This morning, on NPR’s Morning Edition, there was a commentary on the war in Iraq by Douglas W. Kmiec, Dean and St. Thomas More Professor at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. I transcribed the commentary, entitled, “A Just War“:
“The war is underway and it is just. The road to Baghdad is treacherous, but failing to defend freedom would be worse. As President Bush summarized, ‘In an age of unseen enemies who make no formal declarations of war, waiting to act after America’s foes have struck first is not self-defense, it is suicide.’
Despite constant protests, the war in Iraq is consistent with the UN charter, the Constitution, and moral calculus. One can prayerfully say that it would be joyous if war had been avoided or over in a week. Amen!
But that is to say nothing, absolutely nothing, about Iraq’s hundreds of tons of chemical agents and Hussein’s history of killing thousands of his own people. It ignores Iraq’s continued production and weaponization of anthrax and other biological toxins and the inevitability that someday, Saddam will obtain fissile material for his own nuclear bomb. It also ignores the shameful and unlawful manner in which Saddam fights and hides behind women and children now. Peace is civil order mediated by law; it is not the docile acceptance of terms dictated by a bully.
Already we have routed terrorists with links to Al-Qaeda in northern Iraq, reasonably confirming that Iraq was the willing enabler for the outlaws responsible for deadly attacks on our soil and the continuing jihad directed against our citizens worldwide. Only those who insist upon avoiding war at all costs, including the cost of freedom and continuing fear, can rationalize that away.
The record of Saddam Hussein is one of aggression and material breach: his original invasion of Kuwait in 1991, his duplicitous rebuff of the conditions of truce in 1992, and his most recent gamesmanship on UN Resolution 1441.
Did we need additional evidence to see the real possibility of a conflagration far worse than World War Two? Absolutely not. No just war theory should be misunderstood to say otherwise.”
Besides the professor’s ignorant repeating of the lie that the presence of Al-Qaeda backed terrorists in the northern no-fly zone — a zone controlled and patrolled by the US and Great Britain for the past decade — “reasonably confirm[s]” that Osama and Saddam are in bed with one another, his allegations of a factual basis for Iraq’s “hundreds of tons of chemical agents” and their “continued production and weaponization of anthrax” indicates that he’s either holding back information from the US and the UN, or that he’s talking out of his ass.
For the dean of a respected law school to throw in his lot with the 50% of ignorant Americans who think Iraq was responsible for the September 11th terrorist attacks further shows that these are the words of an ideologue who has twisted definitions to serve his own partisan purposes. His idea of a trumped-up “just” and “preventive” war does not differ much from the justifications which inspired the Crusades.
Although it may seem that the director of a prominent Catholic institution in the US would be speaking with some doctrinal authority, it seems the US Conference of Catholic Bishops might disagree with the Professor. They have expressed their opinions in a message dated November 13, 2002:
Based on the facts that are known to us, we continue to find it difficult to justify the resort to war against Iraq, lacking clear and adequate evidence of an imminent attack of a grave nature. With the Holy See and bishops from the Middle East and around the world, we fear that resort to war, under present circumstances and in light of current public information, would not meet the strict conditions in Catholic teaching for overriding the strong presumption against the use of military force.
Not an out-and-out condemnation, but certainly not the ringing endorsement of “just war” expressed by the Professor. And Kmiec’s proclamations are definitely not in keeping with the following statements made by Vatican representatives:
Joaquin Navarro-Valls, Vatican spokesman, Interview with Catholic News Service, March 5, 2003: “The Vatican sees the United Nations as the guarantor of international law, and so it would view any action outside U.N. authorization as very dangerous….[T]he concept of ‘preventive war’ is not found in the moral principles of just-war theory — not even if it is authorized by a vote of the United Nations.”
Archbishop Jean Louis-Tauran, Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, Conference at Rome hospital, February 24, 2003: “A war of aggression would be a crime against peace….No rule of international law authorizes one or more states to intervene unilaterally….The resources of international law must be fully employed, and the consequences of an armed intervention on the civilian population must be carefully weighed.”
Archbishop Celestino Migliore, Permanent Representative of the Holy See to the United Nations, Address to the U.N. Security Council, February 20, 2003: “The Holy See is convinced that even though the process of inspection appears somewhat slow, it still remains an effective path that could lead to the building of consensus which, if widely shared by Nations, would make it almost impossible for any Government to act otherwise, without risking international isolation.”
So, the US bishops, as well as the Pope’s political and secular representatives, have more-than-hinted that this is not a just war. That didn’t keep this American from expressing his freedom of speech. Good for him! I just wonder if he realizes that the Church, which provides his employment, is not a democracy.
I have a great deal of respect for The Volokh Conspiracy because, for me, the contributors to that site provide a strong, well-resoned counterbalance to my instinctively liberal tendencies. One of Eugene Volokh’s consistent bugbears is fuzzily-presented polling results and flimsy statistical analysis.
