Legal education is indoctrination at Columbia and elsewhere, and has borne much fruit

The New Neo Posted on by

On the Columbia Law School curriculum:

Parents are paying $331,350 — or students are going into enormous debt — for what amounts to a three-year reeducation camp at Columbia to produce leftist social warriors who will, as Christian says, “upend centuries of legal traditions and institutions,” including trashing the U.S. Constitution, to usher in the Marxist, socialist utopia they think we should be. And just like the other schools we are examining, everything is centered not on training budding lawyers to analyze a legal issue and provide sound advice to a client or to serve as an effective prosecutor who can protect the public from dangerous criminals, but rather on convincing students that we live in a systematically racist, sexist society engaging in mass incarceration for political reasons.

Ah, but I already knew that, because I get a monthly magazine from my own alma mater, which is not Columbia but is of that ilk. It’s been that way for years and years and years – simply unreadable leftist tripe.

More about Columbia, where Critical Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory courses are required as part of the first-year curriculum that forms the entire foundation of the law students’ experience. I hadn’t known they were required, but it surprises me not in the least:

Among the required courses for first-year students is “Critical Legal Thought L6173.” It teaches “critical approaches to the assertion of the law’s objectivity and rationality,” including readings that “cover Feminist and Critical Race critiques of law’s aspiration to objectivity and neutrality.” It is through that biased lens that what used to be standard legal courses like torts, contracts, criminal law, property, and civil procedure will be “examined.” Gosh, I never realized that the standard rules of civil procedure that govern how civil cases proceed in the courts and that are applied neutrally to all parties in a lawsuit were racially discriminatory.

Naturally, this will be followed by another required course, “Legal Methods II: Critical Race Methods: Practices, Prisms, and Problems L6130.” According its description, the U.S. “suffers from many forms of discrimination” and this course will examine the “interface between legal interpretation, lawmaking practices, and racial hierarchy,” focusing on intersectionality, historicism, anti-formalism, social construction, storytelling, and denaturalizing baselines.” No doubt knowing about “intersectionality” will help the school’s graduates file well-reasoned, well-written appellate briefs – NOT.

In that way the school encourages several things. The first is that applicants already probably self-select for leftism, at least to a great extent, and that serves a gatekeeping function in the legal profession, especially at its elite levels. The second is to strongly establish the idea that everything the law student will learn at Columbia about the principles and rules of the entire legal system is not about objective and fair application of the law, but about using the law to gain power for your side. If there is no such thing as objectivity in the law – and not even a striving after it as a goal – then the law is just a tool for the gaining of power for your side (hmmm; same theme as today’s earlier post below this one).

Critical Legal Studies arose in the mid-to-late 1970s and represented a war on the idea that objective principles exist in law or are possible or even desirable in law. Of course, perfect objectivity never existed in the law, but the rules were designed to attain that goal as best as possible, knowing that some flaws would always exist. Critical Legal Studies used those flaws to torch the whole thing and replace it with the idea that everything was about power. Once Critical Legal Studies had infected law schools and then the rest of academia in its spinoff Critical Racial Studies, it formed the mindset of generations of students who later became influential in the real world in an enormous number of fields.

If there are no legal truths or goals except power for your side, the defenses against tyranny crumble. If you want to learn more about how Critical Legal Studies took over, I highly recommend Beyond All Reason, which was written in 1997 by two liberal law professors who were alarmed by it. If you read it, I think you might be astounded at how much damage had already occurred by then.

In the comments today, “Brian E” has a relevant question;

Are we seeing more of this– the judge sanctioning not only conservative plaintiffs, but the lawyers representing them?

Does this work both ways?

Federal Judge in Missouri CRT Suit Now Going After the Plaintiff’s Lawyer

In that case, the Obama-appointed judge apparently wants to sanction the lawyers (for plaintiffs who oppose CRT training in a public school district in Missouri, by the way) because under Missouri law attorneys are not supposed to talk to the press if it might influence the case. The author of the piece concludes:

It isn’t as if this is the first time a lawyer in a high-profile case has talked to the press. But from the Left’s point of view, this was the “wrong” lawyer talking to the “wrong” press with a “wrong” point of view. And I would bet my next three paychecks that if the lawyers for the school district had opined in public, the response from the bench would have been crickets.

