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Abolish It! (Joe)

The short version is, the bar exam is a stupid, pointless, useless, meaningless barrier to entry.  Way back in the archives of 2005, Dan Solove made this argument in much more detail than I am willing to — suffice it to say, I agree.

"Legalize pot."  "Abolish the bar exam."  "Stop incarcerating the black ghetto on a population-wide scale."1  "Stop killing people in the Muslim-populated countries of the Middle East."  Regular readers are probably thinking, Why is Joe always rabble-rousing?  Why all the agitation for significant social change?  To which I respond, Because I can, people.  That's what bloggers do.

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1 – Speaking of which — by which I mean, speaking of something else entirely, the connection being race and criminal justice — I'm surprised no one on this blog has commented on the Skip Gates arrest.

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10 responses to “Abolish It! (Joe)”

  1. Dean C. Rowan

    Funny, I was just thinking about (but not actually preparing) a post responding to today’s NYT story about Gates and Obama.
    The bar exam was a piece of cake–maybe a slightly stale, crumbly cake–compared to law school in my experience. The bar prep folks gave good advice for my money (and it was my money, since I didn’t have a firm to absorb the fees as overhead). For instance, they advised, “If you don’t know the law regarding a particular question, just make it up.” Along comes a First Amendment essay question. I was at best only so-so familiar with the “standards” in that arena, so I made them up, fleshed out the analysis, and survived. Of course, you could argue that this very skill–technically, bullshitting–is important to successful lawyering, and therefore the bar is useful and does have a point. But I won’t.

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  2. narayan

    I too am amazed at how long it has taken the blog world to explode with the Gates story. I imagine that respondents who have written on the law & order side of the issue on other blogs don’t know of any blacks other than MLK & Obama. Even on TV the story did not receive adequate coverage the day after it happened. It’s shameful. My experiences with Boston, Brookline and Cambridge police in the 80s have all been demeaning. I would’t trust the Massachusetts judiciary either in case Gates pursue a civil suit. Despite the protests of Crowley and the Cambridge PD, racism still pervades the region. Cops are too thin skinned when relating with non-white people. The overt racism of the bad old days has given way to subtle defensible forms.

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  3. D

    Riffing on Narayan’s post, the incident also exposes the limitations of blog-reporting. So far, the world has been presented with two accounts – Gates’s and official police version. Predictably, they differ. And yet everyone seems to agree there was a neighbour somewhere who called the police, other city cops with the one who did the arresting, university police, people passing by, lingerers, all at the scene, watching and (presumably) enjoying themselves. It’s just apparently one has bothered to go talk to these people. A professional cadre of reporters, when it’s interested in a story, at least does this sort of straightforward leg-work. You can trust the blogosphere to take Umbrage and offer sage opinion, but apparently not to do actual reporting. Now if someone could just convince the pros to get on this story and do some work…surely they’ve tired of Michael Jackson by now.

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  4. Ruchira

    Rouse the rabble, Joe! That’s why you are here.
    I have been following the Gates story keenly. My son currently lives in Cambridge, MA. We spoke this morning. I asked him about the Gates incident and what the buzz was in the neighborhood. Astoundingly, he said that he has not heard a word and learnt all he knows from the media!
    From what I have gathered so far, President Obama’s characterization of the police reaction was on the money. “Stupid,” he called it without mincing words. And we know that Obama rarely speaks off the cuff.
    I have heard some in the media and on the blogs say that Professor Gates shouldn’t have lost his cool and he may have overreacted (as in, he had it coming). And that we should be glad that the matter was cleared up without further ado. To that, I quote a commenter on another blog:

    Power. Prejudice. Persecution.
    Some persons identified as part of some categories of persons doing nothing illegal nor unsocial will be perceived as guilty of provoking a reaction possibly violent with an excuse being they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, as if it were an accident that a reasonable person (‘a reasonable person’ who of course is not associated with some categories of these minorities of persons) might have predicted just might happen.
    thus these minority categories may be said to be responsible for their own fates and even were ‘asking for it’.
    That’s prejudice, which involves prejudging.
    Where do power and persecution factor into this sort of situation?
    In the kind of response that says “someone should have known they were a powder keg” or should have “seen it coming” or that it was understandable given the ‘situation’.
    Visual identification/confirmation
    as gay or black or chicano or some other minority–possibly mideastern–justifies in many minds prejudgement and persecution.
    Objecting to this is usually considered as overreaction.

