Anybody can make a trivial mistake. It takes a real fool to defend one until it starts to look important. Until today I would never have called Laurence Tribe, eminent Harvard professor and constitutional scholar a “fool”. Nor, I’m sure, is he foolish in most things. But Ramesh Ponnuru’s “How To Be a Hero of Liberty” has stung him into folly. As I have noted before, Ramesh discovered distortions in a memoir Professor Tribe penned about the experience of arguing his first Supreme Court case shortly after his father’s death. What he uncovered was not much of a scandal; the errors were of the kind to be expected when a man recalls in an informal venue events that occurred more than 20 years in the past. The “exposé” created no buzz; those few right-of-center bloggers who noticed it at all pooh-poohed the significance of Professor Tribe’s mild exaggerations.
The professor did find one intemperate defender, whose contribution to reasoned discourse was to engage in google bombing and the purchase of half a dozen variants on the domain name “rameshponnuru.com”. He suffered retaliation in the form of a mock site called Rock-Dumb.
At this juncture, a wise, or ordinarily prudent, man would have let the non-controversy sink into Lethe. Eminent scholars, alas, can be strangers to ordinary prudence. Professor Tribe has now sent NR a letter to the editor denying that he made any mistake at all. There are a couple of flaws in his defense.
First, he ignores the actual charge against him. In his memoir he claimed that, as he prepared his reply brief and oral argument in the 1980 Richmond Newspapers case, he was under tremendous pressure to deemphasize the Ninth Amendment argument that he had advanced in his initial brief. By his account it was the memory of his father that steeled him to resist “the Pooh-Bahs of the establishment”.
That’s who I was. And am. So the Ninth Amendment argument stayed in. And, I’m happy to report, in the end it hit its target.
Ramesh showed that a few facts had been omitted: Other advocates on the same side of the case had made similar Ninth Amendment arguments. Professor Tribe barely mentioned the Amendment after making his purported resolution that it was going to “stay in”. And there’s no sign in the Court’s opinion that “it hit its target” in any meaningful sense.
Professor Tribe’s letter doesn’t defend, or even reiterate, his previous narrative. Indeed, the Ninth Amendment is now merely “among the reminders” that the right of the public to attend trials is one of the “tacit postulates” of our judicial system. He contradicts Ramesh only on a subsidiary issue, contending that his critic understated the extent to which the Ninth Amendment was discussed in the initial brief. He is right in a narrow sense: Contrary to Ramesh, the Amendment was not just a “rhetorical flourish”. Yet he is also slippery. “In fact, it occupied fully seven pages,” he avers, failing to add that the brief was 72 pages long and that those seven pages start at page 52.
Then comes a paragraph for which both “misrepresentation” and “folly” are apt characterizations:
Responding tit-for-tat to each of Ponnuru's distortions is rendered unnecessary by http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/Ponnuru.pdf [by the intemperate defender whom I mentioned], a devastating, line-by-line demonstration that his entire piece, published online weeks before the printed version, was a pastiche of misstatements. It remains only to ask readers of this once discerning if ideological magazine to reflect on its remarkable decision to reprint so misinformed an attack on my character despite that intervening demonstration. [emphasis added]
“How To Be a Hero of Liberty” was posted on-line on February 25, 2005. It was printed in National Review’s March 14, 2005, issue, which appeared on newsstands two weeks before the cover date,
For those who would like to read more about this matter, the Volokh Conspiracy has collected pertinent links, and Eric Rasmusen has tried to decipher what the Supreme Court and Professor Tribe actually said (and did not say) about the Ninth Amendment in the course of the Richmond Newspapers case.
ABSTRACT
It presents problematizations on possible relations between the education, the knowledge and the culture in postmodernity, by means of a postcritical bibliographical research of inter(in)vention of the current "malaise" of the contemporarilly and its respective influences in the field of the education. Uses a postcritical perspective of research the daily postmodern, that is a research of "invention" and not of "evidence" of that already it was systemize. Problematizate ephemerally postmodernity and its possible influences in the society contemporary, intending to blow up felt and to make to jump what still notit was meant, what was unsignificant, from the following questionings: Postmodernity is a paradigmatical change? A revolution? A renewal? A rupture? A crisis of modernity? An exit of modernity? A period of transition? And what is it occurring with the education in the current world, of the form as is interrogated by all its agents, like parents, teachers, pupils and intellectuals? Which is the interrogation that implicit or explicitly is formulated from the individual experiences of its actors, of institucional environments, the societies as a whole? Which the new challenges that place for the education in the context contemporary? And, at last, what human to educate? Of this form, it was not objectified to define and to objective effect permanent conclusions concerning what would be, specifically and objectively, postmodernity, but to make only some ephemeral considerations on thematic extremely (im)pertinent in the "malaise" of the current times and its interrelation with the education, from the ideas of Zygmunt Bauman and Boaventura de Sousa Santos.
Keywords: Education. Postmodernity. Bauman. Santos. Contemporarilly.
http://prof.alexsantana.googlepages.com/monografia
Posted by: Alex Sandro C. Sant'Ana | Thursday, June 21, 2007 at 07:15 PM