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Old October 9, 2008, 06:27 AM   #7
Bartholomew Roberts
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Join Date: June 12, 2000
Location: Texas and Oklahoma area
Posts: 8,462
Using law reviews to change or influence the development of the law is a very old practice and goes way, way back. The primary difference now is instead of this being a scholarly discussion, it is now a profession. There are institutes and funding out there where you can make a living advocating for a particular change in the law - and there are certainly institutes that are money hungry enough, sympathetic administratively, or a combination of both that they will lend their name to it.

For that matter, take a look at Sanford Levinson out of University of Texas law school. Many of you may recognize the name as his "The Embarassing Second Amendment" article was one of the key starting points on the road to Heller back in the early 1990s. Professor Levinson was also fairly liberal which gave his argument more credibility.

His latest effort comes around remaking the Supreme Court and the Constitution to suit modern times. Right now it is just the occasional law symposium on the subject; but the ABA has picked up the push to modify the Supreme Court and their most recent ABA Journal has an article discussing all the ways it might be modified to make it more "modern" (i.e. subject to popular will - which I kind of thought was the whole antithesis of what the Court was about).

The really disturbing thing about rewriting the rules of the game in the middle of the game, is that political realities are such that it would be almost impossible to do this as a bipartisan effort. In reality, it would take an overwhelming dominance of the legislative system by one party to accomplish it; but once they had it, they could rewrite the rules in a systemic fashion. Personally, I don't see a lot of good coming out of a set of rules written by one particular party - they are going to inevitably reflect that party's ideology and protect their power base rather than reflect a good balance of power.
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