The Big Picture and the Closeup

The coming fight is over one particular form of unconventional casting, placing white actors in non-white roles. Acceptance of non-white actors in white roles is fairly widespread. However, there is a resistance when the traffic runs the other way. It is argued that this is “appropriation” of the ability of oppressed and silenced minorities to tell their own stories and contravention of the wishes of authors, and that it unfairly curtails the already limited career opportunities of minority performers. I know of no test cases yet, but it looks likely some disappointed white actor will bring one sometime soon. And when that actor’s suit is brought, I predict the right of theatrical employers to discriminate will be upheld.

When candidates complain that this system is “rigged,” what they generally mean is that the will of the voters is tempered or overridden altogether by the will of the party elders. But is that a bug or a feature? I’m here to argue it’s a feature.

One learns that “[c]ompensation adjustments are being used in most firms to deal with underperforming partners…” That phrase “deal with” makes it sound as if “underperformance” were some form of misbehavior that the headmaster will need to address. Okay, so we know Altman Weil are really only talking about cutting people’s pay. But it can get worse. We learn that “chronic underperformers are being counseled out of their firms.” Don’t slip and fall in all that euphemism.

Assuming that the equivalency of our cellphones and ourselves is near-complete now, and that it will come even fuller soon, are we willing to allow phones to be treated as if they were separate from ourselves when it comes to our limited but precious privilege against self-incrimination? The DOJ’s paradigm is that cellphones are like documents or things external to ourselves, things which may lawfully be seized and searched, given probable cause, even to incriminate us. But is that really different from saying that one’s brain could be seized and searched? Back in the days when “telephone” meant a communications device that lived on a desk, yes, it was different. Now, when “phone” means a computer into which we pour so much of ourselves (and which happens to include voice communications among its myriad of functions), the difference grows harder and harder to maintain with a straight face.

But the play is not all philosophical argument, as important as this is: it also is a love story, a family tale, and an account of the ‘band of brothers’ that was Gay Men’s Health Crisis. And like most great playwrights who turn their attention to public events, Kramer maintains a tight relationship between these stories. Kramer’s artistic control of the huge canvas on which he paints is in the end what makes the play so powerful.

This was a substantial play that dealt thoughtfully with a host of issues. There’s feminism: the story of a woman fighting her way through a male-dominated profession, rising from a little paper in Battle Creek to a national byline with the Associated Press. There’s journalistic ethics: what happens when a reporter gets too close to a subject, and the tricky line between reporting and public relations. Then there’s the problem encountered by an involuntary archivist: what to do with a trove of letters that reveal a historical personage’s private life? And most of all, there’s a strange love triangle: on the evidence of the play, Hickok was nearly as smitten with Franklin Roosevelt’s policies as she was with his wife, going so far as to serve in his administration.

Unless we pass laws that restrict where drone-users may take their craft, and what drone-users may photograph when they get there, we are in for a drastic diminution in what we may call private. We may need to expand the notion of curtilage, the area others cannot enter without your permission. However, air travel has not been kind to that notion. Once it became technically possible for airplanes to overfly your property, it also became obviously absurd to maintain that you owned all the airspace above it. The question instead became where the boundary would be drawn. Something akin to the notion of navigable waters became the standard. If the sky above your neighborhood could be safely flown by fixed-wing craft above a certain level, then basically you didn’t own the sky above that level – and could be observed from it. But drones can usually safely fly far lower than that. Carrying the logic of this old compromise to its logical conclusion, then, drones should not only be able to look in your windows from the other side of the boundary line, but should also be able to hop your fence. After all, the air on the near side of your fence is also navigable. To a drone.

It will always be possible for lawyers to find a reason that the rules do not apply in whatever situation we face at the moment. Every circumstance is distinguishable from others, and the thicket of laws is so thick, we lawyers can always venture into it and come back brandishing some legal principle to justify whatever our leaders want to do. But if we lawyers justify our leaders into losing their way, we shall have failed in our most important responsibility.

The slick little ploy Mr. Stewart had sought to pull was to blame one form of externality (air pollution) on efforts to avoid another (unemployment). Imagine, as Mr. Stewart chronicled, VW using 600,000 people to build about the same number of vehicles as Toyota built with 340,000! If only VW fired about half its workers, Stewart suggests, it could be like Toyota and – not pollute so much. Because that’s the only possible choice, of course. Right?

At ancient common law places of public amusement were required to admit all comers. This changed largely in response to two forms of pressure: the desire of proprietors of places of public amusement to exclude racial minorities, and the desire of gambling venues to exclude perceived cheaters without being forced to go through the niceties of due process. One motive, then, has been flatly unconstitutional for the last fifty years, and the other was the (successful) wish to eliminate what had been a common-law right. Should a change in the law that came about solely to assist racial segregation and increase the profits of the very wealthy still stand?