[PEN-L:229] Re: Re: juries

[James Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote: >>I heard somewhere that the FIJ movement is in some way "right
wing." Maybe, but it looks like one of those issues where the right and
left unite (or should unite) against the middle.<<

Doug answers: >It's paranoid liberals who get most exercised about the FIJ
people, I think, because they're convinced the masses are a baying,
ignorant, bigoted crowd of proto-fascists.<

Yeah. I think it's the same people who wish the US Supreme Court could fix
society the way they did with Roe vs. Wade or Brown vs. the Board of
Education -- or, more generally, want "professionals" or "technocrats" or
lawyers in charge -- and don't want the people involved at all. But without
mass movements to push the Supremes to "do good things," I think that such
a top-down approach is quite limited. Though I'll defend to the end the
legal results of the Roe decision (legalizing abortion), the top-down
method of instituting them sure did fire up the anti-choice movement. And
though the Brown decision was well-intentioned, it sure looks like the
whole idea of bussing students to engineer racial integration was a
disaster, among other things encouraging "white flight" from public schools.

in pen-l solidarity,

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html