The Western Allies commenced "round the clock bombing" of the Third Reich.
A few things about this are worth noting.
It was essentially a massive upgrading of another theater, this one the skies over Germany, in which the Soviet Union, which lacked a heavy strategic bomber capacity, and which was not strategically placed to join in it, was absent. The Soviets were of course also absent from the Battle of the Atlantic.
While it can't be expected that they would be in either, the fact that the Western Allies carried on these significant efforts benefited the USSR as well as the Western Allies, something that Soviet and now Russian recollections of the war choose to forget.
Also controversial is the extent to which the raids were actually effective. German production went up during the war, so the question is whether strategic bombing depressed it from being higher, or simply disrupted it in other ways. The latter certainly occurred, but to what extent the former did is an open question.
The 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Latvian), came into existence. The unit was made up of Latvian volunteers, and conscripts, who harbored the naive hope that serving the Germans would lead to post-war Latvian independence.
While naive, and inexcusably associated with the SS, this is an example of the "war within a war" nature of the Second World War. The Baltic States, along with Ukraine and Poland, would particularly be associated with various armed efforts against the Soviets, some of which were completely independent of association with the Germans, while some, outside of Poland, were. Many of the partisan type movements, which this obviously was not, carried on fighting for some time after the war.
Of note, Latvian resistance to the Soviet Union remained fairly strong up until 1949 and remained a factor the Soviets had to consider into the early 50s. The last violent acts by Latvian resistance forces occurred in the 1980s and the last Forest Brother, Jānis Pīnups, who had deserted from the Red Army during World War Two when wounded and left for dead, came in from hiding in 1995.
Regarding the Baltic States and the SS, during the war Estonia also contributed volunteers to "foreign legion" SS units, that being the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian) The Latvians would contribute a second one, that being the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (2nd Latvian). Because the units contained conscripts, the US regarded them as not complicate in the criminal nature of the SS after the war.
As of this day, the United States had been at war for a year.
The Marine Corps celebrated the day by bombarding Japanese position on Guadalcanal.
The USS New Jersey was launched by the U.S. Navy:
The massive battleship was of the Iowa Class, and would serve off and on until 1991.
We've covered this time frame, 12/7/41 to 12/7/42, in a sort of day by day fashion, even though this isn't "World War Two Day By Day". We've done it as an interesting historical exercise, much like we started tracking the period of a century ago when we commenced with our day by day on the Punitive Expedition. This blog isn't "A Century Ago", or whatever, either.
Anyhow, it has been instructive.
What we have seen is that on December 7, 1941, the world was truly in contest. The Soviets were losing the war in the East. Not just might be losing, they were outright losing. The British, who really would have been entitled to regard the Easter Front as "the second front", were holding on however, and continued to fight where ever they could, sometimes in a surprising place like Greece, but perhaps most notably in North Africa. They were doing surprisingly well, even though the Germans had joined the fight to aid failing Italy there.
On the seas, however, the titanic Battle of the Atlantic raged, and the Mediterranean was very much in contest.
A year later, the United States and Australia had arrested Japanese progress in the Pacific. The Japanese would have been entitled not to have necessarily regarded the tide as having been turned, but any rational observer would have had to conclude that their offensive in the Pacific had already ground to a halt, and they were now on the defensive. They should have been worried.
The tide had been turned in North Africa and the handwriting was on the wall for the Afrika Korps, although the now German lead enterprise was attempting to react to Operation Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of Vichy France's possession in the region which lead to the effective and rapid end of Vichy. The French military had departed from its own official sovereign and joined the Allies. And the battle for the Medettreanean was over, with the Allies prevailing in what was a Royal Navy victory. The Italians were beginning to regard the war as lost.
The Red Army had finally arrested German progress in the East and had launched its first really successful counter-attack, surrounding Stalingrad in what was to become a German disaster. In the East too, the Germans would have been entitled not to regard the contest as decided, but they no longer would have reason to regard a battlefield victory against the Allies as likely.
What my parents did on this day I don't know, of course. Both would have been in school. For my father, at least, talk of the war being "a year old" must have come up in some fashion.
The British commenced Operation Frankton, a kayak insertion raid on the French port of Bordeaux. The raid by commandos of the Royal Marines gave rise to the nickname The Cockleshell Heroes for its participants, who over a course of several days several vessels in the harbor, damaging six of them. The Germans predictably captured six of the men, and executed them.
British military kayaks.
Interestingly, it was Japanese vessels that had evaded blockades that the British were particularly attempting to target.
Today saw the first flight of the P-63 Kingcobra, the intended successor to the P-39.
The aircraft based on this frame were never popular with the U.S. Air Force and the while the aircraft was adopted by the US, it was not deployed in combat. It should principally be regarded as a Soviet fighter, and it was very popular with the Soviet Air Force, which was actually not supposed to deploy it, by agreement with the US, against the Germans, but retain it in the Far East in case of a Japanese attack upon the Soviet Union. Nearly indistinguishable from the P39, that agreement was not honored.
A P63 was recently involved in a tragic accident in Dallas, which we have noted here:
Tragedy. P63 hits B-17 at Dallas Airshow. (Graphic)
I'm sorry, it's hard to see how this could happen.
Actually, it apparently isn't all that hard to see how it could happen, as the P63 had poor visibility.
President Harding nominated Democrat Pierce Butler to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace William R. Day. Nominating a Democrat assured Harding that he could get his nomination past the then Democratic U.S. Senate.
Gee, it's almost like politics played a role in Supreme Court nominations back then. . .
While he was a Democrat, he was also a staunch conservative, this being a day when conservatives still existed in the Democratic Party. He was one of the justices that proved to be trouble for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.
Butler was also a devout Catholic. Today he's partially remembered for issuing the only dissenting opinion in Buck v. Bell, a case which permitted compulsory sterilization of the intellectually disabled and which is regarded now as one of the worst Supreme Court decisions of all time. Bell's dissent, was, interestingly, without a dissenting opinion, but it was a dissent. Oliver Wendell Holmes attributed his dissent to his Catholicism.
Butler also dissented from Olmstead v. United States, which upheld Federal wiretapping.
He died at age 73 in 1939.
Võ Văn Kiệt, a North Vietnamese Communist figure who later played a prominent role in opening the Vietnamese economy back up, and who served as the Prime Minister of the country in the 1990s, was born.
When this war started, I never thought, several months later, we'd be seriously looking at a situation in which Ukrainian forces stood a chance of completely driving the Russian military out of territory that Russia has been occupying since 2014.
Nor, frankly, had anyone else.
But it's begging to look as if they might. Indeed, it's more likely than not.
This is an example of Western military training, Ukrainian resolve, and the fact that the Russian army sucks, and always has, exercising its influence. Ukraine, it appears, is about to triumph in its second offensive in less than a month, and this one stands to expel the Russians from Ukraine,
Which means that a desperate Putin, who has painted himself into a corner, may be about to use tactical nuclear weapons.
