I think the lawyers are conspicuously absent from your call outs here, Tim, and I wonder why that should be. Shakespeare already knew that the law was going to be a stumbling block if not an outright iron wall. And we’ve surely been seeing the outcome of 1980s legal “outreach” to the Right in what’s been going on in the 2020s. When Amiri Baraka planned who was going up again that wall, I imagine that he agreed with Shakespeare—which might have surprised them both.
This is a great point. It goes along with the regulatory state, I think--I'll work that into the next part, because I think law, regulation and risk management have been one of the major unforced errors in this story.
Definitely needs to be nailed to the regulatory state. You need a LOT of lawyers to build that sort of regulatory apparatus, and you need a LOT of lawyers to fight it (while still maintaining it). And now we’re seeing that you only need a few lawyers, well placed, to bring the whole edifice tumbling down.
Yes. Also that the lawyers (mostly) didn't need the liberal-progressive mindset and its accompanying infrastructure of virtue and value to tend to regulations that were originally adopted with that mindset as justification--and that as lawyers lost touch with the mindset, they became profoundly blind to the rise of Federalist Society judges and lawyers who absolutely, absolutely have a very different mindset and value proposition in mind. The lawyers are a huge part of how liberals AND progressives became almost stupidly proceduralist and why they were so blindsided by Trump as a result.
Yes, I was groping towards that, in my little intervention. First, convince the lawyers that all that matters is the law and that, somehow, the law transcends human frailty. Then convince everyone else that the law does that, too. One day I will tell you about John’s experiences editing “The Journal of Law and Economics” back when Scalia was just another law prof at the U of C and when Posner ruled the roost—all paid for by the Scaife Foundation.
I think the lawyers are conspicuously absent from your call outs here, Tim, and I wonder why that should be. Shakespeare already knew that the law was going to be a stumbling block if not an outright iron wall. And we’ve surely been seeing the outcome of 1980s legal “outreach” to the Right in what’s been going on in the 2020s. When Amiri Baraka planned who was going up again that wall, I imagine that he agreed with Shakespeare—which might have surprised them both.
This is a great point. It goes along with the regulatory state, I think--I'll work that into the next part, because I think law, regulation and risk management have been one of the major unforced errors in this story.
Definitely needs to be nailed to the regulatory state. You need a LOT of lawyers to build that sort of regulatory apparatus, and you need a LOT of lawyers to fight it (while still maintaining it). And now we’re seeing that you only need a few lawyers, well placed, to bring the whole edifice tumbling down.
Yes. Also that the lawyers (mostly) didn't need the liberal-progressive mindset and its accompanying infrastructure of virtue and value to tend to regulations that were originally adopted with that mindset as justification--and that as lawyers lost touch with the mindset, they became profoundly blind to the rise of Federalist Society judges and lawyers who absolutely, absolutely have a very different mindset and value proposition in mind. The lawyers are a huge part of how liberals AND progressives became almost stupidly proceduralist and why they were so blindsided by Trump as a result.
Yes, I was groping towards that, in my little intervention. First, convince the lawyers that all that matters is the law and that, somehow, the law transcends human frailty. Then convince everyone else that the law does that, too. One day I will tell you about John’s experiences editing “The Journal of Law and Economics” back when Scalia was just another law prof at the U of C and when Posner ruled the roost—all paid for by the Scaife Foundation.