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September 30, 2007
Bill Murphy, RIP
Teacher, Target of Attacks, Resigns in Mississippi
OXFORD, Miss., Aug. 5 (UPI)
-- A University of Mississippi law professor who has been the target of segregationists for several years has resigned to take a better position at the University of Missouri.
William P. Murphy, attacked by legislators and others because he is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, will become a full professor of law at Missouri Sept. 1. He has been at Mississippi since 1953.
His resignation came after the State College Board had refused to renew his contract.
The professor first came under attack in 1959. That year, however, the College Board rehired him. In 1960, an unsuccessful attempt was made in the Legislature to cut off state funds to anyone belonging to the Civil Liberties Union.
Bill Murphy, my colleague and friend, died yesterday in Chapel Hill at the age of 87. He was absolutely everything any law professor might aspire to be -- erudite, passionate about justice and fairness, and equally engaged in the worlds of ideas and action.
The New York Times doesn't mention it, but the "offense" that got Bill Murphy(effectively) fired at Ole Miss was his insistence on teaching that Brown v. Board of Education was the law of the land and should be followed rather than resisted. As Bill himself explained in a 1978 oral history,
I never really thought of it in terms of taking a stand on anything. It all started because I was teaching the course in Constitutional Law. And I taught the course basically the way it was taught all over the country, the way I would have taught it anywhere else in the country, and that assumes that Supreme Court decisions are law and at some point, to some extent, ought to be complied with. And so I never really consciously took a stand on anything. I started out just teaching a normal Constitutional Law course. And the only thing that made that unusual or got me in hot water was that that normal approach toward constitutional law and the authority of the Supreme Court was contrary to the basic approach which these Citizens Council types took. And that was that the Supreme Court didn't have the authority, and that there wasn't any duty to comply. So I started out, really, in complete innocence, just doing what a constitutional law professor would have done anywhere in the country, and the only thing that made it unusual was the time and the place. They apparently wanted the Con Law course taught kind of like it would have been taught at a Citizens Council rally.
... I had no earthly idea that it would end up the way it did when I began to pursue my teaching and my writing activities. It just happened that the way I taught and what I wrote turned out to be directly contrary to what many influential Mississippians believed, and so they decided they had to get rid of me. And I had to decide whether I was going to keep on writing and teaching the way that I thought I ought to, or whether I was going to knuckle under to these people, and at that point I did have to take a stand.
Take a stand he did, but the segregationists ultimately proved too powerful for Bill, and so he resigned in 1962. When the trustees at Vanderbilt were pressured not to act on a visiting position for Bill that the law faculty there had voted, he landed at the University of Missouri.
While at Missouri, Bill published his chef d'oeuvre, The Triumph of Nationalism: State Sovereignty, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of the Constitution (1967). In 1970 he came to UNC, where he was still in the office as an emeritus every day when I arrived in 1998. By then he was busy doing labor arbitrations all over the country, and had served a term as president of the National Academy of Arbitrators. He continued this work until just a few years ago, when health problems finally slowed him down -- physically, at least. Up until the very end, he remained keenly interested in goings-on in the worlds of law and politics. Just a couple of weeks ago, at Bill's request, I packaged up a couple of annual Con Law casebook supplements for Bill and sent them home to him so that he could read up on last Term's developments at the Supreme Court.
The legal academy has lost a brave prince. We'll miss you, Bill.
Posted by Eric at 10:47 PM
September 27, 2007
Hmmm.....
I wonder what that's about.
Posted by Eric at 8:11 PM
September 21, 2007
An interesting perspective on the Duke Lacrosse case
Posted by Eric at 12:46 PM
September 17, 2007
Chemerinsky To Become Dean At UC Irvine
Posted by Eric at 1:26 PM
September 13, 2007
Is This, Like, Gnarly, or What?
Posted by Eric at 4:59 PM
September 12, 2007
American Inquistion: Questions and Answers, Part 3
The Press has released a Q-and-A about the book. I'm periodically publishing excerpts from the Q-and-A here at IsThatLegal. The first excerpt was here and the second here. Now comes the third:
Q: What were the "point systems" used in the [loyalty] questionnaire?A: The "point systems" reflected the attempts of bureaucrats to take the internees' answers to the loyalty questionnaire and convert them to number values, so that each internee would have an ultimate loyalty "score." The point systems were absurdly oversimplified and dependent on cultural assumptions: practicing judo earned a negative score, while little-league baseball earned a positive; Buddhism was a negative and Christianity a positive.
Q: What penalties were invoked when a man or woman was considered to be disloyal?
A: A charge of disloyalty could force an internee's transfer to a special segregation camp where conditions were harsher and the atmosphere more turbulent. It could bar an internee from securing permission to leave a camp for a job in the country's interior. It could block an internee from obtaining a job that the government deemed too sensitive for the war effort in any way. And, as the war wound down and the mass exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast ended, a finding of disloyalty meant that a Japanese American could not return home to the West Coast.
