legal-scholars

"The main reasons relied upon by those responsible for the forced evacuation, therefore, do not prove a reasonable relation between the group characteristics of Japanese Americans and the dangers of invasion, sabotage and espionage. The reasons appear, instead, to be largely an accumulation of much of the misinformation, half-truths and insinuations that for years have been directed against Japanese Americans by people with racial and economic prejudices-the same people who have been among the foremost advocates of the evacuation.'"

"I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way life. It is unattractive in any setting but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must accordingly be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution."

"That an individual should languish in prison for five years without being accorded the opportunity of proving that the prosecution was based upon arbitrary and illegal administrative action is not in keeping with the high standards of our judicial system. Especially is this so where neither public necessity nor rule of law or statute leads inexorably to such a harsh result. The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution. I can perceive no other course for the law to take in this case."

"No adequate reason is given for the failure to treat these Japanese Americans on an individual basis by holding investigations and hearings to separate the loyal from the disloyal, as was done in the case of persons of German and Italian ancestry. Yet nearly four months elapsed after Pearl Harbor before the first exclusion order was issued; nearly eight months went by until the last order was is sued; and the last of these "subversive" persons was not actually removed until almost eleven months had elapsed. Leisure and deliberation seem to have been more of the essence than speed. And the fact that conditions were not such as to warrant a declaration of martial law adds strength to the belief that the factors of time and military necessity were not as urgent as they have been represented to be."

"It must be conceded that the military and naval situation in the spring of 1942 was such as to generate a very real fear of invasion of the Pacific Coast, accompanied by fears of sabotage and espionage in that area. The military command was therefore justified in adopting all reasonable means necessary to combat these dangers. In adjudging the military action taken in light of the then apparent dangers, we must not erect too high or too meticulous standards; it is necessary only that the action have some reasonable relation to the removal of the dangers of invasion, sabotage and espionage. But the exclusion, either temporarily or permanently, of all persons with Japanese blood in their veins has no such reasonable relation. And that relation is lacking because the exclusion order necessarily must rely for its reasonableness upon the assumption that all persons of Japanese ancestry may have a dangerous tendency to commit sabotage and espionage and to aid our Japanese enemy in other ways. It is difficult to believe that reason, logic or experience could be marshalled in support of such an assumption."

"Any inconvenience that may have accompanied an attempt to conform to procedural due process cannot be said to justify violations of constitutional rights of individuals."

"Murphy fought against discrimination in many forms. He was the first justice to include the word "racism" in an opinion, in his vehement dissent in Korematsu v. United States (1944). In Falbo v. United States (1944), he wrote, "The law knows no finer hour than when it cuts through formal concepts and transitory emotions to protect unpopular citizens against discrimination and persecution.""

"No one denies, of course, that there were some disloyal persons of Japanese descent on the Pacific Coast who did all in their power to aid their ancestral land. Similar disloyal activities have been engaged in by many persons of German, Italian and even more pioneer stock in our country. But to infer that examples of individual disloyalty prove group disloyalty and justify discriminatory action against the entire group is to deny that under our system of law individual guilt is the sole basis for deprivation of rights. Moreover, this inference, which is at the very heart of the evacuation orders, has been used in support of the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy. To give constitutional sanction to that inference in this case, however well-intentioned may have been the military command on the Pacific Coast, is to adopt one of the cruelest of the rationales used by our enemies to destroy the dignity of the individual and to encourage and open the door to discriminatory actions against other minority groups in the passions of tomorrow."

"Criminal punishment for disobedience of an arbitrary and invalid order is objectionable regardless of whether the order be interlocutory or final."

"The judicial test of whether the Government, on a plea of military necessity, can validly deprive an individual of any of his constitutional rights is whether the deprivation is reasonably related to a public danger that is so "imme diate, imminent, and impending" as not to admit of delay and not to permit the intervention of ordinary constitutional processes to alleviate the danger. Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34, banishing from a prescribed area of the Pacific Coast "all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien," clearly does not meet that test. Being an obvious racial discrimination, the order deprives all those within its scope of the equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. It further deprives these individuals of their constitutional rights to live and work where they will, to establish a home where they choose and to move about freely. In excommunicating them without benefit of hearings, this order also deprives them of all their constitutional rights to procedural due process. Yet no reasonable relation to an "immediate, imminent, and impending" public danger is evident to support this racial restriction which is one of the most sweeping and complete deprivations of constitutional rights in the history of this nation in the absence of martial law."

