under freedom of religion than it brings tax cuts under freedom of religion.

TWU’s theory seemed to be this:  (a) TWU had a sincere religious belief that gay sex is wrong, and (b) (quoting its factum in earlier litigation) it believed in ‘the importance of being in an institution with others who either share that belief or are prepared to honour it in their conduct’.’ Some undergraduate TWU students avowed they valued a learning environment in which others supported their values and said that, if given the choice, that is the sort of law school they would prefer to attend.

As a theory of religious liberty, this is a spectacular failure.  None of these assertions about the preferability of studying ‘in an institution with others’ who share one’s beliefs comes close to claiming, let alone justifying, a right to the extra-mural conformity of all other students, Christian or not.   Nor does a religiously-based preference for a certain policy satisfy the test for religious conviction set out in prior cases.  Neither authority nor orthodoxy is required, but in Canada the claim must involve a sincere belief, ‘having a nexus with religion, which calls for a particular line of conduct’(Syndicat Northcrest v Amselem  para 56, emphasis added).  The requirement of a felt compulsory character to a doctrine—something one must do, not merely something one would prefer to do—was reaffirmed in Multani  v.  Commission scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys (‘an individual must … show that he or she sincerely believes that a certain belief or practice is required by his or her religion’. (para 35, emphasis added))

The mis-match between TWU’s asserted belief and its proposed policy was glaring, and the harm to equality of opportunity, and dignity, for gay students (and others) was plain. On such facts, it is easy to see why the Law Society of British Columbia and the Law Society of Ontario, refused to accredit a law school proposing to operate that way.   The law societies have a duty to regulate the profession in the public interest, and in Canada sexual orientation is a constitutionally prohibited ground of discrimination.   It seems beyond doubt that, as regulators, the laws societies could have come to their decisions reasonably, and that the Court would therefore not second-guess them.

But how did the religious liberty theory even get to first base?   It is important to bear in mind that the issue is not whether TWU could teach law from a Christian perspective, or refuse to offer ‘Sexuality and the Law’ seminars, or ban rainbow flags or gay clubs from campus.   The issue is whether its religious freedom includes the right to prevent (without formally prohibiting) the admission of gay students and the hiring of gay professors, on the ground that that will produce the sort of environment that Evangelical students prefer to study in.

Canadian constitutional law follows the familiar pattern of assigning to the claimant the burden of proving a limitation on his right, and to the relevant authority the burden of justifying that limitation, if it can, through a balancing test.  There is controversy about whether lax analysis at the first stage impedes or confounds a fair and reliable inquiry at the stage of justification.  In the TWU cases, the majority’s laxity is evident and consequential.

A religious conviction or practice can merit protection even if it is unorthodox, idiosyncratic, or insane.  But it must have a ‘nexus’ with religion, and it must be sincerely held. In Amselem the Court held that a judge must ‘ensure that a presently asserted religious belief is in good faith, neither fictitious nor capricious, and that it is not an artifice.’  This offers poor guidance.  The contrast-class to ‘sincere’ (i.e. ‘insincere’) is here illustrated by a hodgepodge of examples none of which are necessary and some of which are insufficient as marks of insincerity.   One can be insincere just to be polite (‘I like your tie’), or as a conventional gesture (‘Nice to see you’), or to avoid conflict (‘I suppose Trump has some merits’), or to assert something for sake of argument (‘OK, agreed that free trade is ideal, nonetheless…’), or as an understood hyperbole (‘The World’s Best Burgers!’)  Religious beliefs are frequently asserted with such inflections of insincerity.  (As are many other forms of conscientious belief.) In particular, religious affirmations often function as conventional, rote markers of identity, or as strategic moves in a conversational gambit.   As such, they do not express the speaker’s sincerely held beliefs, but neither are they capricious, fictitious, artificial, or uttered in bad faith.    My feeling is that, in TWU, the majority felt timid about inquiring into the university’s sincerity because they wrongly associated an insincere claim with a claim in bad faith, or even with some kind of lie.

A better test for sincerity in this area is that that there should be correspondence between the asserted belief and the action or policy meant to serve that belief, that there should be a willingness to act on the belief where that is feasible, and that affirmation of the belief should not be merely conventional or strategic.  TWU’s assertion fails this test.  A sincere belief about the value of a religious educational environment does not reach its claimed right to exercise total control over the sex lives of all its students.   Moreover, although all students would be compelled to agree to the Covenant, the university exhibited no plans to supervise their conduct, and it occasionally hinted that it would not do so.  Was this a compromise with students’ rights of privacy, or a sign the Covenant was merely of conventional, expressive value, a signal as to what sort of people would fit in to the proposed law school?   That would be nearer a niche marketing strategy than a sincerely held religious conviction.  The Court should have tested this.

