Category Archives: law

School Fraternities and Sororities

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In their WSJ article regarding Fraternities at Cornell University and school management teams’ efforts to “reign them in,” the news writers had this remark:

…fraternities that are both a disproportionate source of trouble and a fixture of campus life.

Neither of those need to be. Schools have no intrinsic obligation to host fraternities or sororities, and neither fraternities nor sororities have any intrinsic right to a presence on campus. It’s completely straightforward, if requiring more courage than school managers seem to possess, to ban these organizations altogether and thereby eliminate that particular disproportionate source of trouble.

Of course, that would move the misbehavers that so heavily populate and take advantage of those fundamentally insular organizations into the school’s dormitories or to off campus locations, including to fraternity and sorority houses that might set up off campus. Frat and srat houses, after all, collect a fair amount of dollars in the form of dues and donations, so they’re likely to hang around nearby, never minding the troublemakers in their membership.

Dormitories, though, are much easier to monitor, inspect, and control, than are these houses. Off campus, on the other hand, gives the city and State police direct access and better ability to deal with the criminal behavior that’s all too common in frat and srat houses. The authorities possessed by campus police are severely limited by those too timid school…administrators.

If a fraternity or sorority wants onto a school’s campus, let it demonstrate its worthiness first with several years of trouble free operation off campus and on other schools’ campuses.

Government Rules

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James Freeman asked, in his Wednesday WSJ op-ed, how many of these are necessary.

How much government could we all do without? President Donald Trump says that red tape, when cut, becomes beautiful. Truer words were never spoken, and last week this column noted his encouraging progress in repealing misguided rules enacted by his predecessors. Now a few recent examples [not repeated here] suggest that half or more of government regulation is completely unnecessary.

I submit that we already have a nearly complete set of government rules in our Bill of Rights, backed up by the Bill’s overarching document, our Constitution.

I would add two rules to flesh the list out to completeness. One would enforce the sanctity of contracts. When two or more parties agree on a thing, that contract should be entirely enforceable as it stands, with severe sanctions applied to those who violate it. There really are only two legitimate ways to deviate from a freely done agreement. One way is if all of the parties involved agree to alter the contract or to dissolve it altogether. The other way is through the bankruptcy of one or more of the parties, making it impossible for them to uphold their parts of the bargain. Current bankruptcy law deals quite nicely with this sort of eventuality.

The other government rule centers on truth in advertising. Advertisements are contracts between the advertiser and the buyer, and so within the sanctity of that contract, not being truthful should be a felony if the distortion can be shown to have been deliberate, or a civil offense if the distortion can be shown to result from either party’s negligence.

Such a cleanup of our rules and regulations regime would result in how many pages of the Federal Register becoming obsolete and without effect. It also would virtually eliminate compliance costs and very greatly simplify our lives and our economy.

Even better it would render the vast majority of the Civil Service unnecessary, with those personnel returned to the private sector, all to the profit of a greatly downsized and so more efficient government, of the civil and now private employees, and to our economy writ large, through no longer having to compete so much for the same resources that the government had heretofore competed for.

Yes, I’m ignoring environmental and climate regulation in this. Those milieus are well enough covered by our Bill of Rights and the proposed contract sanctity rule.

Understanding our Constitution

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Professor Emeritus Michael Polelle, of the University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Law, in his letter to The Wall Street Journal, disagreed with Justice Samuel Alito’s originalist view that the words of our Constitution should be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.

The problem is that the Constitution wasn’t adopted by an Athenian democracy where all citizens were lawmakers. … Legislatures appointed the Framers. It follows that the most relevant and practical frame of reference is what the Framers….

I disagree with Polelle. The Framers didn’t ratify the Constitution; they only wrote it. Their final draft, also, was flawed enough in the view of the population outside of and much larger than those Framers that the debates about it—the Federalist Papers and the less well organized Anti-Federalist Papers—extracted an agreement for the people to ratify that draft if a series of Amendments—the Bill of Rights—were passed by Congress and put to the people for additional ratification or rejection.

Then most of the States artificially expanded their franchise so a larger subset of We the People could vote on ratification. That ratification vote was on the basis their interpretation of the words of the Constitution, not the Framers’. And so was the subsequent ratification of the Bill of Rights.

It’s entirely appropriate for our Constitution’s words to be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.

An Appropriate Move

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The Trump administration is adjusting its interpretation of Title IX as it concerns sexual assault, including rape. The change greatly reduces the requirement for colleges and universities to themselves investigate sexual assaults, including rape, where those occurred off campus. Critics, of course, complain that the move will simply increase the likelihood of further moves like the alleged Cornell student who lately has filed a civil suit against the school and the seven students she alleges raped her at an off-campus party.

The move may well encourage fee-seeking lawyers and deep pockets civil suits by alleged victims, but the plain matter is centered on who has the jurisdiction for investigation and criminal charges.

If the assault occurs off campus, even if in an off-campus fraternity or sorority house, it’s still primarily a city police matter, not a campus police mater. The fraternity and sorority house is off campus almost exclusively because it’s not supported or even sanctioned by the school, perhaps even evicted from the school’s campus. That severely limits campus police authority regarding those places, and campus police have no authority at all anywhere else off campus. Beyond that, off-campus means off campus, and so outside the jurisdiction of school authority of any sort.

Outside school jurisdiction, though, does not mean the alleged victim has no protections against assaults or no means of redress after the assault as some of the more hysterical criticisms would have it. Those protections and means of redress remain where they have always been: in the local, State, and Federal laws against any crime, including sexual assaults of any form, in the hands of local and State police to investigate, and in the hands of the State and Federal criminal trial courts.

An Illegal Strike

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Teachers strikes are explicitly illegal in Washington, but so far that State’s law men and women, at both the State and city level, have lacked the integrity to enforce their law. Thus, Seattle’s children are in danger of being deprived, yet again, of their access to education: the teachers of Seattle’s teachers union voted 91% in favor of striking and are set to walk off their jobs before the current school year starts.

There are two responsible answers to this move, if the union follows through, and both of them should be carried out. One is to fire for cause every teacher who goes on this illegal strike. The other is to decertify the teachers union for carrying out the illegal strike.

There are no other legitimate alternatives. The fact that the State’s and city’s managers have kowtowed to teachers unions in past illegal strikes presents no excuse for letting the union and those of its members get away with its illegal action this time. All acquiescing would do would be to demonstrate, once again, the intrinsic dishonesty of those in the State’s and city’s government.

Update: It appears the school district and the teachers union have reached an agreement. Apparently, the union is getting 9% in guaranteed salary increases, plus added school staff, but no added teachers on anything else to improve the children’s academic performance.