Not until this past week would I have made that statement. But I am now. The man is unhinged from reality, and has left himself no choice, other than to act in a decent moral fashion or a manifestly evil one. But as observers of history and politics well know, at some point some people have so sold their souls such that the truth and morality no longer have any meaning.
Putin may have sold his soul long ago that reality no longer matters to him.
It won't work, but we're about to enter, maybe, the most slippery slope we have since . . . well ever. More slippery than the Cuban Missile Crisis, and certainly slipperier than Able Archer.
When, um I mean if, Putin orders the use of tactical nuclear weapons, NATO will reply in force, by destroying Russian ground assets in Ukraine and naval assets in the Black Sea, which may then mean that the current war expands, possibly, into a general European war. And if this war has proven anything, it's that the Russian military is so incredibly bad it won't be able to do anything whatsoever about it.
Of course, I suppose, it could retaliate with nuclear weapons, which I don't think it will, but which is a possibility of course.
At any rate, at this point, Russia appears to be very badly losing the war against Ukraine on territory that voted to leave Russia in 1991 but which Putin's Russia has been seeking to reclaim, and partially had. Now, Putin's miscalculated war, whose calculations were based on the Russian army amounting to something as it last had . . . well never, seems to be going completely amiss. Putin has left, however, his country very little choice. He can't negotiate because he's declared the territory to be part of Mother Russia, and he can't win, as the Russian army is as bad as it has ever been. The only thing he has left, as noted, are nuclear weapons.
Remarkably, Western military analysts do not seem particularly scared even while acknowledging the possibility, which should give us some comfort. Having long pondered a low yield nuclear war, they seem comfortable with one occurring, with only one side using them.
Let's hope it doesn't occur, and that God may help us all.
Господи, помоги нам всем.
Слава Україні!
Oct 4, cont:
Perhaps coincidentally, reports this morning report the movement of weapons from a nuclear missile unit, although at least in a Western army, such weapons would not be tactical nuclear weapons. And Russian ballistic missile was deployed in the Arctic. If these reports are correct, they are likely meant as warnings to the west, which won't and shouldn't be heeded.
Elon Musk, who proposed a peace plan on Twitter, received an enormous backlash, including from Ukrainian officials. He called Crimea part of Russia since the 1780s, and uniting it "Khrushchev's mistake". His plan also called for a UN administered vote on succession of those areas recently claimed to be annexed by Russia.
It was in fact conquered by the Russian Empire in 1783, but it had a distinct ethnic nature at the time. It was its own political subdivision inside the Soviet Union, although many Crimean Tartars were deported by the USSR after World War Two. It voted to leave Russia and join Ukraine in 1991 and had the status of a political subdivision until invaded and occupied by the Russians in 2014.
Musk has been taking a lot of flak on Twitter recently. This comes just after a spat with economist Robert Reich.
Oct 4, cont:
Washington Post headline from today:
Ukraine hammers Russian forces into retreat on east and south fronts
October 5, 2022
Putin signed the annexation order on the partially occupied territories yesterday.
October 5, 2022 cont.
The Ukrainians have broken through at Svatove in Luhansk. Basically, the Russians are coming unglued.
October 8, 2022
A giant truck explosion has damaged the Crimea Bridge, the only land route over the Black Sea to Crimea.
October 9, 2022
Sergei Surovikin, who previously led Russian forces in Syria, has been placed in command of the effort in Ukraine. He'd also previously led the Russian effort in southern Ukraine. Recently, he's been in command of Russia's air and space assets.
October 10, 2022
Russia's reply to the truck bombing of the Crimea Bridge has been a missile offensive on Ukrainian targets, many of which are simply civilian targets.
Russia has effectively reverted to the practices of the Second World War in regard to target acquisition. I've noted it before here, but I regard the targeting of civilian targets from the air, by anybody, during World War Two to have been criminal in nature. Collateral damage, unfortunately, is another matter.
There's no excuse whatsoever for it now.
The truck bombing remains of unclear origin. Nobody has said anything to this effect, but it appears to likely have been a suicide bombing, which is generally out of character for the Ukrainian war effort. Some Russian sources feel that it included Russian dissident elements in its organization, and it may have. It may very well have been an independent or semi-independent act.
October 11, 2022
Iran
Widespread protests in Iran have extended to the nation's refineries.
Russo Ukrainian War
A second day of Russian missile attacks is ongoing in Ukraine, as the Russians do the only thing they seem capable of, lashing out at Ukraine in general.
Russian cyberterrorists launched a cyberattack on U.S. airports yesterday.
October 13, 2022
Uniting two pariah states in one war, Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel are training Russian troops on the use of Ukrainian drones, inside of territory occupied by the Russians in Ukraine.
All the while, protests are spreading in Iran against its government over its treatment of women, effectively, and the loss of life of women at the hands of Iranian authorities.
October 15, 2022
Russia has suspended additional recalls/levies, having brought 220,000 men into service. 260,000 Russian men have fled the country. It appears that conscription/recall was one more thing the Russian government was unable to effectively manage.
October 15, cont.
Two volunteer Russian soldiers, from a former part of the Soviet Union, opened up on their fellow trainees today in Russia, killing eleven of them.
Which gives credence to my theory that the Crimea bridge bombing fits into the long history of auxiliary regional warfare. I.e, I think that will turn out to be the work of Georgians, or Armenians, or Azerbaijan's, rather than Ukrainians.
All of which means Russia is starting to encounter the fruits of its prior repressions in the current attempt to annex and subjugate Ukraine.
October 16, 2022
Ukrainian orchestra conductor Yuri Kerpatenko, Керпатенко Юрій Леонідович, was murdered by Russian soldiers for refusing to perform in an orchestra performance hosted by the Russian in Kherson Oblast.
The Russians are well on their way to making themselves the Nazis of the early 21st Century. And I do mean the Russians, not Putin. Just as the crime of Nazi Germany have tainted the Germans ever since, so will the crimes of the Putinist taint Russia, lest it do something to stop them from carrying on.
October 18, 2022
Russia has hit Kyiv with numerous suicide drones, part of an overall missile and drone attack on Ukrainian population centers.
More and more Russia of 2022 actions like Germany of 1939-1945.
Ethnic tensions among Russian recruits resulted in Tajik soldiers killing Russian compatriots in Belogorod. Their commander had insulted Islam and claimed the invasion of Ukraine a holy war.
This is interesting in that Russia has rapidly reached a state of demoralization within its Army which has surpassed that experienced by the United States during the Vietnam War and which should be a sign that its army may simply come apart.
October 19, 2022
Iran
A Persian edition of the British newspaper The Telegraph ran an article on how to use handguns. It must be noted that given the UK's position on firearms, that's rather ironic.
Protests are spreading and children are now included in them. Factions appear to be developing in the government.
Russo Ukrainian War
It has been confirmed that Iranian Revolutionary Guards are in Crimea as training cadre on Iranian drones, as their own country edges towards a revolution which would leave them as permanent guests of Putin's regime.
The last two days, the Russians have been targeting Ukrainian infrastructure with missile and drone strikes.