Then there is second, logical, difficulty.   There cannot be a right to freedom of religion that guarantees an environment in which everyone’s faith meets as few challenges as possible.    Religions conflict.   What advances one sets another back.  It is easier to be an Evangelical Christian in an environment without Anglicans or Jews (and, perhaps, gay people), but it is also easier to be an orthodox Jew without the background ‘mood music’ of Christianity.  Are ghettos the ideal?  Or do religions have the right to take their preferred environments along with them when, as in most modern societies, people move and mix? And what about internal minorities within religions?   There are already (closeted) gay students and  faculty in the undergraduate programme at TWU.   Are their rights satisfied by the Community Covenant’s contract of adhesion?  Is it enough that, if they don’t love TWU Law they can leave it, even if no other law school will admit or hire them?

Owing to the protean and competing nature of religions, it is a fantasy to think that we could fix the limits of religious freedom to ensure that such conflicts never arise.   But we can moderate them, and a good place to start would be with a sharper definition of freedom of religion.   Amselem and Multani, diligently applied, set the right direction, and help us understand why TWU was so misguided.  The traditional area of religious freedom comprises the liberty of beliefs and practices considered by the believer to be obligatory, together with such immunities and resources as are necessary to live openly and honestly in light of those beliefs.  John Locke—the Evangelical!—put the case well:

[S]ince men are so solicitous about the true church, I would only ask them here, by the way, if it be not more agreeable to the Church of Christ to make the conditions of her communion consist in such things, and such things only, as the Holy Spirit has in the Holy Scriptures declared, in express words, to be necessary to salvation; I ask, I say, whether this be not more agreeable to the Church of Christ than for men to impose their own inventions and interpretations upon others as if they were of Divine authority…’

Locke is speaking only to fellow Christians and only of communion, but his idea is of universal importance. It is one matter to ask others to share the burdens of toleration with respect to things one sincerely believes ‘necessary to salvation’; it is quite another to impose on them one’s own ‘inventions and interpretations’ of preference.   This resonates with the analysis offered by Justice Rowe, who concurred with the majority outcome in the case, but disagreed that TWU’s religious freedom had been infringed.  He wrote, ‘I do not see how the majority can have it both ways. The logic of their position seems to come down to this: the claimants have a preference for a practice that is not required, but is nonetheless protected by s. 2(a); however, as the practice is not required, but only preferred, its infringement is of little consequence. In my view, this analysis reflects an overbroad delineation of the right, leading to the infringement being justified too readily.’  That is broadly correct.

Perhaps a gay-free environment would make it easier for certain Christians to lead the sort of lives they want to live, including at law school.   But remember that a Jüdenfrei environment was thought to make it easier for another kind of Christian to lead the sort of lives that they wanted to live.   I not here suggesting any moral equivalence or slippery slope.  Yet the craving for uniformity, for a community free of the Other, is a symptom of moral failure.   In a law school it is a symptom of intellectual failure.  Were it ever endorsed by a court as an aspect of freedom of religion, it would also be a jurisprudential failure.

On ‘presenting as’ a man

Les Green9 Comments

A colleague reports to me that, in one of her lectures, a young fellow began his intervention with the following preface: ‘Speaking as someone who presents as a man…’

What are we to make of this?

It is tempting to make fun of it.  In the circumstances, he could just as informatively have said, ‘Speaking as someone who presents as white…’ or ‘Speaking as someone who presents as having tattoos…’ or, for that matter, ‘Speaking as someone who presents as sitting in the third row….’

I need to point out that he was (I am told) not someone who ‘presents as a man’ in any sense in which that phrase is illocutionarily happy.   He wasn’t, for instance, a cross-dresser, or transgendered, or a male-looking intersexual.  He was a just an ordinary white man (more exactly, a teenager), with visible tattoos, sitting in the third row.

The suggestion been put to me that he may have been trying to demonstrate a special kind of woke-ness. He was showing his awareness that gender roles are partly constituted by self-presentation.  But it is a bit hard to suppose that this would have come as news to anyone in that class, or even outside it.  Can there be anyone left, even among the bad guys, who does not know that manhood is partly constituted by, and in, the presentation of self?  (‘Man up!’, ‘Be a man!’, ‘What kind of man are you?’) And since everyone knows this it seems odd to make such a grandiose gesture in support of the obvious, especially in a university.