But that’s small potatoes compared to this (the article is from a year ago):

The left has developed a powerfully coordinated legal election effort under the leadership of left-wing lawyer Marc Elias. In recent years, he has successfully brought together a coalition of left-wing nonprofit groups to work in conjunction with each other on elections. It’s a brilliant plan considering the left now dominates much of the legal system to give him victories; in urban areas they have more judgeships, they dominate state bars which are responsible for attorney discipline, and they run the biggest, most powerful law firms.

The reason they have taken over state bars is because while conservative attorneys are more likely to have families and be involved in church, taking up much of their free time, liberal lawyers are not, so they have more time to volunteer and serve on state bars’ boards of governors and committees. The left also controls large law firms for similar reasons. Without family and church obligations, they can devote long hours to achieving required billable hours.

Now they’re coming after elected attorneys too. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who has been out on the forefront investigating election fraud, had 12 bar complaints filed against him and his staff by radical activist Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs over election issues. He beat them, but she will just figure out reasons to file more; continue to throw mud until something sticks. The Arizona State Bar is one of the most vicious bars in the country. I work as a reporter, and can rarely get comments for my articles from conservative attorneys in the state due to their fear of retaliation.

The State Bar of Texas is going after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, suing him for investigating election fraud in the 2020 election. Paxton asked the U.S. Supreme Court to enjoin Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin for breaking election laws by implementing voting changes during the COVID-19 pandemic without the approval of state legislators. SCOTUS rejected his request 7-2 for lack of standing, a sign that it wasn’t completely without merit. So now the bar is alleging he violated a catch-all, vague rule of professional misconduct prohibiting “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”

Much much more at the link.

‘Disinformation” and the search for truth: more Twitter files

The New Neo Posted on by

I was about twelve years old when I first read Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. It scared me more than anything I’d ever read. Did I understand every single bit of it? No, but I understood a surprising amount.

And it wasn’t just Room 101 and the rats that scared me – although they certainly did scare me. It was the pervasiveness of the thought control and the replacement of truth with lies. In fact, Newspeak – the language of Orwell’s dystopia, which may just have been his most brilliant and insightful invention – was designed not only for thought control but for using words that meant the opposite of what they purported to mean. And the society depicted by Orwell not only instituted Newspeak but also was engaged in overwriting truth with falsehood, in particular regarding historical events. There was no news and no history that was not propaganda.

We have gotten very close to that obliteration of truth and its replacement by propaganda, and the internet – originally thought to help foster truth – has facilitated that propagandist process, especially through the dominance of social media. I’ve written about this phenomenon before, here and here. But I’m revisiting it, in the light of the most recent Twitter files episode, which is discussed here by Andrew Lowenthal, who is a somewhat old-fashioned leftist (in other words, a free speech advocate). The article focuses on the campaign against “disinformation,” which is often a form of “disinformation” itself:

Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing…

Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.

After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.

I underestimated just how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia and NGOs under the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy. We’re still calculating, but I had estimated it at hundreds of millions of dollars annually and I’m probably still being naive – Peraton received a USD $1B dollar contract from the Pentagon…

Twitter emails show consistent collaboration between military and intelligence officials and elite “progressives” from NGOs and academia. “They/them” signatures mingle with .mil, @westpoint, @fbi and others. How did the FBI and the Pentagon, once the avowed enemies of progressives for their attacks on the Black Panthers and the peace movement, their war-mongering and gross over-funding, begin to fuse and collude? They join together in election tabletop exercises and share hors d’oeuvres at conferences put on by oligarch philanthropists. That cultural and political shift was once a heavy lift, but now it is as simple as cc’ing each other…

The Twitter Files also show just how much the NGO and academic set had been absorbed into the inner Big Tech elite, upon whom they pushed their new anti-free-expression values…

The Files make plain egregious acts of censorship were enabled or ignored by NGOs and academia, often not because they were wrong, but because the ideas came from the wrong people.

Lowenthal goes on to add that the left used to champion free speech, and needs to do it again because:

The shoe will one day again be on the other foot. When that day comes free speech will not be the enemy of liberals and progressives, it will be the best possible protection against the abuse of power.

Here Lowenthal shows that he’s naively living in a dream world. He’s a leftist, but – if he is sincere in what he wrote, and I believe that he is – he doesn’t seem to understand the nature of the left, although Orwell (also a leftist, by the way – see this) certainly did. The hardcore left is not for truth or for free speech; that was just a pose, necessary until it took power. The left is interested in power, and it intends to obtain it and change the rules so that it will never lose it and the shoe will never be on the other foot. Then it will control the flow of information and can smother truth entirely if it is threatened by that truth.