The Russians are evacuating Kherson.
October 21, 2022
Conor Kennedy, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, is apparently just back from the war after having served in the Ukrainian Legion.
By his own account, his time in the war was fairly short, although he reports that he liked being a soldier.
The Russians are withdrawing from Kherson. It is believed that they may attempt to blow up a substantial dam in the region in order to cover their withdrawal.
October 22, 2022
Russia is trying to evacuate civilians from Kherson while also pouring in conscripts, fodder for the cannons.
October 24, 2022
From The Pilar interview with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I:
The Russian-Ukraine War is a conflict largely between Eastern Orthodox Christians. How do you feel about this as the spiritual leader of the world’s Eastern Orthodox Christians?
The ongoing war waged by Russia into the sovereign territory of Ukraine has weighed heavily on our mind and heart in recent months. It is true that it has been characterized as Orthodox fratricide, although the consequences have reached many more people, including Ukrainian Catholics as well as other Christian and religious believers, and the repercussions have surely been felt throughout the world.
What is still more painful to us is the fact that the Patriarchate of Moscow has stooped to the level of submitting to political ambitions of the Russian Federation, even endorsing and seemingly blessing this cruel invasion and unjustifiable bloodshed. We have repeatedly condemned the aggression and violence, just as we have fervently and fraternally appealed to the Patriarch of Moscow that he separate himself from political crimes, even if it means stepping down from his throne.
October 25, 2022
Myanmar
The government launched an airstrike on a celebration by the Kachin Independence Organization in the northern state of Kachin, killing at least 80 individuals.
The air force is equipped principally with Russian and Chinese aircraft.
Russo Ukrainian War
Russian diplomats have been yapping about Ukraine preparing to use a "dirty bomb", which it isn't. The fact that they're doing this, however, is raising a lot of speculation about the purpose of this Kremlin story. Something is going on.
It's now clear the recent annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia has caused a split in the Kremlin, with some Russian figures reaching out to the west to try to start negotiations.
October 25, cont.
The US has been hitting Al Shabaab targets in Somalia, including one earlier this week. The one earlier this week was in support of Somali National Army forces.
October 30, 2022
Expanding the drone war, Ukrainian naval drones hit a Russian cruiser yesterday. Russia called off the grain deal in retaliation.
The drone attack was by a group of drones, showing how naval war is rapidly evolving. Effectively, such vessels take the place of PT boats, when PT boats were still viable.
General Alexander Lapin has been relieved of his command of the central area Russian forces in Ukraine.
At least where I live, the World Series, being run on Fox, is featuring a television commercial opposing US aid to Ukraine in the current war.
November 2, 2022
Russo Ukrainian War
The Wagner Group is attempting to recruit fromer Afghan National Army refugee commandos who have taken refuge in Afghanistan. They are resistant to recruitmant, but fear being deported to Afghanistan.
According to the NYT, Soviet commanders recently discussed the topic of the use of nuclear weapons. This without Putin.
This is probably not cause for undue alarm, but it is cause for alarm. Americans might wish to recall that this occured in our military in the 50s and 60s, and it was politicians that percluded their use by frustrated commanders.
North Korea
North Korea, the diapered baby of nations, fired 23 missles into the sea this week.
It's hard to know why this isolated Stalinist theme park does these things, other than to get attention. Whatever it is, it doesn't work. Indeed, the Communist Clown State risks somebody taking it seriously at which point its ongoing existance, or at least that of its leadership, stands to become iffy.
November 3, 2022
Uniting both of the topics above, North Korea is supplying artillery shells to Russia.
Yesterday it launched an ICBM over Japan.
November 8, 2022
Ukranian President Zelensky expressed an openess to peace talks with Russia, on Ukrainian terms, those being:
One more time: restoration of territorial integrity, respect for the U.N. charter, compensation for all material losses caused by the war, punishment for every war criminal and guarantees that this does not happen again
This is not insignificant, although its likely to be dismissed as being so. At least the condition of war crimes trials is likely to be bargained away. This may be an actual bid to open talks, done with Western backing.
Where it would lead is another matter. Maybe Ukrainian territorial integrity, but combined with a promise not to join NATO.
November 9, 2022
While there are fears it may be a ruse, the Russians appear to be withdrawing from Kherson in advance of a Ukrainian offensive.
Do so is wise in light of their inability to defend it, but also telling. Kherson was taken early in the current war and Ukraine will soon advance back to the Dneipr.
November 10, 2022
The United States estimates that both Russia and Ukraine has sustained over 100,000 casualties in the current war.
Note, that's casualties, not deaths.
November 11, 2022
The Ukrainians are in Kherson and will very soon have retaken the complete left bank fo the Dnipr. This is an epic Russian defeat, and the Ukrainians will be in striking distance of Crimea.
Meet The Press, the longest running television program in the United States, premiered in that format. It had previously premiered on radio as American Mercury Presents: Meet the Press on October 5, 1945.
While I very much favor This Week over Meet the Press, it occurs to me that somewhat ironically, as I listed to the audio podcast variant, I listed to it closer to the radio version.
The first guess for the then 30-minute Thursday night program was James Farley, the Postmaster General and DNC Committee chairman. The initial moderator was Martha Roundtree, reprising her role from the radio variant, and the only woman moderator of the show to date. Roundtree hosted the program until 1953.
She died in 1999 in Washington D.C., nearly blind since the 1980s, due to the harsh effects of primitive television lighting.
As noted, I do listen to it, but I'm not a fan of the current moderator, Chuck Todd. Indeed, I was hoping for a second female moderator in the form of Kasi Hunt.
On the same day, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov told a Moscow audience that the means of making an atomic weapons were no longer secret. American intelligence took that to mean that the Soviet Union knew how to build a bomb, but didn't necessarily have one. The Soviets, who had penetrated the American government fairly successfully, suspected that the US was working on such a weapon by 1942 and started their own project accordingly. Nonetheless, they had not developed a bomb by this point themselves, but were only two years away from doing so.
Canada invited Newfoundland to join the Canadian Dominion.
And, we might note, to the tune of $30,000,000, at least if what reports from a recent event I went to indicate. The public, i.e., State of Wyoming money, portion of that is $10,000,000, which is important to keep in mind, although that's wroth pondering in and of itself. That means anyway you look at it that 2/3s of that come from donations, which is amazing, if accurate.
UW's summation of the project is as follows:
A 19,300sf, two-story addition will wrap the northwest end of the existing building. 25,000sf of the existing facility will be renovated creating spaces for clinics, accessible restrooms and improved vertical circulation. The facility expansion and improvements will bring the College of Law into compliance with American Bar Association standards, centralize College of Law clinics with the broader legal education program and allow students, professors, and the community better access to resources. The project will greatly enhance the recruitment of potential students and faculty to the College of Law and support the public legal service the University of Wyoming provides to the citizens of Wyoming.
Super nifty, eh?
Hmmm. . . maybe not so fast.
First, as is so often the case, a little history.
