Legal Commentary

Puzzling through Prof. Kmiec's endorsement of Obama

By Beldar

This (by Pepperdine University Law Prof. Douglas W. Kmiec, a genuine legal star in the Reagan and Bush-41 Administrations) is the least persuasive and most hang-dog endorsement (of Barack Obama) that I've ever seen. If it were written in a newspaper, I'd have suspected that it had been butchered by the editors, and that they'd mistaken the substance for the fluff and mistakenly hacked out all of the former to meet some very sharp and arbitrary word-count. But this is a self-published post on Slate.com's new legal blog, "Convictions," so Prof. Kmiec lacks that excuse. We must grade his essay as if it were his best work, or at least his work (and not some editor's mangled version).

Objectively, he gets an F. In fact, were I his professor, I wouldn't even accept this as a completed assignment. Instead I'd return it to him with instructions that his endorsement must at least either (a) offer good reasons to vote for the candidate who he's endorsing or (b) offer good reasons to vote against the opponent of the candidate who he's endorsing. Prof. Kmiec has done neither.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on March 24, 2008 (boomark / email).