    And Joe, best of luck for the bar :-)

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  5. Joe

    D, I agree that that is an important limitation of blogging: there are no blog-reporters. We don’t gather news; we comment on it. There might be some exceptions, e.g., Ezra Klein might have insider sources for certain information on Beltway politics, but bloggers don’t news-gather generally. That said, I actually think not being interested in the outside-witness perspective on this issue is somewhat justifiable. The basic facts are pretty clear; what we want to know is the internal motivations of the cop and the professor during this incident.
    On Narayan’s point, my understanding is that Boston has generally gotten better (if still not where we’d like it to be) on race issues over the past few decades. But what I actually wanted to say is that I would trust the Massachusetts judiciary to do its job appropriately in the event that Gates files a civil suit. The problem is that I don’t think he has a strong claim — has anyone heard a theory on what his cause of action would be? “That cop was a dick” isn’t enough.

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  6. D

    “The basic facts are pretty clear; what we want to know is the internal motivations of the cop and the professor during this incident.”
    I’m baffled by this statement. I don’t know how you disentangle the two. Certainly some matters of a purely technical nature are pretty clear: what was Gates charged with? Did the cop have a good reason to be questioning him? Is the charge one that could have been made to stick? [Disorderly conduct. Clearly yes. Obviously no.]
    These are questions that are useful to know answers to if you’re lawyer to Gates or the arresting cop, but don’t shed much light on race relations and police, which is what the case is interesting for. In that regard, here’s some fifty things off the top of my head I’d like more facts on:
    – This neighbor: why did he think Gates was being suspicious jimmying his own lock in the middle of the day? Did he know/recognize Gates or was he new to the area? A bit crudely, what are his politics? Did he see Gates at all? Maybe he saw only the driver. Might he even have quarreled with Gates and thought it amusing to send cops off harassing the man? (Ok, that last is a bit fanciful.) How on earth are we to settle whether the cops should have been involved at all – and whether a white Gates might have had these policemen on his back as well – if we know absolutely nothing about the person who called them?
    – Gates himself: he clearly pissed the cops off, who wrongly arrested him. What did he do and say to piss them off? Yes, yes, yes that doesn’t matter if you’re interested in wrongful arrest, but we’re not interested here in whether cops are, as a breed, drunk on the little power they hold, and how they expect servility. They frequently are, and everyone who’s had any run-ins with them catches himself being obsequious, assuming he doesn’t make that a matter of conscious policy. That’s regrettable and all, but it’s also a pretty broad phenomenon, so if I’m to get something out of this ruckus about being in the path of cops while black, I need to know more about what the parties said and did, and how loudly. Let’s remember after all, the interesting question isn’t whether a pissed off cop abused his powers. It’s whether he might have done the same thing if Alan Dershowitz, say, had been involved instead. So yeah, was Gates yelling and shouting? Who started it? Was there shouting at all?
    – The class aspect: Gates is far from being a slumdog. He’s a University Professor at Harvard. He knows the frickin president for heaven’s sake (he also knows the city and state politicians, all the newspaper editors, the biggest of the bigwigs at Harvard etc.) The cop knows too at the outset that he’s in a posh locality, in Harvard owned housing, before he ever asks anyone for ID. Was Gates offended that a mere working class stiff was presuming to exert power over him? Obviously that’s a delicate judgment even given to someone with a ringside view – how shall we separate arrogant toff from ‘uppity’ black guy? – but I’d like to at least see an effort to disentangle these issues.
    – The photograph: the one which shows Gates being handcuffed. Looks like a cellphone image. Who took it? Why was he there? Had he been drawn there by the cop cars or by loud argument, or was he just passing by? What did he make of the arrest? Those cops in the photo: in some circles the important fact here is that in addition to the arresting fellow, there’s two more cops, one black, other latino. Are they subordinates or equals? Why did they let this arrest take place? Were they there the whole time? Did the white guy make the cop because he was first on scene, because he was the one Gates fought with, because he’s in charge, etc? What do they make of this incident?
    I grant that just interviewing everyone on the scene isn’t going to resolve any of these questions, but surely it helps to have the views of everyone present.

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  7. narayan

    Joe : I thought I had chosen my words carefully. I (me, myself) don’t trust the MA judiciary. This is based on painful Kafkaesque experiences and great financial loss through malfeasance at three levels of the judicial system in an open and shut discrimination suit. At the same time, in similar but far less egregious circumstances, three white colleagues made out like bandits. I hope your trust in the system is also based on personal experience. Seen through white eyes, Boston may well be an enlightened liberal city. It remains in my memory the best place I’ve lived in, culturally and socially, but equally, the covert racism of the place sticks in my craw.

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  8. Joe

    Narayan, I misunderstood your comment, actually — I thought you were saying that you had had bad experiences with the police end of the justice system there. I was suggesting that there’s probably less reason for cause for concern with the courts, but I didn’t mean to downplay the significance of your own experiences.

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  9. Steven Augustine

    “The problem is that I don’t think he has a strong claim…”
    This article at Slate, and the first comment as a response, are interesting:
    Gates Affair Legal Aspects

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  10. Joe

    I like D’s comment. It’s always nice to have a reminder that the legal view of events is pretty severely limited!

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