1926 University of Wyoming debate team. I wanted to put up a photo of the 1923 College of Law graduating class, which I think would be the first one, but I couldn't find one.
A big renovation that occurred some years after I went there also was to "bring the College of Law into compliance with American Bar Association standards. . . "
At least if this goes forward, and it seems like it certainly shall, the 1970s styling of the current law school will be abandoned for a more traditional look. That's good, as the current law school is really ugly.
Apparently, the new structure will look like this:
And apparently it will include something called the Alan K. Simpson Center for Clinical and Experiential Learning.1
And as a graduate of the institution, I'm thrilled. . . . well, like a lot of lawyers if you talk to them quietly. . . I'm not.
Why are we doing this? And don't give me the "ABA says. . . ". If it's the case that the school falls out of ABA compliance on a fairly regular basis, there's either something systemically wrong with the school, or the ABA standards.
The law school was founded in 1920 and was the first professional degree program offered by the University of Wyoming, if "profession" is constrained to its original meaning, that being an occupation that professes by its nature, it would include only law, divinity and medicine. That definition is probably too narrow by contemporary terms, but it would still be limited, in spite of the American social trend to define everything as a profession, to the law, divinity, broadly defined medical occupations (human medicine, veterinary medicine dentistry) and accounting. Looked at this way, FWIW, the medical fields have expanded their knowledge and reach, taking over two areas that were formerly practiced by tradesmen (dentistry and veterinary medicine) and accounting has become so complicated that it's a subspecialty of the law in reality.
I'd be tempted, I'd note, to add engineering, which is now a licensed profession. It isn't the only one, however, by any means. Teaching is subject to licensure as well, and so now is being a geologist, which it was not when I graduated back in the dawn of time with a Bachelor's of Science in Geology (the earth was still cooling back then).
So my definition may, I'll confess, be too narrow.
The law school originally held classes on a floor in the old UW library building, meaning that two of the lawyers I once practiced with had gone to the school there. It was moved to a separate building in 1953, and I practiced with some lawyers who went there at that time. The current building was opened in 1977, with additional library space added in 1993, after I went there.
Somewhere I have some photos of the pre 93 building, but I've never uploaded them.
The move in 1953 makes sense, and the move in 1977, even if the latter's 1970s architecture leaves a person less than inspired.
But this?
I don't really know why the University added a law school in 1920, but I can guess. UW is a land grant university and was seen as a big step towards statehood when it was formed in 1886. As that 86 date indicates, it predates statehood. Land grant universities tended to focus on what was deemed necessary for the state. I don't know what classes were offered in the early days, but they probably were ones that focused on agricultural and industrial areas that were vital to the state.
Law is vital to the state.
Indeed, it's vital to a civil society. It's indeed remarkable that lawyers were the only institution in the entire state that bucked the "election stolen" myth when 41 of them, followed by 52, dared to take on Trumps anointed Harriet Hageman, herself a graduate of the University of Wyoming College of Law, on her backing the stolen election lie.
Law isn't the only thing vital to the state, however, and this is frankly a bit much.
For that matter, I thought the post 93 renovations, while nice, were a bit much. You can see a little bit of them here:
This is the large Moot Court Room for the University of Wyoming. Having been in most of the courtrooms in the state I can safely say that its one of the nicest in the entire state.
The back half, or gallery half, of the courtroom has a moveable wall that can open up to allow greater space, or perhaps just more conventional space in the courtroom and also allow the courtroom to function as a lecture hall. Viewed as a courtroom, what we see here in front of us is the bar of the court.
When I went to UW's College of Law it didn't have a moot courtroom at all, now it has two, a large one and a small one (I have yet to see the small one). This particular room was the large classroom at the time. It is quite a facility and I guess it demonstrates how much the physical assets of the College of Law have improved in the past three decades.
According to the University, the College of Law will allow the courtroom to be used by the state courts upon request, if it is not already in use.
Indeed, the degree to which a law school is necessary is pretty open to question now. When I got out of the College of Law in 1990, it was still the case that the state had a state specific section of the bar exam. Since that time, the Supreme Court caused the State Bar to go to the Uniform Bar Exam. This was controversial at the time, as it should have been. The net impact of it was to allow out of state lawyers to easily transfer their licenses to Wyoming, which was pretty easy to do beforehand. Now the floodgates are open. The current exam has no state section whatsoever, and therefore it's just as easy to get a degree from the University of Ohio, or whatever, and hang out a shingle as a "Wyoming lawyer". Indeed, lawyers who are members of any of the state legal organizations will inevitably find out of state, usually Colorado, lawyers in positions in those organizations.
Indeed, it should be noted that part of the propaganda for the law school renovations is
The project will greatly enhance the recruitment of potential students and faculty to the College of Law and support the public legal service the University of Wyoming provides to the citizens of Wyoming.
That really should be read as:
The project will greatly enhance the recruitment of potential out of state students and faculty to the College of Law and support the public legal service the University of Wyoming provides to the citizens of Wyoming in the form of aid to the those on the lower rung of society.
Now, let me note, helping those on the lower run of society is a good thing, but that's what law school clinics do. That's fine.
But recruitment of out of state students? That's a byproduct of a collapsing enrollment base.
Indeed, there have been persistent rumors ever since the Supreme Court mandated the UBE that this was done to try to aid UW and that UW's College of Law wanted it. The thought, the rumor maintains, was that the UBE would help UW graduates go to Colorado or elsewhere, and thereby boost the school by divorcing it from the practice inside the state. If that was the thought, it achieved the polar opposite and didn't really help the school.
It also didn't help the school when a former Dean of the Law and a former, then new, UW President got into an enormous spat over the focus of the school. The students sided with the Dean, but they had little knowledge on what they were really achiving. The Dean, at that time, was really focusing on small time law, seemingly haveing given up on the long history of big time law inside the state. The President wanted to link the law school's focus to the energy industry. The Dean resigned and the President failed.
What all this gets to is this. When the state had a state focused bar exam almost all the students know that they were going right into practice with Wyoming firms and the like. Now, many leave, sometimes nearly half. Going to UW still provides a direct link to Wyoming firms, but not the hard and fast way that it used to. It's signficant, but reduced.
Given all that, the point of having a law school is now somewhat debatable.
Alaska doesn't have one.
Now, this is not to say that most Wyoming lawyers aren't from UW, they still are, which speaks for its survival. And it should also be noted that while law is a profession, it's also sort of a trade, and a law school in Laramie serves as sort of a trade school. Graduaing from there means you are respected by Wyoming firms.
Indeed, the law has long been an occupation for polymaths to a degree, and even more than that, an occupation for lost polymaths. The law is full of people who liked lots of stuff but not one thing in particular, or who couldn't make a living in that one thing they really liked. But to be brutally frank, it's also a haven for people who'd reached career dead ends early in life and found the back alley of the law an easy one, or maybe the only one, to duck into. Sure, there are those who "always wanted to be a lawyer", but right now, of the state's entire population, that's five people.
And the law school also serves as a place that people end up in as they're Wyomingites, have a degree, and have nowhere else to turn to.
