Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

The Apse of St. Steven’s Cathedral and the Brushfire

A truly astonishing picture over at Cathedrals of California. Go over there to see it full size and check out their other wonderful photos. 

Headline of the Day

This one made me chuckle: ”Great tits cope well with warming”

In Defense of Corporate Lawyering and Making a Lot of Money

In my essay, Reflections on Twenty Years of Law Teaching: Remarks at the Rutter Award Ceremony, I took advantage of the captive audience at the award ceremony to argue that:

Legal education pervasively sends law students the message that corporate lawyering is a less moral and socially desirable career path than so-called “public interest” lawyering.  The corporate world is viewed as essentially corrupting and alienating, while true self-actualization is possible only in a Legal Aid office.

Our students get these messages not only in law school, of course, but also in the media. Films like “A Civil Action” or “Erin Brockovich” illustrate the general ill repute in which corporations—and corporate lawyers—are held, at least here in Hollywood.

In my teaching, I have chosen to unabashedly embrace a competing view. I tell my students about Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who wrote that: “The limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times. Even steam and electricity are less important than the limited liability company.”

I tell them about journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, whose magnificent history, The Company, contends that the corporation is “the basis of the prosperity of the West and the best hope for the future of the rest of the world.” ...

The rise of the corporate form thus has “improved the living standards of millions of ordinary people, putting the luxuries of the rich within the reach of the man in the street.” The rising prosperity made possible by the tremendous new wealth created by industrial corporations was a major factor in destroying arbitrary class distinctions, enhancing personal and social mobility. Many of the wealthiest businessman of the latter half of the 19th Century and the 20th Century began their careers as laborers rather than as scions of coupon-clipping plutocrats.

And so I put it to my students this way: You want to help make society a better place? You want to eliminate poverty? Become a corporate lawyer. Help businesses grow, so that they can create jobs and provide goods and services that make people’s lives better.

The goal isn’t just to make my students feel better about themselves. I firmly believe that too many of our students, when they get out in practice, may be more willing to act in ways that are ethically gray—to act as facilitators rather than gatekeepers—if they’ve been told repeatedly that they’ve already “sold out.” If more legal academics were to celebrate the pro-social aspects of corporate practice, perhaps our students would be better gatekeepers once they get out in practice.

In the LA Times, PJ O’Rourke visited some of the same themes in his inimitable way:

1. Go out and make a bunch of money!

Here we are living in the world’s most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to young people, “Go out and make a bunch of money.” Instead, they tell you that money can’t buy happiness. Maybe, but money can rent it.

There’s nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.

2. Don’t be an idealist!

Don’t chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you’ll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That’s $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You’ll be doing good for society. Does chaining yourself to a redwood tree do society $100,000 worth of good?

Idealists are also bullies. The idealist says, “I care more about the redwood trees than you do. I care so much I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. It broke up my marriage. And because I care more than you do, I’m a better person. And because I’m the better person, I have the right to boss you around.”

Get a pair of bolt cutters and liberate that tree.

Who does more for the redwoods and society anyway—the guy chained to a tree or the guy who founds the “Green Travel Redwood Tree-Hug Tour Company” and makes a million by turning redwoods into a tourist destination, a valuable resource that people will pay just to go look at?

So make your contribution by getting rich. Don’t be an idealist.

Here’s the video of my speech:

The Imperfectibility of Human Institutions - Even America

In his speech following his impressive win in the North Carolina primary, Barack Obama said:

I believe in our ability to perfect this union because it’s the only reason I’m standing here today.

Setting aside the question of whether the adverbial clause sensibly follows from the main clause, this is one of my pet peeves. I simply do not believe in anyone’s ability to perfect anything. As the NAB puts it, ”all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God.” Or, in the classic phrasing of the King James, “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God ....”

If humans are by their very nature imperfect and, moreover, imperfectible, it follows necessarily that human institutions are also inherently imperfect and, moreover, imperfectible. Even the United States of America.