"Common sense and justice dictate that a citizen accused of a crime should have the fullest hearing possible, plus the opportunity to present every reasonable defense. Only an unenlightened jurisprudence condemns an individual without according him those rights. Such a denial is especially oppressive where a full hearing might disclose that the administrative action underlying the prosecution is the product of excess wartime emotions."

"Experience demonstrates that in time of war individual liberties cannot always be entrusted safely to uncontrolled administrative discretion. Illustrative of this proposition is the remark attributed to one of the members of petitioner's local board to the effect that "I do not have any damned use for Jehovah's Witnesses." The presumption against foreclosing the defense of illegal and arbitrary administrative action is therefore strong."

"Individual rights have been recognized by our jurisprudence only after long and costly struggles. They should not be struck down by anything less than the gravest necessity. We assent to their temporary suspension only to the extent that they constitute a clear and present danger to the effective prosecution of the war and only as a means of preserving those rights undiminished for ourselves and future generations. Before giving such an assent, therefore, we should be convinced of the existence of a reasonable necessity and be satisfied that the suspension is in accordance with the legislative intention."

"This exclusion of "all persons of Japanese ancestry, both alien and non-alien," from the Pacific Coast area on a plea of military necessity in the absence of martial law ought not to be approved. Such exclusion goes over "the very brink of constitutional power" and falls into the ugly abyss of racism."

"Terry Gross: "Are you playing any official or unofficial role on Harvard's legal strategy or decision-making?" Noah Feldman: "No. The university follows a good policy of creating a wall between its lawyers who represent it and its law faculty who have lots of ideas about how it should be represented. So my primary role is as a constitutional scholar, analyzing the issues, writing about them, speaking about them. And that's the right job for me in this moment.""

"It's very unusual for the framers' predictions to come true that precisely, and when they do we have to ask ourselves. Some day, we will no longer be alive, and we will go wherever it is we go, the good place or the other place, and we may meet there Madison and Hamilton. And they will ask us, 'When the president of the United States acted to corrupt the structure of the republic, what did you do?' And our answer to that question must be that we followed the guidance of the framers, and it must be that if the evidence supports that conclusion, that the House of Representatives moves to impeach him."

"Terry Gross: "The attacks on Harvard started with the task force commissioned by Trump to address antisemitism on campus. And, you know, this has led to cancellation of billions of dollars in grants and contracts to Harvard. But didn't Harvard reach a settlement with Trump over antisemitism?" Noah Feldman: "No. Let me tell the story a little bit differently. I think, really, what we're facing now started with the testimony in Congress of Harvard's president and a couple of other university presidents in which they were pushed very hard on a series of hypothetical questions about how the campus manages free speech in the context of protests. That put a target on Harvard's back, and the Trump administration has been pushing very, very hard since they came into office to exploit the perception - in my view, the incorrect perception - that Harvard is some sort of hotbed of bias, antisemitism and Islamophobia in order to bring about a fundamental attack on higher education with the stated goal - this is their stated goal - of making the university align itself with the administration's beliefs and priorities, which is a clear violation of the First Amendment. What's more, Harvard hasn't reached any settlement of any kind with the Trump administration. There was a lawsuit brought by a small number of students alleging that Harvard had not sufficiently protected the environment against antisemitism. And that was settled by the university before the Trump administration even came into office.""

"Harvard Law Prof. Noah Feldman's testimony during Wednesday's impeachment hearing took a turn for the mystical Wednesday afternoon, when he seemed to claim that impeaching President Trump was necessary so that lawmakers would be able to answer to Alexander Hamilton and James Madison when they bump into them in the afterlife. Feldman was fielding questions from attorney Norm Eisen, who questioned witnesses at the behest of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., when he claimed that Trump's actions were exactly what the framers of the Constitution forewarned. Immediately prior to the morbid warning, Feldman claimed he had been an "impeachment skeptic" when Robert Mueller's Russia report came out. But he said that changed after President Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that resulted in the impeachment inquiry due to suspicion that the president sought help in investigating political rivals."