Now, that's not intended as a slight to lawyers. Lots of lawyers who really would have preferred to be something else in their young lives are great lawyers. Some of these, indeed many, so take to the law that, as noted in our recent threads on retirement, can't leave it or won't.
But we have a law school and $30,000,000 is a lot of money.
It should be used for something else.
A veterinary school would be my choice. We don't have one, but we sure have a lot of animals in this state, and a lot of those animals are agricultural animals Wyoming veterinary students have to go somewhere else for their studies. That speaks of their dedication, but it also speaks to the state's neglect.
A dental college also strikes me as a good idea. Not every resident in Wyoming has legal problems, but they all have teeth.
Massively expanded law school? Don't need it.
We'll get one anyway.
Footnotes.
1. This would suggest that perhaps the Simpson family or his firm had some role in the donations. That's just a guess. He's a 1958 graduate of the UW College of Law. His father Milward was a 1925 graduate of the Harvard College of Law. His father, William, was also a prominent Wyoming lawyer, having read the law, rather than going to law school, under two other lawyers. Alan Simpson's sons are also lawyers, one of whom is a currently sitting judge.
This is remarkable in that this means that the currently actively practicing members of the family are fourth generation lawyers.
A photo taken before the fall weather started to set in,
My 97 TJ in the background, with a 1960s vintage Bronco I in the foreground.
I've always really like the looks of the first generation Bronco. The TJ is probably a better 4x4, it ought to be as it's thirty years newer, but the Bronco beats it in style.
Note: The other day I did a long post on clothing standards. In pasting together a couple of other lingering posts for a combined new topic (the one on retirement) I ran across this post. Well, bummer, I just posted this one:
As a Wyoming lawyer, but a lawyer, I've watched the slow decline in clothing standards while participating in it.
At my first day of work in 1990 I reported to work wearing a double-breasted Brooks Brothers suit. The first partner who came in was wearing wool khaki trousers and a blue blazer, and he was dressed down. He told me that I didn't have to wear a suit every day.
For years and years, however, I normally wore a tie and clothing appropriate for a tie. Then COVID 19 hit.
For much of the prior spike of the disease (we're in a spike now, of the unvaccinated, but of course the entire state disregarding that) I kept coming in the office. I was often the only one there when we were at the point where the staff didn't have to come in. I pretty much quit dressing in office dress at the time as there wasn't much of a reason to do it. Nobody was coming in, I was there by myself, what the heck.
I've not made it back to normal, and not everyone else has, either.
And of course normal in 2019 was not the same thing it was in 1999, or 2009. We'd already slid down the dressing scale in the back of the office, where I am. I never used to wear blue jeans in the office, but by 2019 I already was a fair amount. Starting with COVID 19, I am all the time.
One of the things about that is that in 2019 I already had a selection of older dress clothes that were wearing out, I hadn't replaced. Probably the inevitability of their demise would have caused me to replace them on in to 2020. But I didn't have to. Additionally, the long gap in time meant that I pretty much didn't do anything about the fact I'm down to two suits now.
Two suits isn't much if you are a trial lawyer.
Well, running up to the trial, I was going to go down to Denver and get new ones. But I ran out of time. I still haven't done it.
I need to.
I'll confess that part of my reluctance to get new suits is that I'm 58 years old. I don't wear suits daily at work, and I'm not one of those guys who is going to claim "I'm going to work until I'm 80". Any new suit I get now will still be in fighting shape when I'm 68, and that's reasonably enough, but to my cheap way of thinking, emphasized by the fact that I have two kids in college, its something that is both easy for me to put off, and in the back of my mind I tend to think "maybe I won't really need those if . . . "
On this day in 1972 the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September attacked the Israeli quarters at the Olympic village in Munich, killing two athletes and taking nine hostages.
Black September was named for the failed Palestinian attempt to overthrow the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in September 1970, an event which was a Palestinian disaster. This event itself led to the Palestinians being expelled from Jordan and going to Lebanon. The organization's connection with the Palestinian Liberation Organization has never been clear, but it is clear that there was one. In 1973 the PLO caused the shutting down of the organization, whose violent acts had not been successful in engendering any support for the Palestinian cause.
This is an event I can recall happening, and oddly enough I believe I learned about it after the family went swimming on a Wednesday afternoon, something that was pretty common for us to do. Indeed, we swam a lot during the summer, and almost always did on Saturday afternoons and often on Sunday afternoons. It wasn't a tradition I kept up with my own family, but I probably should have. The day prior Mark Spitz had won his seventh gold medal at the Olympics, the first athlete to do so.
Mark Spitz at the 1972 Olympics.
Spitz, then only 22 years of age, retired from swimming after the 72 Olympics, but competed again in 199w after filmmaker Bud Greenberg offered him $1,000,0000 if he made the team that year. He failed to do so by only two seconds.
Spitz had intended to become a dentist, but the Olympics interrupted that pursuit, and he did not resume it after 1992, other opportunities having developed. He married the next year and the couple have two children.
First of all, let me note that I’m not accusing Trump of being in the mob.
I just found this interesting, and I unfortunately find it a sad and interesting look at how things were (hopefully not still are) in business, on the East Coast.
Back in December 2019, not all that long ago really, and running up to the election that following year, Rolling Stone published an article written by Seth Hettena entitled:
The Real-Life Mob Families of ‘The Irishman’? Donald Trump
Knew Them
The president and his associates have long histories with
the Mafia figures who populate Scorsese's film
The article was written because The Irishman had just been released on television.1
Rolling Stone noted how the central characters in the film were now all dead, quite of a few of them because of mob hits, which also wasn't what the film was about. It was about two very elderly men who are still living. One of them was Donald Trump. As the article states:
Well, many still remember. One person who knew the real-life mob families that show up in The Irishman is President Donald Trump.
And it goes on:
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Trump’s buildings and his
casinos attracted underworld figures like “Fat Tony” Salerno, the
Fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping boss of the Genovese crime family. Salerno,
who’s portrayed in the film by Domenick Lombardozzi, supplied the fast-drying
concrete that built Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Salerno also
controlled the local concrete workers union, and when a strike shut down
construction in Manhattan in 1982, the one of the few buildings that wasn’t
affected was Trump Tower.
The Irishman is based on the 2003 book I Heard You Paint
Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, by
Charles Brandt. (The title is a reference to the special kind of painting
Sheeran did that left his victims’ brains on the wall.) The book is full of
characters who didn’t make it into the movie, but they did surface in Trump’s
world. One is Philadelphia mob boss Philip Testa, the “chicken man” whose 1981
murder by nail bomb Bruce Springsteen sings about in the song “Atlantic City.”
Testa’s son sold Trump premium land that became a casino parking lot. Another
figure in the book is Testa’s successor, Nicodemus “Little Nicky” Scarfo, whose
associates tried to lease Trump land for his casino in Atlantic City — until
New Jersey casino regulators quashed the deal.