The framers of the American Republic were highly conscious of this basic fact. They knew that fallen mankind was capable of great evil and that tyranny therefore was an ever present threat in human society. As law professor John Mcginnis has explained:

The Framers understood that the self-interest which in the private sphere contributes to welfare of society — both in the sense of material well-being and in the social unity engendered by commerce — makes man a knave in the public sphere, the sphere of politics and group action. It is self-interest that leads individuals to form factions to try to expropriate the wealth of others through government and that constantly threatens social harmony. John O. McGinnis, The Original Constitution and Our Origins 19 Harv. J.L.& Pub. Policy 251, 253 (1996).

The Framers therefore created a system of government replete with checks and balances designed to ensure not that our nation was eventually perfected, but that it would survive the imperfections of its leaders and people.

A further problem I have with this sort of rhetoric is the implication that we can define the perfect through the exercise of reason, whether individual or collective. The Founders admittedly relied on their collective reason to establish principles of good government, but they wisely did not try to work from a blank slate. Recognizing the limits of human cognition, they looked for ideas that had stood the test of time. In particular, they codified many of the liberties of Englishmen that had been validated by long-standing custom and practice. Hence, reform and new ideas were adapted while respecting the collective wisdom of the ages.

Finally, all too many people who talk about perfecting a society strive to do so through the vehicle of government. Personally, I do not believe the government can make people, institutions, or societies better—let alone perfect. After all, government is itself comprised of fallen men and women whose imperfections are precisely the reason good government is shackled with checks and balances. Unconstrained, government attempts to create a “Great Society” destroy communities, disintegrate the little platoons that inculcate virtue, atrophy both man’s ability and desire to control their own destiny, and limit choice.

As a Christian, Obama should be aware of the full implications of The Fall. He should know that government is not a vehicle for perfecting humanity or human institutions, but rather a vehicle for ensuring that the baser elements of human nature are restrained. If government does that, it has done all that we can expect of it.

Update: Humorist PJ O’Rourke gets it:

I am not one of those people who believes that God is involved in politics. On the contrary. Observe politics in this country. Observe politics around the world. Observe politics through history. Does it look like God’s involved?

The Bible is very clear about one thing: Using politics to create fairness is a sin. Observe the Tenth Commandment. The first nine commandments concern theological principles and social law: Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, et cetera. Fair enough. But then there’s the tenth: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”

Here are God’s basic rules about how we should live, a brief list of sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts. And, right at the end of it we read, “Don’t envy your buddy because he has an ox or a donkey.” Why did that make the top 10? Why would God, with just 10 things to tell Moses, include jealousy about livestock?

Well, think about how important this commandment is to a community, to a nation, to a democracy. If you want a mule, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don’t whine about what the people across the street have. Get rich and get your own

Trojan Silliniess

James Joyner:

Seen whilst driving home: A Virginia “Friends of Tibet” license plate with the vanity inscription “UCLA SUX.”

Presumably, a USC fan.

Just for that, I’m going to watch the Beijing Olympics after all.

In the Event Hillary’s Really Finished

You know how Larry the Cable Guy says, “Lord, I apologize for that right there, and please be with the starvin’ pygmies down there in New Guinea, A-men” ?

Ditto.

Is HRC Really “Dead”?

Dan Drezner:

In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign being declared effectively dead by one and all, it is worth reflecting on what she gained by staying in the raise for the past two months and change.

He goes on to offer some typically thoughtful insights. I just want to caution that we ought not count HRC out yet. The Clintons have an amazing ability to bounce off the canvas and come back swinging. Until Barack Obama drives a (figurative) stake through her heart or goes Highlander on her, I won’t believe it.

When it’s finally done, of course, we’ll have a parade and sing a little song:

McCain’s Justice Advisory Committee

John McCain has announced his Justice Advisory Committee and its full of a diverse set of high powered legal minds that will make both social and economic conservatives happy. Starting with Ted Olson and Sam Brownback as chairs. Scattered through the committee are a bunch of friends, including my old UIUC colleagues Gerard V. Bradley, a nationally leading expert on jurisprudence, and Ron Rotunda, one of the most prominent constitutional law scholars in the country, Rick Garnett of MirrorOfJustice.org, Orin S. Kerr and Eugene Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy and, of course, in the latter case UCLAW.  Kudos to all.