So here's the way I look at this: There are very many places on the
Internet where people discuss a vast range of things -- the war,
constitutional law, abortion, taxes, guns, and so on. Most of them aren't
very good. CONLAWPROF, I like to think, is much better, which is why most
of us chose to participate here and not elsewhere.
Why is CONLAWPROF better? Part of it is that we're a smart bunch of
people -- but actually, lots of the not very helpful online discussion
groups include lots of smart people. Rather, I think, it is that we're
speaking about stuff on which we're genuinely experts. When laypeople talk
about constitutional law, the results are generally not terribly useful
(though sometimes they do provide an interesting perspective); the ratio of
heat to light and unsound analysis to valuable analysis is too high. When
constitutional law scholars talk about constitutional law, the results are
generally much better.
But just as most of us wouldn't find much value from participating
in laypeople's discussions about constitutional law (again, this is a
generalization, and I realize there are exceptions), so I think that most of
us wouldn't find much value from discussions by constitutional law
professors on which we ourselves are just laypeople. Of course, the
discussions may well contain a good deal of valuable information -- but a
lot less than discussions on areas that are within our core expertise.
So there's no doubt that various factual questions *are* relevant to
discussions of constitutional law: What did the Bush Administration really
know about weapons of mass destruction? Just what is the evidence about the
physiological development of fetuses at various gestational ages? What does
the criminological data reveal about the effectiveness of gun control? What
is the evidence about the biological differences (or absence thereof)
between men's and women's mental processes? What are the likely economic
results of various tax policies? But this list is just not a very good
place for discussing them, because so few of us are actually experts on
these fields. Few of us can write with real scholarly knowledge about them;
few readers can tell the accurate posts from the inaccurate ones using their
own real scholarly knowledge.
Sometimes the comments might sneak in as a side item in a post, and
that's fine. But when whole threads become devoted to the subject, the list
is likely to become a much less valuable resource for its members -- members
whose time and online attention spans are necessarily quite limited.
I hope that explains my policy on these matters, and I hope most of
my colleagues on this list agree.
Eugene
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Allan Ides [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 10:42 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: From the list custodian
>
>
> Eugene,
>
> I respectfully disagree with the your last posting. The
> notion that a discussion of constitutional law can be
> separated from the facts underlying the constitutional claim
> is, if not simply wrong, at least not one of general
> approbation. To cite only one source, Judge Posner's recent
> book on Law, Pragmatisim, & Democracy surely suggests a
> contrary view. How can one be pragmatic in the application
> of constitutional principle without a deep awareness of the
> relevant facts? Thus, under this view, whether a particular
> gun control measure is effective is intimately related to
> whether that measure is unconstitutional. I'm not saying
> that Posner is right, but only suggesting that your polite
> remonstrance may not reflect the views of all participants on
> this list.
>
> Allan Ides
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Volokh, Eugene" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Saturday, June 7, 2003 4:18 pm
> Subject: From the list custodian
>
> > Folks: Constitutional law questions related to when a
> President may
> > be impeached are of course entirely on-topic for this list. But I
> > think that
> > once the discussions starts focusing on purely factual questions
> > related to
> > international events, then it seems to me that it's no longer
> > within list
> > members' primary expertise. (The same, of course, goes for
> > factual issues
> > underlying a wide variety of other constitutional topics,
> such as the
> > developmental stage of fetuses, or the practical issues underlying
> > whethercertain gun controls are effective, or economic questions
> > related to the
> > effectiveness of various tax policies.)
> >
> > So let me suggest again a rule of thumb: If a post is
> tied pretty
> > directly to a constitutional question, please include some
> language in
> > the post that indeed does so. On the other hand, if you
> find that the
> > languageseems forced and not really well-connected to the post,
> > then that might be a
> > signal that the post is best handled off-list, or on some
> other list.
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Eugene
> >
>