And it goes on:
In 1983, the year Trump Tower opened its doors, the future president reportedly met the Genovese family boss. The common thread linking Salerno and Trump was Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who represented both men. Cohn, the heavy-lidded henchman to Senator Joseph McCarthy, introduced the two men in his Manhattan townhouse, according to the late journalist Wayne Barrett. Under oath, Trump swore that wasn’t true, but he also swore that he didn’t know that Cohn represented Salerno, a fact that had been widely reported in Cohn’s obituary a few years earlier.
And it’s not just Trump who has links to the world depicted in The Irishman. It also overlapped with some of the figures in Trump’s world, past and present. Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, also met Salerno when he visited Cohn’s Manhattan brownstone. This was in 1979, and Stone had been tapped to run Ronald Reagan’s political operation in New York. Cohn, dressed in a silk bathrobe, introduced Stone to the mobster and then offered to help him with the Reagan campaign. Cohn’s advice would change the course of Stone’s life: “What you need is Donald Trump.” Cohn sent the young political operative off to meet the up-and-coming real estate developer. It was a path that would lead 40 years later to Stone’s conviction last month on charges of lying to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks.
Ooo. . . ick.
And there's more:
In March 1986, Giuliani announced that a grand jury had indicted Salerno and others on charges that included rigging construction bids. Trump Plaza, a co-op apartment building on Manhattan’s East Side, was specifically mentioned in the 29-count indictment. Salerno arranged things so his concrete company got a $7.8 million contract at Trump Plaza. It just so happens that while these bids were being rigged, the building was under construction, right around the time that Trump met Salerno in Cohn’s townhouse. Even so, the indictment makes it clear that the bid-rigging occurred without the knowledge of developers.
The FBI had uncovered the concrete bid-rigging scheme at Trump Plaza by secretly bugging Mafia homes and hangouts, including the Palma Boys Social Club, where DeNiro and his “rabbi” Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci, sit down with Salerno in Scorsese’s film. Giuliani, by his own account, listened to countless hours of secretly recorded conversations of mobsters, and he reportedly was able to pull off a convincing impression of the mobster’s scratchy voice. “When you listen to those guys for thousands of hours, you can’t help but sound like them,” Giuliani once said.
Well that explains a lot.
But it wasn't limited to Trump, another was. . . Joe Biden.
Trump wasn’t the only one who knew the people in the world
of The Irishman. In addition to being a hit man, Sheeran was president of a
local Teamsters union in Delaware. In 1972, shortly before Election Day, a
prominent lawyer who was very big in the Democratic Party came to see him.
There were some political ads that would run in the local newspaper every day
in the last week before election, and the lawyer didn’t want them to run. So
Sheeran set up a picket line outside the newspaper, and he knew the Teamsters
union drivers who delivered the paper wouldn’t cross it. So the ads were never
delivered, and on Election Day, Delaware had a new senator: a young man named
Joe Biden. After that, Sheeran said Biden’s door was always open. “You could
reach out for him, and he would listen,” he wrote.
The Biden story isn’t in the movie. There wasn’t room enough
for everyone to make it into Scorsese’s epic Mafia biopic, but Salerno does —
and with good reason. Salerno ran the most powerful of New York’s five Mafia
families. “I’m the fucking boss, that’s who I am,” Salerno once boasted in a
secretly recorded conversation. “Connecticut is mine; New Jersey is mine.”
Nothing got built in New York without Salerno dipping his meaty hand into the
till.
I think that last line is correct. The Mafia was thick into unions, and it controlled a lot. Unfortunately, that means that it dealt with conventional businessmen and politicians a lot as well. This is foreign to a lot of the country, however, and it really never develops in the news, beyond the rumor stage, and it isn't likely to now.
Footnotes:
1. To my surprise, I haven't done a review of the excellent film yet. I'll have to do one. It is well worth watching.
2. According to an article in Politico by David Cay Johnston:
There was something a little peculiar about the construction
of Trump Tower, and subsequent Trump projects in New York. Most skyscrapers are
steel girder construction, and that was especially true in the 1980s, says John
Cross of the American Iron & Steel Institute. Some use pre-cast concrete.
Trump chose a costlier and in many ways riskier method: ready-mix concrete.
Ready-mix has some advantages: it can speed up construction, and doesn’t
require costly fireproofing. But it must be poured quickly or it will harden in
the delivery truck drums, ruining them as well as creating costly problems with
the building itself. That leaves developers vulnerable to the unions: the
worksite gate is union controlled, so even a brief labor slowdown can turn into
an expensive disaster.
Salerno, Castellano and other organized crime figures
controlled the ready-mix business in New York, and everyone in construction at
the time knew it. So did government investigators trying to break up the mob,
urged on by major developers such as the LeFrak and Resnick families. Trump
ended up not only using ready-mix concrete, but also paying what a federal
indictment of Salerno later concluded were inflated prices for it – repeatedly
– to S & A Concrete, a firm Salerno and Castellano owned through fronts,
and possibly to other mob-controlled firms. As Barrett noted, by choosing to
build with ready-mix concrete rather than other materials, Trump put himself
“at the mercy of a legion of concrete racketeers.”
Salerno and Castellano and other mob families controlled
both the concrete business and the unions involved in delivering and pouring
it. The risks this created became clear from testimony later by Irving Fischer,
the general contractor who built Trump Tower. Fischer said concrete union
“goons” once stormed his offices, holding a knife to throat of his switchboard
operator to drive home the seriousness of their demands, which included no-show
jobs during construction of Trump Tower.
But with Cohn as his lawyer, Trump apparently had no reason
to personally fear Salerno or Castellano—at least, not once he agreed to
pay inflated concrete prices. What Trump appeared to receive in return was
union peace. That meant the project would never face costly construction or
delivery delays.
Kleo is a new, just released, German Netflix series. I literally stumbled on it, as I haven't watched Netflix for a while, but I was temporarily idled due to medical fun and games and there was literally nothing worth watching on regular television. I started watching it as it the summation of it on Netflix suggested it'd be the sort of movie I might like. I like spy films and mysteries, and I'm not wholly adverse to shoot 'em ups, even when, or perhaps particularly when, they're superficial.
Well, it exceeded my expectation.
Set in the 1980s, the eight part series is frankly very difficult to describe. It follows the story of East German female Stasi (East German state police) assassin Kleo Straub as she goes from being an "unofficial agent" of the Stasi whose job is killing targets they designate, to being set up and imprisoned, to being released in 1989 as East Germany begins to collapse, at which time she's dedicated to finding those who wrongly accused her and killing them.
And that's all just in the first episode.
Added to that, we have a failed West German policeman who was present in The Big Eden, a nightclub, the night that Kleo performs her last killing for the DDR, who can never get quite over it and who, upon Kleo's release, realizes that she's the woman he identified as the killer the night of the murder.
All of that doesn't do it justice, however.