A different suggestion is that he may have been trying to undermine, by affirming with irony,  the epistemic authority of men.   The ‘speaking as’ locution is often used in the first person to claim theoretical authority, i.e. the epistemic privilege of one’s own perspective, as in: ‘speaking as a woman…’ , ‘speaking as a Jew…’ ‘speaking as a professor…’  So the boy’s preface could have been meant as an ironic, post-modernising riff on male-authority claims. Not, ‘speaking as a man’ (=> ‘I know these things!’), but speaking as someone who so presents and, in drawing attention to that  presentation, thereby implicitly undermining patriarchal authority.  How? If all there is to a man’s perspective is what follows from man-presentation, then people will come to see that those who so present don’t have any real authority.   What sort of epistemic authority could come from presentation alone?   If I want to know how things stand in string theory, I will ask a theoretical physicist—but I’ll stay away from someone who says he ‘presents as a theoretical physicist’. I won’t even go to him if I’m wondering what life is like as a theoretical physicist.  For all I know he may mean that he just plays one on TV.  If any epistemic privilege comes with that position, is the privilege of an actor, not of a physicist.

There is a further catch. Part of what it is to be a man, in our culture, is to not affirm or imply that manhood is achieved solely by or in presentation.   To put it loosely, a boy who prefaces his interventions with, ‘speaking as someone who presents as a man’ raises the suspicion, in that very preface, that he is not really (or not yet) a man.  For it is unmanly to self-consciously present as a man.  And if one is not yet a man but hopes to become one, there is a lot more work to be done than hedging one’s remarks with reference to a man’s perspective.  That suggests the intervention under scrutiny may have rested on a false presupposition about our concept of ‘a man’, namely, that presenting makes things so.  But because that is so obviously false, no one was likely to count against the authority of men the lesser, or different, status of someone who merely ‘presents as’ a man, i.e. who is not a ‘real man’.  The other guys in the lecture, on hearing his remark, were unlikely to blossom into self-reflection, ‘OMG—that’s me too, a mere presentation, a performance!’  More likely they thought, ‘WTF—him again.’  If so, male authority probably emerged unscathed.

So maybe we should revise the account.  Perhaps the interventional preface was intended by the boy only to disown his own manhood and any claim to authority that might come with that.  His point was not so much social as personal: ‘I hereby choose not to speak as a man [which I am], but instead as one who merely so presents.’   I am not so sure, however, that one gets to speak as a man-presenter just by uttering prefaces like that.  (It would have been interesting to know what transgendered students in class thought of his intervention.  Would they have thought it enough to permit him to speak as, or with, them? I have my doubts.)

Offhand, my feeling is that even the purely personal explanation is deficient.  It is clear that although most social roles involve the presentation of self, few are wholly constituted by self-presentation. That is why a white woman cannot just ‘present herself’ into being black, and why—a fact that now causes much personal misery and  conflict—a male cannot just ‘present himself’ into being a woman.

But this point goes deeper.  By the same token, one cannot just ‘present oneself’ into actually presenting oneself.  That is to say, there are also social criteria for a particular performance to count as a presentation of self.  When the artist Greyson Perry dresses as his alter-ego Claire (below) he is not presenting as a woman, not only because he is not trying to pass, and not only because he is failing to pass, but because Claire’s outfits and speech do not even amount to self-presentations. They are performance art.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/a7/e2/04/a7e204228c611d561e33453a599fc205.jpg

So I am now thinking, with some sadness, that the boy in the lecture hall not only failed to undermine patriarchal authority, and failed to disown his own masculinity, he did not even manage to present as a (‘real’) man.  Perhaps he succeeded in presenting as the sort of white college kid with tattoos who goes around saying ‘I speak as someone who presents as a man.’  I guess that too is a kind of performance art.

I am not denying the urgent need for change in our damaging concepts of masculinity (and femininity), nor am I pessimistic about the prospects for change.  It is a question of ways and means.  We can change these concepts and, to the extent that our selves are constituted by them, we can change our selves. But we cannot simply ‘present’—let alone think—ourselves into personal, social, or conceptual change.  That is why Marx wrote, ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.   He did not write, ‘the point is to change it by doing philosophy’.  And were Marx with us today, I am sure he would say that self-conscious self-presentation is about as effective in producing real social change as what he, somewhat unfairly, dismissed as ‘philosophy’.

How to improve Oxford’s interviews

Les GreenLeave a comment

In my last post, I suggested that we can’t understand the persistence of the Oxford admissions interview without understanding its ceremonial function. It is an initiatory rite that expresses and secures the power of  tutors who get to select which undergraduates they would like to teach.

This conjecture has not met universal favour among my colleagues, or at least not among those who are interviewing this week.  They say, rightly, that I exaggerate the lack of uniformity among subjects when I describe our system as ‘chaos’.  Isn’t our Common Framework for admissions a steadying force? Others mention that this is ‘not a good time’ to cast doubt on the fairness or effectiveness of Oxford admissions.   And several tell me they are adequately warned against unconscious bias and that they are not, in fact, conscious of any unconscious bias in their own interviewing.