"Terry Gross: One of Trump's justifications for canceling government contracts is that he accused Harvard as being a breeding ground - I'm quoting here - "breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination." How do you interpret that?" Noah Feldman: "Well, first thing I would say is that it's wrong. You know, it's always hard to understand exactly what is meant when you're being maligned, but, you know, you know the feeling. You know the idea that even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked? Well, that's someone kicking us. One piece of relevant background here is that Harvard was one of the parties in the Supreme Court case - the SFFA case - in which the Supreme Court, for the first time in nearly 50 years, overturned the idea that racial diversity was a permissible rationale to use in college admissions. And the Trump administration, in all of its rhetoric, has been referring, subsequently, to the perfectly lawful use of diversity as it existed from 1978 and really before then, until just, you know, a year or so ago as, quote-unquote, "discrimination." I think that's the rhetorical move there. And Harvard is no more a breeding ground for that point of view than all of the other universities in the country, essentially all, which used exactly the same admissions procedures. It's just that it's easier for Trump to make headlines by attacking Harvard over that." Terry Gross: "That's probably part of the reason why many other universities are worried right now." Noah Feldman: "There are a lot of reasons for universities to be concerned. If Trump can go after the oldest university in the United States, one of the most significant in terms of its endowment and its academic legacy and its prestige, then he can really go after any similar university. And so all universities, I think, have very, very good reason to be concerned because going after a university is one of the things in the playbook of someone who's trying to erode democratic values and who wants to be at least dictatorial, if not a dictator. Universities are a place for the preservation of free expression, free ideas and free beliefs. They've always been that. And so in any country where someone is trying to break that norm of freedom, the universities are a very important target, and that's been true historically.""

"Terry Gross: "So what do you think Trump's attacks on Harvard are really about?" Noah Feldman: "Donald Trump usually has a kind of short-term self-interest objective and then a broader-term aggrandizement objective. In the short term, his self-interest is to make a headline, to make a populist headline that says, Donald Trump is going after those liberals at Harvard University, which might please some of his supporters and, probably more important to Donald Trump, is intended to shed fear or to cast fear on everyone in higher education and, more broadly, everyone who doesn't agree with his policies. You know, it's part of the idea that every day we should wake up and listen to the radio or look at the newspaper and discover that the Trump administration has gone after some opponent in some way that makes it really hard to stand up to Donald Trump. So I think that's the short-term objective. The longer-term objective, though, is part of Trump's overall assault on our democratic values and institutions. And you can see that the institutions that he likes to go after are places like universities, institutions like the press and the courts, which are institutions that are all devoted to independent judgment and independent thinking. We need independent universities. We need an independent press. And, of course, we need independent courts. And Trump doesn't like independence because independent institutions can say no to him. And the more he can weaken the independence of those institutions, the more he can make his agenda the dominant agenda. And ultimately, this is about Trump trying to impose his view of the world on everybody else.""

"A year ago, Harvard's commencement, our graduation, was really, in a significant way, disrupted by students protesting, including some faculty protesting, marching out of the graduation, speakers denouncing the president and the corporation of Harvard, which is what we call our board of directors. This year, commencement was pretty much the polar opposite. There was literally a standing ovation for our president, Alan Garber, when all he had done was come up to the podium. And speaker after speaker hinted at the importance of supporting the university. So what's happened is that Donald Trump's assault on the university has led to a deep unification of the campus. And that's an important transformation from a year ago. I would say it's a fundamental transformation."

"All banks go bankrupt"

"On a larger scale, the Laffer curve may be the most important economic law of political history. Charles Adams uses it to explain the rise and fall of empires."

"Nevertheless, this nice fiction allowed the United States to avoid creating a real locus of sovereignty by creating a fictional sovereignty to satisfy the Romanists. Sovereignty, under this doctrine, is vested in "We The People." Some of this political power is granted, charter-like, to the United States federal government. The rest is granted (per the 10th Amendment) "to the States, or to the people, respectively" -- that is to each State and to individuals. In reality, political power is distributed amongst the federal government, states, counties, and munipalities, with a variety of enumerated and unenumerated rights that these governments may not infringe being retained by private persons."