The film features far more twists and turns than most spy movies, and makes the tricky loyalties in the John Wick films look like child's play. Kleo, the assassin herself, played by Jella Haase, is impossible not to like, even though she's clearly partially unhinged and trying to get through life with a badly damaged soul. Sven Petzold, the detective, is dogged in his pursuit, but he's also hapless and somewhat incompetent in his job. Indeed, as an example, it's obvious about halfway through the film that Sven at first deeply likes Kleo and then is falling in love with her even though she's so messed up that he has to at one point make her promise to quit killing people, which she does simply because he requests it, not because she has any real concept of right and wrong beyond being a dedicated Communist.
None of this, however, comes close to actually describing the plot.
In terms of its history, which is why we review certain films here, this film does a good job of capturing the atmosphere of the times in Germany and Europe. The East Germans, whom in this film are mostly those associated with the Communist government, can hardly gasp what is happening to them as their government collapses. As many of them are its agents, they're dedicated to an institution that's collapsing for the most part, while some of them are rapidly moving on into capitalism. The West Germans are pretty willing to take advantage of the situation. More than that, however, West Germany is shown to have become a multicultural post Volk society, whereas East Germany has not, something even demonstrated by the actors chosen in the film. All of the East German characters are figures that we'd recognize from classic films involving the Germans of World War Two, even though that is not what they are portraying. They're all very German (although some of the actors actually are not). The West Germans, however, appear not only more modern and 1980s "cool", but many of them are clearly not ethnically German, that most obviously being the case for West German intelligence agent Min Sun, who is played by Chinese-born, but German raised, Yun Huang.
Backgrounds are correct for the period, including the funky German techno music that plays a role in the series. Clothing is as well, with that also providing a difference between the East and the West. Firearm wise the maker was careful to equip the East Germans with Soviet type handguns, whereas the West Germans carry the iconic German PPK.
The film includes reference to actual characters from the period, and not just in the greater sense of being background for the times. The head of the East German police is a character in the film and not fictionalized as to name, for instance. Margot Honecker, Erich Honecker's third wife, shows up as a character. These insertions are done so well, that offhand references to fictional events become difficult to distinguish from ones that didn't happen, as in references to the "woman who attempted to kill Reagan" and the details of that event, which never occurred.
This being a German movie, it should be noted that there is seemingly an obligation that Haase be seen topless at some point. In this case, the nudity is basically limited to a single scene, but it's quite graphic. There must be a clause in the contracts for German actresses that they have to appear nude at some point in a film.
Anyhow, It's very well done and with watching.
As a note, this is a German language movie, but it has well done English subtitles. An option to listen to it with British English dubbing is available, but I don't care for that much personally. The subtitles are very close translations of the German, with departures due to German idioms that don't granslate perfectly.
Knights Templar playing the ancient game of chess.
American Bobby Fischer became the International chess champion in Reykjavík, Iceland, following the withdrawal from match 21 by Soviet player Boris Spassky.
I can dimly recall this, as it was really followed at the time, even though I was only nine years old. Then, as now, it was hard for me to really grasp the interest in this event. I like the game, but as an international sporting event, if that's what we'd call it, it's a little hard to grasp.
The Cold War must principally explain it.
Fischer's prize was $154,677.50, a substantial haul nor or then.
Fischer was an odd character and hard to like. He was anti-Semitic and became a Holocaust denier, even though his mother was Jewish. After the 1972 victory, he didn't play a competitive game in public for another 20 years, although he did play against MIT's Greenblatt computer in 1977, beating it three times. In the early 1990s he replayed Spassky in Yugoslavia, where he won again but where he also didn't seem to have evolved in the game. Spassky remained friends with Fischer throughout his life and introduced him to a known serious love interest of Fischer's, with that latter relationship not lasting, not too surprisingly.
The Yugoslavia match violated economic sanctions in place and made Fischer a fugitive from justice from the United States. He lived in various places before going back to Reykjavík, where he died in 2005 at age 64. A member of the Worldwide Church of God for much of his life, just prior to his death he became intensely interested in Catholicism and requested a Catholic funeral.
The United States dropped its claims on the Swan Islands in favor of Honduras.
The big news in Casper was that the Texas Company, generally referred to as Texaco, was coming to Casper. It would build a refinery on the edge of what became Evansville, referred to in these articles as the lands belonging to the Evans Holding Company.
The refinery was one of three in operation here when I was young, including the giant Standard Oil Refinery and the Sinclair Refinery, the latter of which had been built originally by Husky Petroleum. Only the Sinclair Refinery remains in operation. The Texaco refinery closed in 1982. The Standard Oil Refinery closed for good in 1991.
A committee issued its report finding Admiral Kimmel and General Short at fault for failing to coordinate their defenses or taking appropriate measures, leading to the disaster at Pearl Harbor.
This significant item, or series of items, below:
Today in World War II History—January 24, 1942: Battle of Makassar Strait—first US naval surface action in Asian waters since Spanish-American War: US destroyers and US & Dutch aircraft sink six Japanese ships at Balikpapan, Borneo. US Flying Tigers P-40s shoot down 12 planes over Rangoon, Burma. New song in Top Ten: “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.”
The Battle of Makassar Strait was significant for the reasons noted, although the Japanese land action at Balikpapan was successful.
The Germans relieved a Soviet encirclement at Sukhinichi in a type of action that would remain common for the rest of the war.
Peru broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy and Japan.
Abie's Irish Rose premiered on NBC. The radio comedy involves a wealthy Jewish widower whose son begins to court, and then secretly marries, an Irish Catholic girl. The theme had been a long-running popular one and this was a radio adaptation of a play that had first premiered on May 23, 1922, and then made into a film in 1928.
It would be made into a film again in 1946.
The play, written by Anne Nichols, was loosely based on her own story, although in her case she had been raised in a strict Baptist family and married an Irish Catholic man. It was an enduring American theme had appeared before, in other settings, by other authors, and would continue to be later. For example, O. E. Rölvaag had included it in his sequel to Giants In the Earth, Peter Victorious, but with the Irish Catholic girl marrying a Norwegian Lutheran. It'd repeated directly in Brooklyn Bridge, the 1990s television show set in the 1950s and would, in a different twist, be repeated in the film Brooklyn, also set in the 1950s, with an Irish immigrant woman and an Italian American man, both Catholics but of different ethnic backgrounds. In some altered form, perhaps involving somebody of Hispanic origin, it's probably ripe to be repeated.
Let me first note, I really like NPR in general, and the NPR Politics podcast in particular. I'm a regular listener. I don't buy the "liberal bias" line about NPR at all, and generally find that it has good, straight forward, reporting.
I haven't been too thrilled by the addition of Nena Totenberg, however.
Seventy-seven year old Totenberg has a reputation for Supreme Court reporting going way back. And while I complain about the top of everything being vested in the Boomers, I will note that Totenberg is a real exception in that most of the hosts of Politics are Millenials, which is very refreshing. I have no one specific thing, other than I just feel that Totenberg is an example of an antiquated view on the Court somehow. A little snarky, sort of inside baseball, kind of approach to somebody who maybe has been around the Court a little too long.
Maybe.