There is no doubt that admissions interviews could be, and historically have been, much worse (including when I used to do them).   Still, I think we should abandon them, for the reasons I gave.

Oxford knows how to admit talented students without the ritual. That is how we already admit people to our elite, tutorial-taught, postgraduate degrees, including the B.Phil. and B.C.L.: centrally, on the ‘paper file’, and without interviews.  Many of them come to Oxford without ever having had a tutorial or anything like one, yet they learn how to learn in our system.   Indeed, many of their tutors gave their first Oxford tutorials without ever having had one; they too learned. Yet we persist in the fiction that only by seeing the cut of their jib can we be sure that applicants can work the magic of an Oxford tutorial.

In any case, if interviews are to persist, there is one way we can improve them: No one should interview those they will have the blessing (or burden) of teaching: nemo iudex in causa sua. If an applicant really is incapable of learning in our system, let that determination be made by someone other than the tutor who will be charged with trying to help them.   This argues for more centralized, faculty- or department-led, ‘blind’ interviewing.    Perhaps it even argues for the inclusion of non-specialists (academics in other subjects, or alumni, or even students!) on our admissions panels.

I do not pretend that eliminating or improving interviews will make Oxford more representative of the communities we serve. For that, more drastic measures are needed.   I shall sketch the case for one of them in the New Year.

In the meantime, all good wishes for the holidays, and my sympathies to those of you who are interviewing, or being interviewed. Best of luck!

Why Oxford’s admission interviews persist

Les Green1 Comment

A week from now, one of Oxford’s annual rituals begins.   Clueless teenagers arrive in force to be interviewed for an undergraduate place.

I call it a ‘ritual’ because admissions interviews are not really functional; they are ceremonial.  They take place in buildings that, unless you live in Downtown Abbey, seem utterly alien.  Directions are given in code (‘call at the Porter’s Lodge’, ‘meals will be taken in Hall,’ ‘await instruction by the Old Smoking Room’…). The interview is a minuet in which smiling tutors and grimacing candidates dip and swing around questions that are supposed to distinguish minds that are truly graceful from those that are merely trained.  None of it makes our admissions process more accurate, reliable, or fair.

Oxford has many rituals that are harmless, even valuable: gowns, punting, Evensong. The interview is not among these.  It adds expense, work, and stress for no benefit. But compelling empirical evidence of unconscious bias, negative and positive, in face-to-face interviews has no impact on the high priests of the process, the admissions tutors. Some of the most inquiring and skeptical minds on the planet display a touching faith in their own ability to spot a diamond in the rough while never being dazzled by the flash of fool’s gold.  The ritual is hated by applicants, hated by the press, and increasingly hated also by the government.

So why does it go on? Few are actually proud of the fact that, year after year, we admit a vast disproportion of applicants from private (i.e. fee-charging) schools. Only 6.5% of the cohort are educated in such schools, but last year they made up 41% of Oxford’s intake. (The average for all UK universities was only 10%.)   And few of my colleagues are unaware that their counterparts around the world do not have the burden of interviews.

In part the explanation is stasis: ‘”How many Oxford dons does it take to change a light bulb?” “–What do you mean, ‘change’?”’

In part it is chaos: Oxford is a federation of 38 universities, its colleges, without a coherent overall admissions policy.

But I’m afraid that another important part of the explanation is power. Admissions tutors do not want to yield the power to choose the students they would like to teach over the next three or four years of their careers. The interview is a ritual that expresses, secures, and celebrates their power.

It is not generally understood that, at Oxford, those doing the interviewing are those doing the teaching.  Nor is it understood that those at the top of the hierarchy, the Professors, normally have no obligation to teach or admit undergraduates.   It is the Tutorial Fellow, overworked and often underpaid, that does the heavy-lifting. (Oxford, unlike many leading universities in the US or Canada, has not yet shunted undergraduate teaching onto graduate students.) That is why they are so keen to keep control over those they admit, and why a dysfunctional and damaging ritual continues.

But the secret is starting to leak out. British author Alex Preston, writing in what is, I think, intended to be a defence of the interview system, openly acknowledges that he was crammed for it: ‘I was prepared for my interview by the genial headmaster of the Sussex state secondary I attended. We met most mornings in the weeks leading up to that fateful October day and he’d fire questions at me about Eliot, Pound, Woolf and Joyce…’

Preston is touchingly unaware how few applicants have a ‘genial headmaster’ able to coach applicants for ‘most mornings’ over a period of weeks.   But Preston does have enough self-awareness to figure out what the Oxford interview is really for:

‘the interview was about my potential tutors deciding whether I was a pupil who would manage to stick out the three years of essays and exams, whether I’d bore them in tutorials, or infuriate them…’

An ineffective ritual that leaks bias into  admissions is sustained by the tutors’ desire not to admit students who might ‘bore’ or ‘infuriate’ them (or, I suppose, who might threaten or offend them).  Even our students have started to figure it out.