As Orwell wrote:

‘You are ruling over us for our own good,’ [Winston] said feebly. ‘You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore-‘

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

‘That was stupid, Winston, stupid!’ he said. ‘You should know better than to say a thing like that.’

He pulled the lever back and continued:

‘Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?’

This is a very bleak vision of the future. I think many on the left still tell themselves that their motives are good; in fact I know many who, like Lowenthal, do tell themselves that. The trouble is that those people will not be in charge when the transition happens, as it is already happening. The hardcore ones will be in charge, the ones who are only interested in power for power’s sake. That’s what gives them their utter ruthlessness.

I will add one more thing: even those hardcore people actually are interested in ‘wealth or luxury or long life” – it’s just that the wealth and luxury and long life in which they’re interested is their own.

Melanie Phillips: on Israel’s Remembrance Day

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s something like our Memorial Day, and it’s today. In her article, Phillips quotes at length from a recent interview with Itamar Marcus, head of Palestinian Media Watch. It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but here’s an interesting excerpt that has to do with the treatment of Christians in the Middle East:

The Christians of Bethlehem and the West Bank thrived under Israel. Under Israel, Christians made up approximately 70 per cent of the population of Bethlehem. The PA’s Islamic supremacist ideology, which it passes on to its people even though it denies this internationally, has led to so much anti-Christian hate and terror that Christianity is being decimated in the Palestinian areas. The Christian population of Bethlehem today is close to 10 per cent. All the rest have run away to South America and Europe. Of course, Christians in the West Bank have to blame Israel for the destruction of the Christian population because to openly blame the criminal PA could mean their death sentences. There are Palestinian Muslims who PMW works with who agree completely with PMW’s messages because they sincerely want peace with Israel, and they can tell only their very closest friends that they want true peace with Israel. They are afraid they will be arrested and tortured if the PA police ever finds out about their real opinions…

Israel is the only country in the Middle East where Christians thrive in every aspect of life and enjoy equal rights. If you look at Muslim countries in the Middle East or Africa, it can be seen how Christians are persecuted and massacred on a monthly basis.

Palestinians are highly adept at propaganda, and have been for many decades. That is probably their most successful export.

Biden announces that he is running – on empty, and on ads

The New Neo Posted on by

But it doesn’t matter that he’s got little left in the tank. They’ll push him across the finish line, if necessary.

I don’t usually watch Biden speak, because his mendacity and hypocrisy sickens me. But I forced myself to watch his pre-recorded advertisement-type announcement, and I’m going to post it here because it’s an excellent example of the sort of propaganda that a lot of people swallow. It presents Biden as a sincere, homey, straightforward defender of concepts like “freedom” and “democracy” and “rights.” There’s a huge emphasis on black people in the visuals, which reinforces the idea that we are in some 60s-style civil rights struggle and Biden is some sort of MLK-lite. I think the ad is quite effective at conveying all these thoughts. The fact that it doesn’t in the least present the reality of Biden or his administration is probably irrelevant or unapparent to many many voters:

It is almost certain that Biden will run a campaign much like the last one, avoiding personal appearances and debates. This time his excuse probably won’t be COVID, it will be that he’s extremely busy with the job of being president.

Some people have been remarking negatively on Biden’s slogan,”Let’s finish the job.” For example, here’s Charles C. W. Cooke’s take at National Review:

“Let’s finish this job” is the type of slogan that a popular, successful president might run. And Biden is not a popular, successful president. Seventy percent of Americans — including 66 percent of independents — don’t want him to run again. His approval rating is at 41 percent, with his disapproval at 54 percent. His time in office has been marked by chronic inflation, a problem that only 20 percent of Americans think that Biden has made better, that 28 percent think he’s made worse, and that 49 percent think he’s ignored. Only 14 percent of Americans think that the economy is good or excellent.

I don’t think that matters. Note that the slogan isn’t “Let me finish the job.” Is this a subtle acknowledgement that it’s not Biden who’s completely in charge, but a group effort, and that the voter should trust the group and the powers behind the throne? And “the job” isn’t the economy, it’s “freedom” and “rights” (read: the right to abortion) and “democracy” (read: stifling conservatives, voter ID requirements, and any suggestion that elections aren’t fraud-free). I think Cooke fails to understand what the Biden campaign is about.

