Blog

The lecture notes are here. The live chat is here.

Individual Liberty I

• Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1476-1478).
• Buck v. Bell (1428-1432).
• Griswold v. Connecticut (1478-1494).

Pierce v. Society of Sisters

This is the Hill Military Academy, a private school shut down due to the compulsory education law.

 

Buck v. Bell

This is Carrie Buck. Why was she designated as “feebleminded”? Because she had an “illegitimate child,” and they charged her with “promiscuity.” The pregnancy resulted from a rape.

This is Carrie Buck with her mother, Emma Buck.

This is Dr. J. H. Bell, the superintendent at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics.

This is the  courthouse in Amherst County, Virginia where Buck’s case was first “heard”:

This is the “State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded,” where Carrie Buck was sterilized in the wake of Buck v. Bell.

Here is a rendering of Carrie’s Buck family tree, as performed by Dr. Harry H. Laughlin. F stands for “feebleminded.” Notice That Carrie Buck is designated with an F, her mother Emma was designated with an F, and her daughter, Vivienne, was designated with an F. There you have three generations of imbeciles. Enough.

 

 

Haughlin, impressed that Nazi Germany adopted his ideas, had this to say:

The fact that a great state like the German Republic, which for many centuries has helped furnish the best that science has bred, has in its wisdom seen fit to enact a national eugenic legislative act providing for the sterilization of hereditarily defective persons seems to point the way for an eventual worldwide adoption of this idea.

In 1936, Laughlin was invited by the Nazis to receive an honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine at the University of Heidelberg for his work in the “science of racial cleansing.”

 Here is Carrie Buck shortly before she died.

Here are several pieces of American propaganda about Eugenics.

This one says, “Some people are born to be a burden on the rest. Learn about heredity. You can help to correct these conditions.”

This piece of propaganda says “Eugenics is the self direction of human evolution.”

Speaking of social darwinism, and surivival of the fittest, here is Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who firmly believed that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Buck’s daughter, Vivian, was raised by foster parents, This is Vivian at 6 months old. She flunked her IQ test. So she was also deemed an imbecile:

It was Estabrook’s habit to photograph the subjects of his eugenical family studies, and one surviving photo shows Alice Dobbs holding Carrie’s baby. It appears that Mrs. Dobbs is holding a coin in front of Vivian’s face in an attempt to catch her attention. The baby looks past her, staring into the distance, apparently failing the test. Estabrook described that moment during his testimony at trial a few days later: “I gave the child the regular mental test for a child of the age of six months, and judging from her reaction to the tests I gave her, I decided she was below the average.”

In case you were wondering, the child was not an imbecile. Here is her report card from first grade. She was a solid B student, with an A in deportment, and on the honor roll.

Vivian died at the age of 8 due to intestinal diseases.

Despite her sterilizations, Buck would go on to be married, twice. First to William Eagle.

25 year after William’s death, Buck married Charlie Deatmore.

Here is Carrie Buck shortly before she died.

Here is a sign in Virginia to commemorate Buck v. Bell.

 

Griswold v. Connecticut

Here is Estelle Griswold, the lead plaintiff at the Planned Parenthood Center of New Haven, Connecticut.

 

Here is a photograph of Dr. C. Lee Buxton and Estelle Griswold after their arrest.

A penumbra is a partial shadow outside the complete shadow of an opaque body.

The lecture notes are here. The live chat is here.

This is the section of the Texas code that governs equitable distribution of community property after a divorce:

Sec. 7.001.  GENERAL RULE OF PROPERTY DIVISION. In a decree of divorce or annulment, the court shall order a division of the estate of the parties in a manner that the court deems just and right, having due regard for the rights of each party and any children of the marriage.

Added by Acts 1997, 75th Leg., ch. 7, Sec. 1, eff. April 17, 1997.