What is to be done?   We are unlikely to abolish interviews (see above, under ‘change’ and ‘chaos’); but there are  ways to limit their damage. I shall explain two in the next post.

How Spain violates the rule of law

Les Green2 Comments

The least important fact about the prospect of Catalonia declaring independence from Spain is that such a declaration would be void under the Spanish constitution.   The most important  is that Rajoy’s government seems willing to hold Catalonia against its will, and even by force.

It unthinkable that Canada would attempt to hold Quebec captive should it vote to leave the federation. It is unthinkable that the United Kingdom would send in  troops to keep control of Scotland or Northern Ireland.  Yet neither state has any constitutional provision for regional or national independence.   The Canadian federal government, though formally limited in its jurisdiction, has vast powers to invade provincial domains. The Westminster Parliament is  unconstrained, and could abolish the Scottish Parliament entirely. It is not any legal difference that explains why neither Canada nor the United Kingdom would behave in such ways. It is a matter of political culture and public morality.

It is true that Canada and the United Kingdom have a deeper and longer loyalty to democracy than does Spain—but that is not the whole story. The larger difference is over another ideal, that of popular sovereignty. It is ultimately for peoples to decide by whom they shall be governed.  Popular sovereignty includes the right to make that decision wrongly, and in some cases even to make it in a way that impedes democracy. If Syrians were to freely vote for a theocracy, no other nation should intervene to prevent them.

Some people admit only  a thin version of this ideal. They say only colonized or oppressed peoples are entitled to self-determination; everyone else must accept their lot and work within existing law, no matter what.  Canadians and the British reject that view. They do not think Quebec or Scotland have the right to decide their futures because they are oppressed by their central governments.   On the contrary, they would fiercely deny that proposition and yet  still respect the will of the minority nations within their borders.

But what about the rule of law? Must the illegality of any unilateral declaration of independence violate this ideal?  The question is more complex than some suppose.

First, if there is any conflict between popular sovereignty and the rule of law we still need decide which should prevail. The idea that existing law should always rule, and  be obeyed, no matter what is a repugnant principle. It is one that kept Spain under a dictatorship for years.

Second, and more important, it is not obvious that an unconstitutional declaration of independence on the part of Catalonia would violate the rule of law. To see why, think again about Canada and the United Kingdom. Each not only tolerates but makes possible a lawful route to independence for  minority nations.

In Canada, a route to the independence of Quebec is secured by the authority of the 1998 Supreme Court decision in the Reference re Secession of Quebec. The decision did not amend or reinterpret the Canadian constitution.  It directed how Canada’s government should respond to any declaration of independence: by good faith negotiation. In the United Kingdom, a lawful route to independence is secured by Parliament’s demonstrated willingness, in Northern Ireland and in Scotland, not only to respect the result of a border poll or an independence referendum, but to provide for, regularize, and recognize such votes. Canada and the UK make possible, and lawful, what Spain leaves to pressure and violence.  Spain’s fundamental law renders independence unlawful.  It  takes a difficult political eventuality for which many countries must somehow provide and puts it beyond the realm of legality.

So is Madrid, not Barcelona, that violates the the rule of law.  In denying any lawful route to independence, in disrupting polls, in assaulting voters, and in threatening to remove the regional government of Catalonia, Spain also shows contempt for one of the central ideals of the European Union.   And, in refusing to condemn this, the European Union  collaborates in an attack on popular sovereignty, and on the rule of law itself.

 

 

 

Why it is hard to be a campus conservative

Les Green11 Comments

When the right claims that US universities have been taken over by ‘liberals’, and that faculty and students of ‘conservative’ opinions are afraid to speak up, they do not mean that its campuses are now swamped by people who think we should restrict liberty only to prevent harm to others, or who demand that social inequalities benefit the worst-off. They mean American universities are full of people who believe things like this:

  • Species arose through natural selection.
  • No author of any gospel ever met Jesus.
  • Homosexuality is a normal variant in human behaviour.
  • The United States lost a war against Vietnam.
  • Human activity is a significant cause of climate change.
  • The United States has worse public health than do countries with nationalized health care.