When I heard the slogan, I immediately thought of Churchill. But then, I’m a Churchill buff, a condition I assume is vanishingly rare these days. For me, it recalled this February 9, 1941 speech (just the phrase; not the style and certainly not the worthiness of the candidate), which I now offer as a palate cleanser:

About Dominion v. Fox, and the news itself

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Kate” writes:

The whole problem with the Dominion lawsuit is that news organizations are supposedly free to report what political factions are saying. Apparently they are only free to repeat leftist charges. Fox News has folded and damaged news reporting in general in the process.

I do agree that the Dominion lawsuit would have had rougher going if it had been launched against one of the regular MSM outlets on the left. I also agree that news reporting has been damaged as a result of Fox’s settlement, but it was already so damaged that it barely matters.

However, I want to emphasize that the Fox lawsuit had certain unusual non-political characteristics that were operating to make Fox believe it was going to lose. The suit wasn’t just based on the fact that Fox had reported damaging information – that apparently turned out to be untrue – about Dominion. It was that internal memos and emails indicated that the news and/or opinion Fox employees airing that information on Fox knew or strongly believed at the time that it was false and did not reveal that.

Lawsuits of this sort, against news organization, must contain at least one of these two elements that would prove what’s known as actual malice: that the defendant knew that a statement was false, or was reckless in deciding to publish the information without investigating whether it was true.

An equivalent case on the right would be if there was email or other evidence that news or opinion people on the networks that aired the views of the “Trump was in league with Russia” hoaxers knew that the story was false at the time they aired it. That’s where politics come in, though. The plaintiff or plaintiffs would have to choose their venues very very carefully, and I’m not sure they wouldn’t be limited to areas such as DC or NY that are reliably blue and would almost certainly rule against them. Dominion’s case (actually, cases plural, because others are pending) was filed in New York [correction: the settled case was filed in Delaware, another blue stronghold, but several other Dominion lawsuits are pending in New York, as described in the link].

That said, there is no question in my mind that the Dominion cases will have a chilling effect on the airing of any news that doesn’t meet with establishment and/or leftist approval and leaves the door open, even a crack, to such lawsuits. And that is, in part, how the Dominion case may have been one of the things that helped prompt the firing of Tucker Carlson. It’s not that he had much to do with the Dominion situation itself – he didn’t – but that he’s somewhat outside the box, and Fox can’t afford to have much more of that.

And speaking of departures, Susan Rice leaves the Biden administration

The New Neo Posted on by

Hard to say exactly what went on here:

Susan Rice, President Biden’s main domestic policy adviser, is leaving the White House after more than two years as the 80-year-old chief executive gears up for a re-election campaign — and days after a report indicated she ignored concerns about migrant kids being pressed into work.

Rice, 58, reportedly clashed with other Biden aides over the border crisis that began during the president’s first year in office, advocating for a tougher approach…

Current and former White House officials blasted Rice to the left-leaning American Prospect magazine last year and accused her of creating an “abusive” and “dehumanizing” workplace.

The inner workings of those in the Biden White House seem quite opaque to me, except for their unrelenting leftism, destructiveness, and incompetence. Half of America seems cool with that, though.

The big news today is about the news: Carlson leaves Fox; Lemon leaves CNN

The New Neo Posted on by

I never was one to watch much TV news, but in the past year or so I’ve pretty much stopped watching it entirely. And I doubt I’ve ever watched Lemon, just awful clips featuring him. Nevertheless, I’m aware that this news about the news is big news today.

First, Lemon’s departure:

CNN has parted ways with longtime host Don Lemon. The announcement Monday came without explanation and astonished the media industry.

Well, it doesn’t astonish me. Seems to me that CNN has been moving him around for a while, not all that happy with him.

From CNN:

“Don will forever be a part of the CNN family, and we thank him for his contributions over the past 17 years,” said CNN CEO Chris Licht in a memo to staff. “We wish him well and will be cheering him on in his future endeavors.”

But Lemon doesn’t sound like there’s a whole lot of love lost there:

In a statement of his own, Lemon said his agent told him Monday morning that CNN had terminated him.

“I am stunned,” Lemon said, arguing that management did not have “the decency” to inform him of his firing directly. “At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network,” Lemon added

CNN rebutted Lemon, calling his version of events “inaccurate.”

I think Carlson’s departure from Fox is the bigger news. It’s certainly the bigger news on the right. Carlson has a huge following and as far as I know he continued to be the biggest draw on Fox. He hasn’t issued a statement yet, either, although Fox has issued the usual boilerplate:

FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor.