"Only a handful of tribes, such as the Narragansetts, specialized in manufacturing wampum, while hundreds of other tribes, many of them hunter-gatherers, used it. Wampum pendants came in a variety of lengths, with the number of beads proportional to the length. Pendants could be cut or joined to form a pendant of length equal to the price paid. Once they got over their hangup about what constitutes real money, the colonists went wild trading for and with wampum. Clams entered the American vernacular as another way to say “money”. The Dutch governor of New Amsterdam (now New York) took out a large loan from an English-American bank – in wampum. After a while the British authorities were forced to go along. So between 1637 and 1661, wampum became legal tender in New England. Colonists now had a liquid medium of exchange, and trade in the colonies flourished. The beginning of the end of wampum came when the British started shipping more coin to the Americas, and Europeans started applying their mass-manufacturing techniques."

"Clock time is a fungible measure of sacrifice. Of all measurement instruments, the clock is the most valuable because so many of the things we sacrifice to create are not fungible. The massive clock towers of Europe, with their enormous loud and resonant bells, broadcasting time fairly across the town and even the countryside, rather than the last relics of the medieval, were the first building block of the wealthy modern world. The Europeans evolved their institutions and deployed two very different but complementary timekeeping devices, the sandglass and the mechanical clock, to partition the day into frequently rung and equal hours. Europe progressed in a virtuous circle where bells and clocks improved the productivity of relationships; the resulting wealthy institutions in turn funded more advances in timekeeping... The massive change on the farm, the dominant form of industry, in the 14th and successive centuries from serfdom and slavery to markets and wage labor, was caused not only by the temporary labor shortages of the Black Plague, but more fundamentally and permanently by the time-rate contract and the new ability to accurately and fairly verify its crucial measurement of sacrifice, time. Time rates also became the most common relationship for the mines, mills, factories, and other industries that rapidly grew after the advent of the clock."

"Barter works well at small volumes but becomes increasingly costly at large volumes, until it becomes too costly to be worth the effort. If there are n goods and services to be traded, a barter market requires n^2 prices."

"Rug the spammers."

"the New England natives used neither silver nor gold. Instead, they used the most appropriate money to be found in their environment – durable skeleton parts of their prey. Specifically, they used wampum, shells of the clam Venus mercenaria and its relatives, strung onto pendants."

"Our lady the Common Law will note other people's fashions and take a hint from them in season, but she will have no thanks for judges or legislators who steal incongruous tags and patches and offer to bedizen her raiment with them. Assimilation of foreign elements, we have already seen, may be a very good thing. Crude and hasty borrowing of foreign details is unbecoming at best, and almost always mischievous. When you are tempted to make play with foreign ideas or terms, either for imitation or for criticism, the first thing is to be sure that you understand them."

"Our Constitution is popular in that the life of the English people, from the greatest to the least, has gone to make it what it is; and it has at almost all times combined the tenacity of tradition with a great power of assimilating fresh elements, and of adapting existing organs to new purposes. For some considerable time our national institutions and our national character have been confirming one another in this habit."

"He had read almost every important book on these subjects and, although he had not Acton's miraculous visual memory for books, he never forgot what he read and always had the facts ready in his mind. His Introduction to Political Science has remained what it was on publication, the best book on the subject. Though not a professed Shakespearean scholar, he had the bulk of Shakespeare's plays so incrusted in his memory that he hardly ever had need to refer to the text and was the originator of more than one illuminating emendation. His knowledge of mediæval and of classical history was complete: it was superior to Acton's in that to him they were always living subjects... On balance, and saving alone modern history in its fullest sweep, I am driven to the conclusion that my father's learning was barely, if it all, less than that of so renowned a man as Acton and in some respects greater."

"Pollock was perhaps the last representative of the "old broad culture." To take only his literary recreations, he easily and habitually wrote verse in Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian, he was a brilliant parodist of the English poets from Chaucer down to his friend Swinburne (as in his well-known Leading Cases), and he had quite a fair acquaintance with Persian and Sanskrit. He was an active and prominent member of the Rabelais Club. In addition he was well read in philosophy, and was a respectable mathematician. He was more of a celebrity in Europe and in the United States than here."

"Since the classical period of Roman law there has never been a constitution of affairs more apt to foster the free and intelligent criticism of legal authorities, the untrammelled play of legal speculation and analysis, than now exists in the States of the American Union, where law is developed under many technically independent jurisdictions, but in deference and conformity to a common ideal."

"Equally at home in the Inns of Court and in the Universities, he was for sixty years at the heart of the law. A brooding presence near the Bench, he might have supplied the answer to the question, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Rooted in the virtues that have come, with whatever truth, to be called Victorian, the fruits of his scholarship were harvested by men who were themselves the products of a new legal education."