Anyhow, there's a case in front of the United States Supreme Court regarding whether the 2nd Amendment provision regarding the right to "keep and bear" arms means you can carry them concealed or not. This is the episode:
In addition to Totenberg NPR invited Joseph Blocher to speak.
And this, dear reader, gives us a prime example of everything wrong about press Supreme Court coverage.
I've already listed my somewhat vague complaints about Totenberg, which are admittedly perhaps completely unfair.
Blocher is a law professor, and as such, however, his opinion here is, well, much like a law professor's.
Being a law professor is often an exercise in evading the practice of law Far too often law professors walked through the doors of a law firm, and then fifteen minutes later went crying out the front door after finding out that it involved hard, hard, nasty brutish, work.
So they entered a law school where they don't have to deal with the reality of law as it really is, in the nasty real world, where real people are.
Which often makes their views on big topics in the law 1) irrelevant; 2) worthless, or 3) dangerous.
This time it was pretty questionable.
Now, Blocher, in looking him up, and about whom I know nothing at all personally, worked on the Heller case, as a practicing lawyer, which is why he is probably a professor in the Duke Center for Firearms Law. Heller was the big case that found that the 2nd Amendment was incorporated into the full Bill of Rights and that it conveyed an individual right.
Having a Center for Firearms Law means, however, that you have a center for things most students don't deal with in their real law practices. Right there, that's worthy of a complaint from a practicing lawyer. A Center For Small Claims Court Law would be much more useful. A Center For Firearms Law sounds too much like a Center For The Way Law Professors Feel The World Should Be.
M'eh.
Anyhow, Blocher is a top dog there.
Now again, I know nothing about him. Just looking him up, it looks like he's built a nice career with this being a partial niche in it. He graduated from law school in 2006. That's long enough ago to have entered picked up the ability to really practice as a real lawyer, which takes about a decade after graduation for some field, and less time for others. I.e., to be able to practice on your own.
He then clerked for a year.
Mm. . . . .
Clerking had a somewhat prestigious reputation when I graduated from law school, and it still does, but it's evolved over time. Clerks used to serve one hitch for one judge and then be booted out into the cold real world a year later.
And that's what his first clerkship did.
First?
Yes, first.
We're starting to see the phenomenon of multiple clerkships now This is pretty much a new thing. Also a new thing, FWIW, is permanent clerkship. I.e., clerks who make that a career, which Blocher has not done, I'd note.
Blocher then went to work for almost a year. . . yes, almost a year, for a law firm, where he helped brief Heller. And then he went back into a second clerkship. Then, after a year of doing that, he became a law professor at Duke.
So he practiced law from September 2007 until June 2008.
This demonstrates everything wrong with law schools. Less than a year of actual practice? Nobody should be teaching law to people who will practice it who hasn't been in the trenches. A law professor teaching law to students who will be lawyers with less than a year of practice is like giving the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a guy whose strategic experience is limited to paying Stratego.
So, again, me'h.
Now, some would immediately note, and some lawyers at that, that to teach a position in a law school surely shouldn't have to mean that you've been a practicing lawyer. The professors in the physics department didn't built atomic bombs, probably, before going to work there. And that's quite right.
But law isn't like those sorts of disciplines. Professing disciplines, of the traditional type, save for the clergy really require you to be out in the muck before you really have an appreciation of what's going on. Those teaching medicine should have seen patients, for example.
And the law belongs to the people. It's easy enough to imagine that you know all about a legal topic, but you don't know anything about it until you've actually practiced law. A think like an individual right to carry a firearm may seem like something you can grasp through statistics and study, but until you are dealing with somebody whose ex spouse is threatening to beat them to death. . . well you don't.
Well, NPR, with Nena and Skippy, went on to try to consider the history of concealed carry and the law.
Totenberg did a good job, in spite of my criticism of her, in giving the history of the recent change in the approach of the states. Need to carry did use to be a requirement in most states in recent years, but has really changed. So that was correct. Where the show dropped ball, however, was here:
TOTENBERG: You know, if you really want an example of how much has changed in the law, I remember Chief Justice Burger in the 1980s, at some point in the 1980s - and he was a conservative Nixon appointee to the court - saying that the idea that you had an individual right to carry a gun was really just silly. He dismissed it. He had an interview with Parade magazine, and he simply dismissed it out of hand. And that was the absolutely accepted, in the legal profession, idea at the time. That has - we have seen not a sea change; we've seen a typhoon - you know, just obliterate that idea now. And oddly, it comes at a time when we have increased mass shootings and more dangerous weapons. So it is, you know - it's sort of - if this weren't radio, I would be gesturing that - my two hands banging up against each other. RASCOE: It's counterintuitive. TOTENBERG: It's very counterintuitive.
Okay, first of all, it is simply not the case that the legal profession universally thought there was no individual right to carry a firearm. In fact, it was hotly debated as there wasn't a case that had clearly decided it. But the one case that did exist, from the 1930s, strongly suggested such a right was in fact there. That results oriented opinion went as far as it could in restricting the one thing before it, a sawed off shotgun in the hands of a felon, but even in that, it suggested the right was there.
Now, at this point, Skippy leaped in to correct Nena, right?
No.
Let me also note that none of the "conservative" judges of the Burger era were all that conservative. Following the Second World War the Court became the domain of the left, and conservative judges of that time simply weren't all that conservative. It was simply a liberal court era. The first real conservative anyone nominated was Bork, who failed to gain a seat after the Senate, with Joe Biden playing a prominent role in it, skewered him for being conservative. That act held back an evolving conservative evolution on the Court which had, in part, been inspired by an activist Court simply making things up.
This doesn't mean Burger was a flaming liberal, either. That's not true at all. Rather, he was conservative in context. As Totenberg notes, he was a Nixon appointee, and Nixon was a conservative in context. Nixon wasn't Reagan, in other words.
But there were lawyers around, even as far back as that, and further, who felt there was an individual right to keep and bear arms. And there were those outside of the legal field who certainly did as well. It was 1993, for example, when Jeffrey R. Snyder penned A Nation of Cowards, a blistering critique of the gun control culture, which ran in the journal National Affairs.
Which gets us to two things.
The Constitution enumerates certain rights, certain rights can justifiably be implied from it that aren't enumerates, and reasonable restraints on the rights that are present or implied can be imposed. But in the long era following the Second World War and up until the last decade, some still were.
That's a subversion of democracy at worst and leads to contempt of the law at best. Under Chief Justice Roberts that trend has been retreating, and it may now have actually ended.
Does that mean you have a right to carry a firearm outside of your home without government permission? Certainly Does that mean that you have a right to carry it concealed? That's much less clear. Can some restraint be imposed? Again, certainly. Can they effectively be so strict as to keep you from carrying anywhere except the game fields and the range? No. Can the government insert itself into knowing what you are doing? Again, probably.
Should NPR get a new Court reporter? I wish they would.
Should Professor Blocher be tossed out on his butt and made to practice real law for a decade? Undoubtedly, and for his own good.
Should Duke do away with the Center for Firearms Law and create a Center For Small Claims Court Practice? It should.
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