“The law… will not bend to the uncertain wishes, imaginations, and wanton tempers of men…. On the one hand it is inexorable to the cries and lamentations of the prisoners; on the other it is deaf, deaf as an adder, to the clamours of the populace.”
There is an ongoing controversy upon the campus of Harvard University and a protest against Law Professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., an African-American jurist of renown, and Dean of the Winthrop House. Spray-Painted upon that house were DOWN WITH SULLIVAN!, OUR RAGE IS SELF DEFENSE, WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON! and YOUR SILENCE IS VIOLENCE.
Over 300 people have signed an online petition calling for his resignation as dean, and members of the Association of Black Harvard Women have addressed a public letter to him stating “You have failed us.” His sin? Agreeing to be part of the legal defense team of Harvey Weinstein.
We have raised up a generation who, like their Jacobin ideological forebears, narcissistically view themselves as positioned in “Year Zero,” blithely ignorant of, or simply ignoring, over 800 years of Anglo-American Common Law going back to the Magna Carta and beyond. Unpopular and despised defendants are the proverbial “canary in the coal mine,” for if the legal oxygen is cut off from them, we all stand a chance of being the mob’s next victim.
The protestors will tell you, as they have in their petition, that they do not object to Dean Sullivan defending Weinstein, it’s just that such representation “induces a great amount of fear and hurt in victims of the crimes that Weinstein is accused of, and although anyone facing the law is innocent until proven guilty, the scope of the Weinstein case still literally shakes people on this campus to this day.” Sullivan should therefore be removed as dean. They fail to see the irony and chilling effect of their own actions.
Harvard has produced – and been home to – men and women who know better. Alan Dershowitz comes to mind, but long before him there was a Harvard man who risked his life and the safety of his young family to defend the unpopular. The quote above is from his defense summation in the trial of the British soldiers accused in the so-called Boston Massacre. His name was John Adams – signer of the Declaration of Independence, first Vice President, and second President of the United States under our Constitution.
Have we raised a “generation of vipers,” who have sunk their fangs into their own tails and are busy consuming themselves? As our children and grandchildren wind their way through our education system and we send at least some of them to college (hopefully without the use of bribes, fake test scores, etc.) how shall we equip them to stand up for and defend their own civilization? I have some ideas. How about you?
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