Sec. 7.002.  DIVISION AND DISPOSITION OF CERTAIN PROPERTY UNDER SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES. (a) In addition to the division of the estate of the parties required by Section 7.001, in a decree of divorce or annulment the court shall order a division of the following real and personal property, wherever situated, in a manner that the court deems just and right, having due regard for the rights of each party and any children of the marriage:

(1)  property that was acquired by either spouse while domiciled in another state and that would have been community property if the spouse who acquired the property had been domiciled in this state at the time of the acquisition; or

(2)  property that was acquired by either spouse in exchange for real or personal property and that would have been community property if the spouse who acquired the property so exchanged had been domiciled in this state at the time of its acquisition.

(b)  In a decree of divorce or annulment, the court shall award to a spouse the following real and personal property, wherever situated, as the separate property of the spouse:

(1)  property that was acquired by the spouse while domiciled in another state and that would have been the spouse’s separate property if the spouse had been domiciled in this state at the time of acquisition; or

(2)  property that was acquired by the spouse in exchange for real or personal property and that would have been the spouse’s separate property if the spouse had been domiciled in this state at the time of acquisition.

(c)  In a decree of divorce or annulment, the court shall confirm the following as the separate property of a spouse if partitioned or exchanged by written agreement of the spouses:

(1)  income and earnings from the spouses’ property, wages, salaries, and other forms of compensation received on or after January 1 of the year in which the suit for dissolution of marriage was filed; or

(2)  income and earnings from the spouses’ property, wages, salaries, and other forms of compensation received in another year during which the spouses were married for any part of the year.

Here is a recent story, similar to the W.C. Fields case,where a mistress is ordered to pay her dead lover’s wife:

Kathie O’Keefe, a former lounge singer turned political activist, spent two “happy” decades with another woman’s husband and now she’s being ordered to pay up.

When her former lover, Jack McCarthy, died 16 months ago at age 78, O’Keefe made a claim against the estate of the wealthy real estate broker.

O’Keefe, 69, wanted a watch and ring he had given her, and the $200,000 she said he promised her.

Not only was O’Keefe turned down, but McCarthy’s wife of 30 years, Margaret, turned the tables and sued.

Now, according to a court ruling in favor of Margaret McCarthy, O’Keefe owes $200,000, to her dead lover’s family.

“I was really shocked,” O’Keefe said on ABCNEWS’ Good Morning America. “I thought of it as a nuisance suit and I didn’t think they had a chance of actually getting a judgment against me,” she said.

McCarthy’s wife relied on an obscure 90-year-old Washington law that forced O’Keefe to account for all the gifts and money he’d ever given her — and pay it all back in cash.

“It doesn’t matter to me if it’s $200,000 or $2 million,” she said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. It was Jack who broke the law and I don’t think I should be punished for the sins of a dead man,” she said.

George Smith, O’Keefe’s lawyer, said the court’s ruling now exposes every extra-marital partner in the area to serious financial risk.

“The old law says, and it’s still in effect, that one spouse cannot gift community property to an individual without the consent of the other spouse,” Smith said. “I think the girlfriend should look at the heading on the check, and if it says, ‘the account of Mr. and Mrs.,’ she’s got problems coming down the road.”

The McCarthy estate demanded $400,000, but after the court ruling, both parties reached a settlement.

The McCarthy estate’s lawyer, Kurt Olson, said things might have been different for O’Keefe if she had what she claimed McCarthy promised in writing.

“If it were a legitimate claim that she was asking for, if she had some evidence that he had intended to give her the money, then obviously that would heve been very important to the estate,” Olson said. “If there was any writing if it had been in any estate planning documents that would have been very relevant but we had nothing except for her word about what a deceased person had said according to her,” he said.

Here are the President’s remarks. The President took a victory lap today on news that the ACA, “or Obamacare” hit 7.1 million people. I should note that now that things are looking good, he is comfortable calling it Obamacare again. I suspect this will change at some point.

