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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7851 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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On an article on viewpoint diversity in the Law at the University of Chicago. Sunstein Viewpoint Diversity

Growing up I believed according to American mythology that the law is blind. Everyone knows of the Blind Justice Statue of the Roman Goddess Justitia. This always implied to me (perhaps being an engineer) that the law was like math 2+2 =4. Word x+y has meaning Z. The whole idea that adding a bunch of words together lacks a definable meaning to me makes no sense. Law shouldn’t have theory. It should be math especially if it is going to be blind and not swayed by public opinion. There should be no theory involved. I guess this makes me a textualists. But it turns out at places like UC that you have 10-20 smart clusters of people who all have different solutions to 2+2 = 4.

Law being like math I believe should definitely apply to judges. Legal theory can be useful for a lawyer who works for a Senator who is writing legislation. Then legal theory has a purpose of designing the equations to get a law that does what you want.

One thing that came out of UC was applying economics to law. This again I have no problem with adding economics to new legislation you create. But from my understanding of legal history judges began adding economic tests to old law. To me this is like discovering that 2+2 had a different answer than the 4 that was a correct answer.

Once I realized the law as practiced is not mathematics I switched my judicial philosophy from some form of originalism to Ketanji Brown theory. I just want a judge who votes the way I want her to and do not care if she’s worse at arguing her theory than another guy. The best I can tell from history is that when public opinion on an issue changes the legal theorists of the smart guy at UC becomes the theory everyone else begins to quote. I prefer to just pick judges who back the policy I want in the current legal environment.

Pragmatically the law has never been blind. The criminal justice system has always judged poor dumb kids differently than rich smart kids. The same crime committed by an urban youth versus a Kennedy kid has never been punished the same way. A big reason for this is the court had a reasonable expectations that the Kennedy’s had the resources to deal with the behavior internally and society didn’t need to spend resources to make sure the crime didn’t happen again.

An important thing to keep in mind about Law:

PDF: The Law is a Fractal: The Attempt to Anticipate Everything

For instance, we might consider a municipal park for which a city had adopted the rule, “no vehicles are allowed in the park.” We could treat “Point 1” on the number line as representing the act of driving a car through the park and “Point 2” as representing refraining from driving a car through the park. The rule would assign the label of “illegal” to Point 1 and “legal” to Point 2. ^5

As has been famously pointed out,^6 these two points and the rule itself are insufficient to cover all the specific factual situations that might arise involving vehicles in a park. At least they are insufficient in any reasonable rule system.^7 What if, for example, a police vehicle has to enter the park on an emergency call? If we want an appropriate, specific rule, we would need another point, between Points 1 and 2, corresponding to the factual scenario, “A police vehicle entering the park.” Point 1.5, let’s call it, to which we would assign, like Point 2, the label “legal.” But what if the driver of the car were a thief who had stolen it from the police? That specific scenario would fall between Points 1 and 1.5, perhaps 1.2, and would be assigned the label “illegal.”^8

And so on. Given the numberless potential variations, foreseeable and unforeseeable, in “vehicles,” motives, and circumstances, there can, provably,^9 be no end to the possible specific scenarios—and thus no limit on the number of rules that would result from trying to write an appropriate one for each possible, distinct fact situation.^10

Great little quiz/game about this https://novehiclesinthepark.com/

It's just in general really difficult to come up with a rule that is

  1. Simple to track and consistently enforce

  2. Covers all potential cases, including adversarial readings.

  3. Doesn't confuse a good number of people with legitimate arguments to how it can be interpreted.

Honestly I took it and scored 93% in the majority. So the rule seems clear to me.

96% here, and my exception A non-functional vehicle is still a vehicle, a tank is a vehicle, and it still counts when it's part of a monument would have been covered by other permitting and planning work anyways.

Same as me! Actual laws like this usually say "motorized vehicles" which makes almost all of the other quiz questions non-ambiguous, but I guess there'd still be some ambiguity about the tank depending on exactly how it was deactivated.

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