"So venerable, so majestic, is this living temple of justice, this immemorial and yet freshly growing fabric of the Common Law, that the least of us is happy who hereafter may point to so much as one stone thereof and say, The work of my hands is there."

"Pollock was not only a scholar versed in the lore of the ages, but also a constant and eager observer of the modern world, sensitive to its trends of thought and conversant with its larger movements. To the solution of some of its most difficult legal and political problems he devoted his remarkable abilities as a lawyer-statesman. In these and many other ways Pollock proved himself to be one of the leaders of thought in the national and international life of his times. In the breadth of his knowledge, however, which was not confined to any one branch of learning, he stood out from our over-specialized age, and was far more like a man of the Renaissance than a modern. It is this humanistic outlook and culture which give character to all his writings on the subject-matters that chiefly engaged his attention."

"From an early time, again, we have had a central and powerful legislature which, as it represents the estates of the whole realm, has made statutes binding on the whole, and knows no legal bounds to its competence. Thus our laws have been eminently national and positive, and our particular legal habit of mind is perhaps the most insular of our many insular traits. Our long standing apart from the general movement of European thought has had its drawbacks; but I think it the better opinion that both in jurisprudence and in the not wholly dissimilar case of philosophy the gain has outweighed them."

"All his books, essays, notes, and reviews upon matters legal are marked by a clarity and a felicity of expression which is the touchstone of a master of his craft; and there are one or two passages in some of his essays which reach a high level of eloquence and beauty. The literary quality of his work is due to the extent and variety of his learning in many other subjects besides law. He was an accomplished linguist who could write verses in Latin, Greek, French and German; he knew something of Eastern languages; and he was a philosopher, an historian, and something of a mathematician. He bore his great learning lightly, and, having a subtle sense of humour, he used his literary gifts to produce the witty parodies and other humorous verses which are published in Leading Cases done into English, and in the volume entitled Outside the Law."

"The doctrine of evolution is nothing else than the historical method applied to the facts of nature; the historical method is nothing else than the doctrine of evolution applied to human societies and institutions."

"A short time after my father's death I was surprised, indeed a little staggered, to hear an accomplished Oxford professor call him "the most learned man since Bacon.""

"When Charles Darwin created the philosophy of natural history (for no less title is due to the idea which transformed the knowledge of organic nature from a multitude of particulars into a continuous whole), he was working in the same spirit and towards the same ends as the great publicists who, heeding his field of labour as little as he heeded theirs, had laid in the patient study of historical fact the bases of a solid and rational philosophy of politics and law. Savigny, whom we do not yet know or honour enough, and our own Burke, whom we know and honour, but cannot honour too much, were Darwinians before Darwin. In some measure the same may be said of the great Frenchman Montesquieu, whose unequal but illuminating genius was lost in a generation of formalists."

"The United States has the of the richest nations. It has the by far. It has among the highest child mortality rates. It has the highest . It has one of the lowest levels of voter registration in the rich countries. In essence, it scores extremely poorly on almost all of the comparative measures when compared with other developed states. I visited China on one of these missions about a year ago and what I found was a country that has , but in terms of extreme poverty, has made an absolutely concerted and genuine attempt to eliminate poverty and has succeeded to an important extent. By 2020, they will in fact have no one living in extreme poverty, unlike the United States. While I don’t for a minute want to suggest that the political system [in China] is desirable or even compatible with democratic standards, I would very much welcome an American government that shows a determination to lift everyone out of extreme poverty. I think that’s what politics should be all about, and it’s not happening in the United States."

"[About unfair methods of competition:] What are the dimentions on which firms are or are not permitted to compete? Should we be having firms competing on who can surveil users the best or who can undercut their workers the most, or do we want to be having companies compete on dimentions or privacy that are actually better serving consumers or workers?"

"...we are going to ensure that there is peace before, during, after the election, because when there is no peace, it’s not the elitists who will suffer, it’s the ordinary people who have elected us into office."

"Let us all work together as one people with a common destiny to build a better Ghana"

"My doors are always open, we’ll make sure to provide the resources and make the necessary contacts. As a Government, we’ll give you the fullest support."

"Why have you stayed away from me after the support you had extended to my election?"

"‘I will use my last ounce of energy to serve Ghana."

"The late President Professor John Evans Atta Mills was without an iota of doubt a unique African leader."