Even more threatening to conservatives, however, is not these individual claims which are endorsed by all but a minority in serious universities. It the dominance of  habits of thought, modes of inquiry, and sensibilities of outlook that lead people to these conclusions. But none of this is because US universities are bastions of liberalism. It is because they are universities.

Of course, as Mill explained, every society should tolerate some truth-deniers. (He went further. He said that if a society lacks truth-deniers it might invent them, to keep us all on our toes.) But Mill never said their place is in universities, or that it falls to universities to provide ‘safe spaces’ for those whose political identity is bound up with  ignorance and superstition.  A university must tolerate, and even welcome, those who follow evidence and argument to conclusions that are false or unpalatable; but it may reject those who seek a platform for hatred or deception.  That is why it counts counts against Middlebury College when it shouts down Charles Murray but it counts in favour of Berkeley when it excludes Milos Yannopoulos.

That means universities can never be comfortable for a certain kind of conservative.  Those who need the lecture hall to flatter their personal convictions are bound to feel lonely and misunderstood.  Those who think views in the college should mirror votes in the electoral college are bound to feel cheated.  Maybe they can take comfort in the welcoming company they can find in America’s churches, legislatures, and even its courts.  But they should expect only argument from its universities—not speaking with a single voice, but speaking in that irritating way that universities do: insisting on belief that is proportionate to evidence, and on standards of reasoning that are neither liberal nor conservative, but merely human.

On Judicial Plagiarism

Les Green14 Comments

It is an open secret that judges sometimes plagiarize from submissions by the lawyers before them, and even from articles and books by academics.   With respect to the latter, they are often aided and abetted by their clerks—law students working with them as research assistants.

Unlike scholarly or literary cheaters, the worry about judicial plagiarists is not that they undermine the research process, violate authors’ ‘moral rights’, or steal someone’s intellectual property. Judicial plagiarism is worse than any of these. It undermines the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary. A judge who knowingly or recklessly reproduces words or arguments of others as if they were his own may not be making his own decisions. If discovered, this undermines public confidence that the judiciary can be relied on to think for itself.

Still, we know judicial plagiarism occurs. We also know why. Courts are underfunded and under-staffed; there is far too much work; many judges struggle with an impossible docket.   So the temptations to silently lift others’ work can be powerful.   Some lifting will be obvious.   A claimant will not fail to notice if a judge copies out page after page of the respondent’s pleadings, interspersing phrases like, ‘as we can clearly see’, or ‘ surely the better view is….’ But unacknowledged material that a clerk, or judge, copies without attribution from sources on Westlaw or Google is harder to spot, and can silently infiltrate judicial decisions.

This is why we should be concerned by reports of plagiarism on the part of Trump’s nominee to the US Supreme Court.  Judge Neil Gorsuch’s 2006 book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia , has been shown to contain passages and descriptions offered, without citation or acknowledgement, as if they were his own, but which were taken from other authors. That book was in turn based on Gorsuch’s 2004 thesis, submitted for a degree at the law school where I teach. It can only be a matter of time before someone downloads the thesis from the Oxford University Research Archive, to see whether it also contained the passages impugned in the press reports on his book.

If it did, and if Gorsuch were still an Oxford law student, he would be subject to the jurisdiction of University, which unambiguously prohibits plagiarism.  It does not matter whether silently copying others’ work is intentional or not; it does not matter whether it is done with the tolerance of those copied; it does not matter whether the passages copied are central to an argument or peripheral.  At Oxford, as at most other universities, the wrong is in the misrepresentation. It is an offence of academic dishonesty.

There is, of course, an important question of degree to attend to.  There is much worse plagiarism around, even in our universities.  And plagiarism in Gorsuch’s book has only been alleged in a few passages, though one of them is fairly extensive. But why is there any at all?  These passages seem to have survived an awful lot of scrutiny. In writing a thesis, submitting it for examination, revising it for publication, responding to editorial comments, and correcting texts and proofs there are many opportunities to spot, and correct, honest mistakes or omissions.  Indeed, it is not too late to do so even now.  So why the silence from Gorsuch and all the loud denials from his apologists?

Here at Oxford, our chief disciplinary officers, the Proctors, do not merely have a reactive role. They have broad powers they must use, not only to enforce our regulations, but to prevent future breaches of them. Why is this important? Gorsuch is no longer a member of Oxford University, so the Proctors have no enforcement jurisdiction over him. But they can and must act to prevent misconduct on the part of current students or faculty.

They should be concerned, then, that Gorsuch’s former Oxford supervisor has provided a statement to the ‘Gorsuch team’ denying any plagiarism in the book:

Having reviewed the examples provided by BuzzFeed News to the Gorsuch team, the professor who supervised Gorsuch dissertation, Emeritus Professor John Finnis of Oxford University, provided a statement to the Gorsuch team, concluding, “[I]n my opinion, none of the allegations has any substance or justification. In all the instances mentioned, Neil Gorsuch’s writing and citing was easily and well within the proper and accepted standards of scholarly research and writing in the field of study in which he and I work.”

