Semester Two of the year-long Con-Law class at SFLS got off to a rousing start last evening as we started getting into some of the more interesting cases.
Loving v. Virginia (1967), was presented by a soft-spoken, young Asian woman who described how this married couple left Virginia and went to live Washington, D.C., but then wanted to come back, and had to file a lawsuit in federal court to do so.
Why'd they do that, I asked.
Because they were told by a prosecutor that they wouldn't have to serve their jail sentence if they got on a bus.
I've had lots of clients who would have preferred a deal like that to the one they got, I observed. What's wrong with a deal like that?
She was a bit stuck.
Was there something about this couple, perhaps?
She was still stuck.
What was the racial make-up of this couple, I asked.
One was white and the other was black, she noted.
Apparently she hadn't wanted to note that, or wanted me to drag it out of her.
Oh, so that's what the situation was. How did this lead to a Supreme Court case.
Pause....
Do you mind if I help your out?
It's okay.
How about that the couple were prosecuted under a statute of Virginia that made it a crime for people of different races to marry and that's why they got prosecuted, convicted, sentenced to jail, and run out of the state? It was a crime in America for a person of one race to marry a person of another race, right up until 1967, which is yesterday on the Con-Law Time-scale. This was a rule of white supremacy, to protect a race.
And so the Supreme Court finally found such laws to be Equal Protection violations.
Why did it take the Supreme Court so long to reach this remarkable, groundbreaking, conclusion, considering that California's Supreme Court had it beat by a good 20 years in coming to the same conclusion?
Because the Court was still reeling from its decision in Brown v. Board (1954), the public school integration case, against the 'massive resistance' of the old South. Felix Frankfurter mentioned this to Learned Hand in a letter. I believe I read that in Gerald Guenther's masterful bio of Hand, whose clerk he had been in 1954 before becoming a distinguished Constitutional Law professor at Stanford, where he organized a much admired casebook on the subject.
I've put the courtesy copy of the Guenther & Sullivan (Kathleen M., the former Stanford Law dean) casebook, sent by the publisher, in the law school library, incidentally. It's useful to see other slants on the same topic. Different teachers have different takes on the same body of work. The casebook we're using is Cohen & Varat, also very well-organized, one subject leading into another smoothly.
***
Another student presented Washington v. Glucksberg (1997) 521 US 702, having to do with whether Washington State could prohibit physicians from assisting patients who wanted to die. With conservative Chief Justice Rehnquist writing for a unanimous Court, the answer was that the state could. Not that the five concurrers necessarily agreed with his reasoning, of course.
By what right does the state take from you the decision whether to live or die? Maybe the state didn't do that. Maybe the state simply prevented you from getting help from your doctor.
Has anyone in the class (of 38) seen "Million Dollar Baby?" I asked?
The new movie starring Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, and Hilary Swank? Any one of whom is worth the $10 for a ticket to watch? One student who's always very alert to what's going on around her in general had seen it. They say it's one of the year's best. It is a good story, very well done, but prepare yourself to do more thinking than usual after a movie, and not to be overjoyed at the ending. Other than that, it's terrific.
If you want to see a great movie that'll make you laugh, buy "My Cousin Vinnie," a classic courtroom drama that even the trial lawyers like. They use it in their closing arguments the way an earlier generation used Perry Mason. I liked Anatomy of a Murder, the book, by Robert Travers, myself, and to a lesser extent, the movie, starring Lee Remick and Ben Gazzara. They won't be on the Final. It's a law class, not a film class.
Washington v. Glucksberg will be on the Final, however, I announced with a smile. I'm going to have to figure out a way to work it in. This shouldn't be difficult in light of the bittersweet movie, that Clint Eastwood calls a love story, which is exactly what it is, although some call it a movie about boxing.
Like Romeo and Juliet is a story about suicide.
I knew a San Francisco police officer who looked more like Dirty Harry than Clint Eastwood did, who played a San Francisco cop and made cars flying through the air, and "Make my day," famous.
The real cop took a lot of kidding over it. He loved it.
Cops love to be portrayed as heroes in the movies.
Sometimes they are real heroes in real life.
They live for that.
Can you imagine the fantasy life of a cop?
Sometimes they get carried away...then things go haywire.
Undercover narcs getting too heavily into the role.
Vice cops getting carried away with their power over the b-girls, as in 647b CPC.
Gambling cops getting too involved with gamblers, and on and on.
Gang cops and gangs, and people behind gands...it boggles the mind.
We take different things from the stories we read.
You can read Katie Couric's interview of Clint Eastwook about Million Dollar Baby here.
Remember, it's definitely on the Final. Washington v. Glucksberg. You read it here.
I may change the names, and alter the facts.
No sense making the crossword puzzles too easy, is there?
No fun in that.
Lawyers like challenges to the mind.
That's why they become lawyers.
Lawyers are people who think the world runs on the rational basis test.
Later they find out there's no such thing, but far be it from me to disabuse them of one of the few remaining Conlaw notions they believe is real, because RBT appears in their outlines, and in so many of the opinions.
RBT is like that Wall of separation between church and state.
Now you see it, now you don't.
One of the Court's three-card monte games, without the walnut shells.
But you didn't read that here, please.
I'm liable to get thrown out of the Conlawprof's Club...