Mr. Carlson’s last program was Friday April 21st. Fox News Tonight will air live at 8 PM/ET starting this evening as an interim show helmed by rotating FOX News personalities until a new host is named.

Blahbity blahbity blah.

A lot of the MSM headlines have made references to the settlement of the Dominion lawsuit and assume this shakeup is connected. Perhaps Murdoch is afraid of further lawsuits, and Carlson is the most controversial person left, although Watters and Gutfield somewhat meet that description. The LA Times has published some rumors from the usual sources who are remaining anonymous, so make of this what you will:

People familiar with the situation who were not authorized to comment publicly said the decision to fire Carlson came straight from Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

Carlson’s exit is related to the discrimination lawsuit filed by Abby Grossberg, the producer fired by the network last month, the people said. Carlson’s senior executive producer Justin Wells has also been terminated, according to people familiar with the matter. A Fox News representative would not comment.

Murdoch is also said to be concerned over Carlson’s coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, in which the host has promoted the conspiracy theory that it was provoked by government agents.

So there’s the Grossman lawsuit, plus the January 6th evidence. Fox appeared to have already demanded earlier that Carlson shut up about that.

Also:

Fox News appears to be cleaning house of some of its most rightward-leaning elements. Last week, the network failed to come to renewal terms with weekend host Dan Bongino, a popular pundit in ultra-conservative circles…

Carlson’s show has also proved problematic for the business side of Fox News Channel. Over the years, many national advertisers have asked that their commercials not be placed in his program, fearful that advocacy organizations would call them out on Twitter for supporting some of Carlson’s stances. More recently, however, Carlson’s program has seen ad dollars return, according to Vivvix, a tracker of ad spending.

I assume that Tucker will go to some other platform or start his own. Will his reach be the same?

As for Fox, I think they’re floundering.

They call this progress?

The New Neo Posted on by

As an official old curmudgeon, I hereby complain about the following:

(1) Company or agency answering messages that feature that same perky/happy voice (what’s she so pleased about?) reciting a long list of possible numbers to press for supposed help. The way it’s arranged, one has to stick with it, listen for a long time, and press a series of numbers in order to finally come to the one people usually want: agent. Or rather AGENT!!, which I often end up screaming over and over while I listen to her natter on.

(2) Self-service grocery checkout lines. I’ve already written about that, but it bears repeating because, as an old curmudgeon, I believe in being boring.

(3) Toilets that are too high and are shaped funny. Those of us who aren’t very tall, or who have bad backs, are in trouble with those things, which one can increasingly find in hotels and motels. Not good. At least I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one of these.

(4) Over-packaging when something comes in the mail.

(5) The fact that contributing to a charity guarantees that said charity will become your new bosom buddy, sending you a solicitation on a weekly basis.

(6) Phone calls or emails asking you to complete a survey after you’ve had a medical or dental appointment. Does anyone think the answers actually lead to better service?

(7) The increasing size and weight of cellphones. I have small hands, and various arm injuries, and holding those things has become more difficult. They still make a few smaller ones, fortunately, but not many.

(8) Chicklet keyboards on laptops. Hate them. Hate Apple. And yes, I had an Apple computer for four long years. Couldn’t wait to get rid of it.

(9) The increasing use of graphic symbols rather than words, to indicate various computer functions. Recognizing graphics is not my forte.

(10) Texting replacing phoning. I realize that a lot of people prefer texting, but I’m not one of them. I like the human voice and the personal contact. Texting is okay for short messgges like, “I’ve arrived at the restaurant.” But people use it for a lot more than that.

I could go on, but I’ll have mercy on you and stop here. But feel free to add your own peeves in the comments.

The abortion pill: legal issues

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve read quite a few MSM articles on the SCOTUS ruling about the abortion pill, and the reporting lacked so many of the details I was looking for that I ended up turning to law blogs and the plaintiffs’ brief to get any clarity at all. And even then, many questions remain in my mind.

Here’s a fairly good law blog article on the subject. An excerpt:

The Supreme Court on Friday night granted a request from the Biden administration and a drug manufacturer to put on hold a ruling by a federal judge in Texas that suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone, part of a two-drug protocol used to end pregnancies in their early stages. The battle over medication abortions, which account for over half of all abortions performed in the United States each year, now returns to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is scheduled to hear oral argument in the case next month. The order means that the drug will remain widely available while litigation continues.

Two justices indicated that they would have denied the requests. Justice Clarence Thomas did not elaborate on his reasoning, but Justice Samuel Alito penned a four-page dissent in which he questioned the need for the court to act now.