Posted by Eric at 9:04 AM
September 11, 2007
9/11: Recent History
Posted by Eric at 8:18 AM
September 10, 2007
Lies, Damn Lies, and Run/Pass Statistics
Yesterday, the Eagles lost to the Green Bay Packers.
Three reporters for Philadelphia's main newspapers -- the Inquirer (1) and Daily News (2) -- all reported in two stories that the Eagles threw the ball 33 times and ran it 29 times. That translates into a 53-to-47 pass-to-run ratio. So, the reporters infer, Coach Reid really is trying for balance this year.
Nothing bothers me more than the abuse of statistics . . . especially run-to-pass numbers for the Eagles (I'm way over the Bush administration's statistical contortions in Iraq). Both stories reflect the media's typical lack of statistical curiosity.
What matters is not the pass-to-pass stats at game's end. What matters is the ratio of CALLED passes to runs during the game.
At Green Bay, the Eagles called 38 passes and 25 runs. That's a 60-40 pass-to-run ratio. HELLO!
It's exactly what Reid's almost always done during his tenure in Philly (except late last season after quarterback Donovan McNabb was lost for the year and Jeff Garcia took over).
This kind of lame reporting is what I've come to expect from the media when it comes to statistics. Surge stats, anyone?
Posted by shertaugh at 1:51 PM
American Inquistion: Questions and Answers, Part 2
The Press has released a Q-and-A about the book. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be publishing excerpts from the Q-and-A here at IsThatLegal. The first was here -- and here is the second:
Q: The Japanese loyalty questionnaire is central to your book. Can you explain what the form was and the significance it had for Japanese internees?A: The loyalty questionnaire was a twenty-eight-question form that the government forced all Japanese American internees to fill out while behind barbed wire in spring of 1943. It tried to probe each internee's work and education background, reading habits, and familiarity with Japanese and American cultural, religious, political, and linguistic traditions. It also asked each internee whether he was willing to serve in the U.S. military and to forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. These forms became a centerpiece of the government's administrative efforts to adjudicate the loyalty or disloyalty of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.
For the internees, the loyalty questionnaires provoked intense anxiety and controversy. Already a year into captivity, many internees saw the questions as a series of vague traps that could only force them deeper into incarceration. Especially provocative was the question asking them to renounce loyalty to the Emperor—a loyalty that none of the American citizens in the camps had ever sworn or announced in the first place. The questionnaires were greeted with wariness, confusion, and even open hostility and resistance in the camps.
Posted by Eric at 10:37 AM
September 6, 2007
American Inquistion: Questions and Answers, Part 1
The Press has released a Q-and-A about the book. Over the next couple of weeks I'll be publishing excerpts from the Q-and-A here at IsThatLegal. Here is the first:
Q: How does AMERICAN INQUISITION differ from other studies on Japanese internment during World War II?A: AMERICAN INQUISITION focuses on what you might call the "inner workings" of the Japanese American internment—the tribunals in the bowels of the wartime bureaucracy that tried to decide which Japanese Americans were loyal to the United States and which were disloyal. Even though these loyalty programs were an important engine of the internment program—the mechanism that continued to repress Japanese Americans long after the government made its initial decision to force Japanese Americans into camps—the literature on the Japanese American internment has paid scant attention to these tribunals.
Q: How did you become interested in writing about the Japanese American internment and about the government's loyalty tests for its supposed internal enemies?
A: The themes of racial incarceration and the persecution of internal enemies run strongly through my own family history. I am the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. My grandfather was incarcerated at the Buchenwald concentration camp after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938; this incarceration came after years in which my grandparents and all other German Jews were increasingly depicted as dangerous internal enemies to the German nation. For these personal reasons, I grew interested in how the United States racially identified and then incarcerated a supposed internal enemy during the same time period. Obviously, the Holocaust and the Japanese American internment were different sorts of programs in crucial ways. Yet they shared a similar engine—the engine of racial scapegoating.
Posted by Eric at 2:48 PM
The Wyoming Quarter
Posted by Eric at 2:10 PM
September 4, 2007
A Post-Script on Larry Craig - "Advise & Consent" by Allen Drury
But the back story includes the suicide of a young Senator from Utah, who chaired a Foreign Relations subcommittee investigating the nomination. The President threatened to use the young Senator's recently discovered, though still secret, homosexual relationship during WWII against him unless he voted to confirm the nominee.
The story line about the young Utah Senator is loosely based on the real-life story of former GOP Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt. It seems Hunt, though a Republican, was anti-McCarthyism.
So, with the 1954 mid-term election heating up, the GOP forced Hunt to resign his Senate seat on the threat of exposing his son's arrest for soliciting sex from a male undercover police officer in a public place.
Hunt resigned. Then he later committed suicide.
It's a sad commentary on the Washington establishment -- the GOP in particular -- that homosexuality remains such a politically deadly taboo.
Posted by shertaugh at 3:01 PM
Some Bohemians Undoubtedly Were, Though.
For the record, I don't know. But I doubt it.
Posted by Eric at 1:57 PM