With Liberty and Justice for Some
Yesterday afternoon, Attorney General William Barr appeared on ABC to demand that President Donald Trump quit making him look bad. Trump’s tweets, the attorney general said, “made it impossible to do my job.” Barr has been intervening in cases in ways that work to protect the president. Those interventions become much more difficult when the president demands them—rather than trusting Barr to know what to do without being told.
At the law schools of the 1970s and ‘80s, a militant faction of professors taught a harsh lesson. Law, they argued, is a myth that property owners invoke to protect themselves and oppress those without property. The legal reasoning that we students were so frantically working to absorb was in fact a deception, an expensive drapery concealing the brute realties of political and class power.
Some students indignantly rejected this teaching. Others accepted that it contained some truth, mixed with much exaggeration and propaganda.