This opinion has been widely republished and read, not only by the politicians for whom it was written, but by law students around the world.  And this opinion, coming from such an influential scholar, sends the wrong message to young lawyers and scholars.

If by ‘the field of study in which [Gorsuch] and I work,’ Professor Finnis means university research in law or legal philosophy, then his claim is unfounded. Oxford University’s regulations and guidance to students, and years of interpretation of  them by the Proctors and others, put this beyond doubt.   But perhaps Finnis means that lower standards of integrity apply to law books than to law theses? I do not think that is true either; but it is in any case it is the standards of our University that our students need to comply with, now and in the future.

For my own part, if ever I encountered plagiarism in work by one of my own students I would insist they revise their thesis to include full acknowledgement and citation, using it as a ‘teaching moment’ to explain why it is critical to get this right, especially for lawyers. Legal citation is, as they say, not exactly rocket science: misattributions or non-attributions, if not accidental, suggest a cheater seeking to gain advantage from the work of others, or someone who has contempt for academic culture.

Good judges are sensitive to the further issues at stake. In a British Columbia appeal against a trial judge’s decision that lifted wholesale from one the parties’ submissions, Mr Justice Smith wrote,

Trial judges are busy, and there can be cases… where a party’s submissions so accurately reflect the trial judge’s reasoning that nothing would be gained by postponing other pressing work in order to rewrite the reasoning and conclusions in the judge’s own words. However, judges who are tempted to prepare reasons for judgment in this way should be acutely aware they may create a perception that they did not reach their decisions independently. Such a perception would tend to undermine public confidence in the impartiality and independence of the judiciary generally and would bring the administration of justice into disrepute:

Of course, an academic book or article is not a party’s submission, but for a judge to rely on it without citation would raise similar worries.   Indeed, that case would be worse for, as I mentioned above, judicial plagiarism of that sort will be a lot harder for the parties and others to detect. Given that it can always be avoided by a mere footnote–by a moment’s attention–failure to provide one is wrong.   That is why we demand it of our students, our judges, and ourselves.

When writing as an academic, Neil Gorsuch did not have a trial judge’s excuse of the extraordinary pressures of work. He was not copying from submissions others had read, but from authors most readers would not even know. With the leisure of the ivory tower, and with no one but scholars depending on his writing, Gorsuch failed an easy, elementary test we demand of every student: acknowledge all your sources–every single one–truthfully and fully. How should we expect him to behave when the stakes, and temptations, are higher?

Should Parliamentary Sovereignty Trump Popular Sovereignty?

Les Green27 Comments

On June 23rd the UK referendum on membership in the European Union delivered a clear, if narrow, result: the country should leave. Much still remains open, but as far as that issue is concerned, the matter is decided. I’m sure that British voters had no view about which mechanism would transfer their decision into law; but they understood that something would. No one supposed that a clear result might be treated as a helpful hint to politicians, or as a preliminary comment in a national seminar on the constitution.

Today’s judgment in the High Court repudiates that understanding. (R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union). Lord Thomas of Cymgiedd CJ, Sir Terence Etherton MR, and Lord Sales decided that the UK executive lacks any power to transmit the will of the people into law by triggering the notification procedure for exit that is outlined in the EU Treaty. The court holds that the absolute sovereignty of Parliament must be respected, and that such prerogative power as the executive has to act in international affairs, including  treaties, can never repeal rights in domestic law. So Parliament must still decide whether to leave the EU. The matter remains open.

The breadth of the doctrine is breathtaking. The court does not merely say that Parliament is not, in this case, strictly bound by the referendum result; it declares that any popular vote is of zero legal relevance until Parliament expressly chooses otherwise. It is not even legally persuasive: ‘a referendum on any topic can only be advisory for the lawmakers in Parliament unless very clear language to the contrary is used in the referendum legislation in question.’ [emphasis added]

If the Supreme Court confirms this decision, the entire national debate on the EU can begin over: in the House of Commons, in the (unelected) House of Lords, then possibly back again to the courts, or maybe even the electorate. And that is what the claimants want: delay and time for second thoughts and further lobbying–not on the ground that the referendum result was unclear or the procedure unfair, but on the ground that the question was wrongly decided.