It surprised me to see Juan Non-Volokh’s praise for a study in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal on the “lack of viewpoint diversity” at University of Michigan’s School of Law — the school at the heart of yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments.
The study was conducted by Northwestern Law Professor John O. McGinnis and Columbia University law Student Matthew Schwartz, and as far as I can tell, it was first published in the Wall Street Journal. My comments are based on Juan Non-Volokh’s quote of this excerpt from the study [1]:
We reviewed all federal campaign contributions over $200 by professors at the top 22 law schools from 1994 to 2000. During that time, close to a quarter of these law professors contributed to campaigns — a proportion far greater than the average citizen. The proof is stark: as the Anglican church was once described as the Tory Party at prayer, the legal academy today is best seen as the Democratic Party at the lectern. America splits evenly between the GOP and Democrats, but 74% of the professors contribute primarily to Democrats. Only 16% do so to Republicans.
Juan Non-Volokh continues:
At Michigan, they report, the differential is eight-to-one. Moreover, they suggest their study underreports the lack of ideological diversity because most campaign contributions to Republican candidates come from only a handful of schools.
These are just some of the problems with the summary of the study quoted here:
- …contributions over $200: Put this in context for us. Is $200 the minimum donation requiring an individual report to the FEC? (Yes, as of 1996 law.) Are these single contributions or aggregate? Is each campaign counted or each donor? Are they for individual candidates or parties or committees? Was the data compiled from committee reports of receipts or from individual reports of donations? (These are reported to the FEC on different forms and different schedules, and may easily be separated when defining search criteria.)
- …professors at: Were these full professors? Associate professors? Adjunct professors? Visiting professors? Emeritus professors? Department heads? Deans?(Many of these categories are identified by different occupational codes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
- …top 22 law schools: Which ranking of schools was used? (There are many rankings, and although they are similar, choosing one ranking over another may skew the results.) Why 22 and not 20 or 25? (This is only a problem if using one of the more common numerical values caused the data to skew away from the hypothesis.)
- …from 1994 to 2000: Why these years? Is this time period typical, containing 4 Congressional and 2 Presidential elections?
- …close to a quarter: How close to a quarter? 22.5%? 27.4%? (That’s a range of 20% of the total. Why not give us a number?)
- …a proportion far greater than the average citizen: How much of a delta does “far greater” represent? Why not tell us exactly what percentage of average citizens contributed to political campaigns? Do these citizen contributions include contributions coming from union or association dues which might not be broken down by individual?
- …the legal academy today: How representative of the legal academy are the professors at these schools? What percentage of law school professors teach at the top 22 schools? What percentage of law students attend these top schools?
- …America splits evenly between the GOP and Democrats: America as a whole may split evenly, but 17 of the top 22 schools in the US News & World Report rankings are in states which voted Democrat in the 2000 presidential elections, 18 of 22 in 1996. There are 213 law schools listed at FindLaw in every state except Alaska, Nevada and Rhode Island, yet the top 22 law schools are located in just 14 of the remaining 47 states.
- …74% of the professors contribute primarily: The problem is the word “primarily.” Does this mean “at least 51% of the dollar value of their donations” are going to Democrats? Or does it mean “51% of the candidates they support” are Democrats? And, as a side point of interest, how many of the professors are contributing to both parties?
- At Michigan… the differential is eight-to-one…: There are 71 professors listed at University of Michigan Law School, when clicking on the “Law Faculty” link. 25% percent of this total is approximately 18 professors who may have contributed more than $200 to federal political campaigns. An 8-to-1 ratio of “primarily” Democratic contributors to Republican contributors leaves us with 16 statistically probable Democratic donors. From this small sample, the survey’s authors describe a “patent absence of diversity in viewpoints.” Unless it is a random sample from a scientifically-determined, representative pool of subjects, 16 out of 71 professors doesn’t represent a pattern.
- …most campaign contributions to Republican candidates come from only a handful of schools: Without seeing the data, I bet there would be a very high correlation between the handful of Republican-contributing professors and the handful of schools in the sample which come from Republican-voting states. What would this show other than a correlation between the politics of law professors and the politics of the majority of the citizenry in their states?
I’m not even going to get into questions about who reviewed the study before it was published, who may have sponsored the study, whether it is slated for publication in any professional journal, or — since we are talking about political bias — what the political orientations of the study’s authors may be. This is an example of the misuse of statistics which Eugene generally finds fault with.
There may be a bias in American law school faculties, but this study does nothing to prove it. And it does nothing to prove McGinnis and Schwartz’s contention that the true goal of Michigan’s affirmative action program is “…racial patterning, not educational diversity.”
[1] I do not have access to the full text of the survey report, as it was available only on the Wall Street Journal’s paid-subscription site. While the full data and methodology should certainly be distributed at the discretion of the survey’s authors, I feel it adds nothing to the community of research nor to the possibility of debate to lock even a summary report of the findings behind a cash register. This is especially true when this vehicle for the dissemination of the findings is known as a bastion of support for the political group most likely to agree with the survey’s findings.
