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...
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Back in 2003, an intelligent-design advocate named Francis Beckwith wrote a book, Law, Darwinism, and Public Education, published by Rowman and Littlefield. Although Beckwith was clearly out of sympathy with Darwinism, the point of the book wasn't about biology. It was about the establishment clause of the first amendment of the Constitution. Beckwith's view was that "intelligent design" was an alternative scientific hypothesis, and that accordingly it is appropriate -- and not even remotely an official establishment of religion -- to teach that hypothesis as one distinct from Darwinism within public schools. That book might have gone unnoticed -- like lots of other books saying the same thing -- had it not been taken up by an enthusiastic review (technically a "book note,") in the Harvard Law Review for January 2004. The reviewer, one of the student editors of the HLR, was Lawrence VanDyke. The note, appearing in such a high-visibility periodical...