I agree that the question was wrongly decided. I also think that referendums are a very poor instrument of ordinary governance. But when what is at stake is the boundary of a constitutional people, we have no better procedure than a referendum, and courts should use their powers to uphold, rather than undermine, the result. Those who regret the result (as I do) should spend less time trying to overturn or forestall it, and more time trying to rally opinion around one of the better options that it has left open. Lawyers shouldn’t feel sidelined: whatever happens there will be work for them.

Democracy is government by the people. But the definition of ‘the people’ is not a matter solely for Parliament. It is matter prior to parliamentary democracy, and the legitimacy of Parliament depends on settling it correctly. The people have a right to decide for themselves the most basic terms of their constitution, including the people who will empowered by that constitution. That is why it is for Scots to decide whether to remain in the UK—and not for the UK as a whole; and why it is for the British to decide whether to remain in the EU—and not for the other member states.

What we might call English Constitutional Theory has long distrusted popular sovereignty.  An influential line of thought running from Hobbes, through Blackstone and Bentham, to Dicey and Jennings, equates popular sovereignty with Parliamentary sovereignty. Even today, the High Court repeats with approval Dicey’s words : ‘The judges know nothing about any will of the people except in so far as that will is expressed by an Act of Parliament’. Of course, it is plausible to think that the ‘will of the people’ needs practical expression. But when we have—as Dicey did not—lawfully organized and fair referendum procedures, it is implausible that only an Act of Parliament can ever speak for the people.

The UK has a fluid, informal constitution, and when disputes about its basic ground rules reach our courts, they generally lie in a penumbral zone where, whatever judges pretend, their decisions not only have political consequences but are made, and can only be properly made, on grounds of political morality. There are no ‘purely legal’ decisions at this level.

Today’s decision sidelines an important principle of political morality. It is not inexorably driven to do so by law or by logic. The judgment depends on two propositions that remain as debatable after the decision as they were before: (1) that the UK’s notification to withdraw from the EU cannot be made conditional on anything, and (2) that the European Communities Act 1972 not only gives EU law direct effect in UK courts, but also makes it part of UK law. Since the parties all accepted (1), the court did not test it. On (2), the court rejected the government’s argument that rights of British citizens under EU law result from an interaction of domestic and European law, and do not rest in domestic law alone.  Legal philosophers have struggled with the general issue at stake in (2).  Compare:  if conflict-of-laws rules sometimes require English courts to give effect to French law, does that make French law part of domestic English law?  It is a delicate question.  The Court makes short shrift of it.  Oddly, given its enthusiasm for Dicey’s doctrine that Parliament is omnicompetent, and its insistence that it only addresses ‘purely legal’ questions, the court  declares  (2) wrong because it is unrealistic: ‘In a highly formalistic sense this may be accurate. But in our view it is a submission which is divorced from reality.’

I wish the court’s desire to shape the law with an eye to reality had gripped it in some more helpful way. Since the UK is a union of peoples, not just one people, the declaration that any referendum, on any matter at all, can only ever be advisory will not go down well in Scotland, or in Northern Ireland. Nor will the conclusion, which follows inexorably, that Westminster can by explicit legislation repeal the Scotland Act 2016, notwithstanding what ‘a decision of the people of Scotland voting in a referendum’ (s 63 A) might have to say about the matter.  Does the Act itself give such a referendum legal force?  If so, it only takes a simple majority, which might consist only of English MPs, to amend or repeal it.

Contrast the more sensitive, and sensible, approach of the Supreme Court of Canada when addressing the constitutional significance of a possible referendum result in favour of Québec independence:

‘The continued existence and operation of the Canadian constitutional order cannot remain indifferent to the clear expression of a clear majority of Quebecers that they no longer wish to remain in Canada.  This would amount to the assertion that other constitutionally recognized principles necessarily trump the clearly expressed democratic will of the people of Quebec.’ (Reference re Secession of Quebec, [1998] 2 S.C.R. 217)

The formulation is inexact, but the idea is sound. The idea that ‘other constitutionally recognized principles’ necessarily trump any clear expression of popular sovereignty is a danger to the continued existence and operation of any constitutional order. The Canadian Court knew that to endorse that idea could risk national calamity. By their judgment they changed, if only marginally, the basic ground rules of the Canadian legal system. It was a wise move.  Perhaps our Supreme Court will follow it?

Popular sovereignty is a moral ideal. Parliamentary sovereignty is an institutional device, helpful where it secures important values, but a hindrance when it does not.

 

The UK government’s policies, in style and substance

Les GreenLeave a comment

We have been absolutely clear: it is right that we ring fence national security and investigatory powers, even if many oppose us on an industrial scale, depriving as they do hard-working families of choice in striving for British values in a high wage, low-welfare economy, where never again need anything but English votes stand in the way of a truly seven-day NHS, an end to failing schools, and a reformed Europe. Also, we love Scotland.