The decision only means that the pill won’t be blocked until the issue is decided later, on the merits. That should happen pretty soon, and then it might reach the Supreme Court on appeal. I think that this interim decision makes sense, because it’s a pill that’s been in use for nearly twenty five years, with FDA approval, and a short wait just preserves the status quo.

Plaintiffs contend, however, that FDA approval was obtained by skirting the usual rules for the process, and that subsequently removing even more of the original safeguards has made the pill dangerous. Do they make a good case for that? I suggest you read at least the first twenty pages or so of the brief, it’s quite interesting.

Abortion activists maintain that the suit is an effort by anti-abortion forces to prohibit a vast number of abortions, and that their goal is to ultimately end all abortions. I wouldn’t doubt it. Their goal is certainly to ban this drug, but – as with many lawsuits – it’s not the only thing they want. The court could fail to grant that request and yet grant another, which is to allow the drug to remain legal but to roll back the situation by replacing some of the safeguards that were only jettisoned in 2016 and then during the COVID years, such as (for example), having to actually see a doctor in person before being prescribed the drug, and being screened for gestational age of the pregnancy by sonogram (the reason for the latter is that the pill is increasingly dangerous to the mother with increasing age of the fetus, and women don’t always know how advanced their pregnancies are). These pills apparently presently account for half of all abortions in the US, and are only available up to 10 weeks (they used to only be available up to 7 weeks).

Here are the plaintiffs’ goals regarding that more limited element of the lawsuit:

The 2019 Citizen Petition asked the FDA to take the following actions to restore and strengthen elements of the chemical abortion drug regimen and prescriber requirements approved in 2000 to protect the health, safety, and welfare of women and girls:

• Reduce the maximum gestational age from 70 days to 49 days;
• Limit the ability to prescribe and dispense chemical abortion drugs to qualified, licensed physicians—not other “healthcare providers”;
• Mandate certified abortionists to be physically present when dispensing chemical abortion drugs;
• Require that the prescriber perform an ultrasound to assess gestational age, identify ectopic pregnancies, ensure compliance with FDA restrictions, and adequately inform the woman of gestational age specific risks, which rise with increasing gestational age;
• Restore the requirement for in-person administration of misoprostol;
• Restore the requirement for an in-person follow-up visit to confirm abortion and rule out life-threatening infection through clinical examination or ultrasonographic scan;
• Restore the 2000 label language that stated that chemical abortion drugs are contraindicated if a woman lacks adequate access to
emergency medical care; and
• Restore the prescriber reporting requirements for all serious adverse events, including any deaths, hospitalizations, blood transfusions, emergency room visits, failures requiring surgical completion, ongoing pregnancy, or other major complications following the chemical abortion regimen.

The 2019 Petitioners also asked the FDA to require a formal study of outcomes for at-risk populations, including the pediatric female population, patients with repeat chemical abortions, patients who have limited access to emergency room services, and patients who self-administer misoprostol.

There’s much much more at the link, too much to adequately cover here.

The 2019 petition described above was almost entirely denied by the FDA, which claimed this sort of thing:

In support of its claim that in-person dispensing is unnecessary, the FDA relied on the “small” number of adverse events voluntarily reported in the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) database to justify the elimination of this safeguard, even though the FDA had years ago removed the requirement for abortionists to report nonfatal adverse events.

If there’s no reporting requirement, how can the data be relied on? I don’t see that it can.

I want to repeat that I’m in favor of allowing the drug to be dispensed for now. I also think it will be difficult for any court to judge this case and ban the drug entirely, because doing that would rest on scientific data that simply isn’t there, and requires second-guessing the decisions of the FDA. You may not trust them, I may not trust them, but if courts grant challenge after challenge to the FDA’s medical judgment, it opens up quite the can of worms. The evidence for overruling the FDA;s medical judgment had better be plenty strong. Or, alternatively, the court could decide that the FDA didn’t follow proper procedures; that would be an easier way out, in the legal sense. If the case ultimately goes to SCOTUS, I don’t think they’ll vote for a full ban, although they may decide to put some of the safeguards back in place.

NOTE: I was for repealing Roe and leaving these decisions to the states; I think Roe was judicial overreach. But I’m not for national prohibitions on abortion or national requirements that all states allow abortion (such as Roe) unless either goal is accomplished by constitutional amendment rather than through the courts. I’m consistent in that approach.