Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Alan Dershowitz, a man for whom I once had some respect, has been such a pathetic shill for Trump of late that it is natural to hope that Nemesis will catch up with him. And perhaps it has. If so, Nemesis has taken the earthly form of another lawyer with an impressive reputation and aggressive persona: David Boies. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/files/boies-complaint.pdf I love the half-smile, or whatever you call that facial expression in his photo here. My talk about Nemesis etc is of course a poor excuse for any legal analysis of the merits of the lawsuit. I will leave any such analysis to another day.

Yesterday in this place, I discussed how Lawrence VanDyke made a splash while studying law at Harvard.  To catch up: he posted a book note in the law review there making clearly out-of-his-depth arguments about evolution, natural selection, and the establishment clause of the first amendment. Let me note parenthetically that I haven't been mistyping his name. In contrast to one-time chimney sweep Dick Van Dyke, Lawrence spells his surname without a break. The only interesting thing about the typographical oddity is that it gives me a chance to use the illustration I have chosen. Anyway: about Lawrence... he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and entered the practice of law with the New York firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.  Starting in 2012, though, he began working for the office of solicitor general. In three different states. This as a career path is a new one on me He worked as Assistant Solicitor General of Texas (2012), then Solicitor General of Montana (20...