Law School, Air Conditioning and Media Criticism
1. LEGAL
Elizabeth Wurtzel, of the Brennan Center for Justice, makes the case for abolishing the bar exam for law students.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Attorney Hans Bader on how abolishing law schools, but keeping the bar, might be a better approach.
“I learned very little about real-world law in three years at Harvard Law School, as a result of classes taught by professors who obsessed over ideologically-trendy but irrelevant hypotheticals, or engaged in hide-the-ball Socratic dialogue. I somehow passed my Contracts class despite not knowing which body of law–the common law or the Uniform Commercial Code–applied to five-sixths of my final and only exam in the class. (I got a ‘B’ anyway.) But my knowledge rapidly improved after graduation, when I had to sit for the bar exam.”
2. ENVIRONMENT
Author Stan Cox argues against the use of air conditioning in a column for the Washington Post.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray discusses how so many ‘green’ policies are really just turning back the clock on technology.
“I suggest Congress and government agencies lead by example and adopt this rule of no air conditioning immediately. In fact, I’m sure it must be somewhere in Speaker Pelosi’s Greening the Capitol initiative. Questions should be asked on the floor as to why they’re running the AC this week.”
3. MEDIA
The left-wing blog Media Matters publishes an ad hominem attack on CEI’s Warren Brookes Fellow Ryan Young.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Journalism Fellow Ryan Young reacts to the attack, pointing out that arguing with facts, not personal attacks, is a higher form of discourse.
“[Blogger Jamison Foser’s] main point is that corporate funding makes arguments untrustworthy. Since CEI receives some corporate funding, we are therefore suspicious. This is not a rigorous line of thought. Arguments are either right or wrong. The presence or absence of corporate funding has nothing to do with whether an argument is right or wrong.”