That’s what the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, is all about -– making sure that all of us, and all our fellow citizens, can count on the security of health care when we get sick; that the work and dignity of every person is acknowledged and affirmed.  The newly insured like Marla deserve that dignity

The president also noted that there were problems with the law, though “democracy” has fixed it. Well, not really. Pen and phone.

Like every major piece of legislation — from Social Security to Medicare — the law is not perfect.  We’ve had to make adjustments along the way, and the implementation — especially with the website — has had its share of problems.  We know something about that.  And, yes, at times this reform has been contentious and confusing, and obviously it’s had its share of critics.  That’s part of what change looks like in a democracy.  Change is hard.  Fixing what’s broken is hard.  Overcoming skepticism and fear of something new is hard.  A lot of times folks would prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t.

And he made a “Death Panel” joke:

But this law is doing what it’s supposed to do.  It’s working.  It’s helping people from coast to coast, all of which makes the lengths to which critics have gone to scare people or undermine the law, or try to repeal the law without offering any plausible alternative so hard to understand.  I’ve got to admit, I don’t get it.  Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance?  Why are they so mad about the idea of folks having health insurance?  Many of the tall tales that have been told about this law have been debunked.  There are still no death panels.  (Laughter.)  Armageddon has not arrived.  Instead, this law is helping millions of Americans, and in the coming years it will help millions more.

I’ve said before, I will always work with anyone who is willing to make this law work even better.  But the debate over repealing this law is over.  The Affordable Care Act is here to stay.  (Applause.)

The President issued a warning–those who oppose this law will be viewed unfavorably by “history” (whatever that is):

In the end, history is not kind to those who would deny Americans their basic economic security.  Nobody remembers well those who stand in the way of America’s progress or our people.  And that’s what the Affordable Care Act represents.  As messy as it’s been sometimes, as contentious as it’s been sometimes, it is progress.  It is making sure that we are not the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t make sure everybody has basic health care.

One of the difficult aspects of assessing the 7.1 million number is how many of these people were previously insured. I’ve seen estimates that as few as one million people, and as many as three million were previously uninsured. In other words, its very difficult to assess how much of an impact this law made. Certainly there are those who are better off. But those improvements come at a serious cost, including making health insurance more expensive, and less comprehensive for many others. As I continue working on the next book, I try to keep these numbers in perspective. But in fairness, kudos to the administration for making it this far form the launch of the web site till March 31.

In 2009, I launched FantasySCOTUS.net, largely as a joke. Today, we have over 20,000 members making predictions about all of the cases before the Supreme Court. Building on the wisdom of the crowds, by crunching all of this data, we have been able to develop the very first Supreme Court prediction market. And it is extremely accurate. But FantasySCOTUS.net was only the start.

The next phase, which will launch during the October 2014 Term, will usher in a revolution for quantitative legal predictions.

Meet Marshall, the Supreme Court predicting algorithm. Much like how IBM named their lead computer after Thomas J. Watson, we named our system after one of the wisest and most forward-looking Chief Justices in the Supreme Court’s history, John Marshall. Given any case that came before the Supreme Court in the last fifty years, knowing nothing more than facts available at the time of the cert grant, Marshall can offer an accurate justice-by-justice breakdown of what will happen. It is frankly unprecedented.

How does Marshall work? Building upon developments in applied machine learning, my colleagues and I have developed a robust and generalized model of Supreme Court prediction. We offer the most extensive method of Supreme Court prediction to date. Using an alternative approach as well as some novel feature engineering / feature generation, our model exceeds previous efforts to predict the outcome of cases. Further, our approach is not fixed to a single term, but is general enough to forecast cases over five decades of United States Supreme Court history (1960-2013). With more than fifty years worth of performance and a more sound methodological foundation, our results represent a major advance for the science of quantitative legal prediction and and portend a range of other potential applications than done before.

As a way of publicly testing the accuracy of Marshall, we will soon announce a tournament. The 20,000+ members of FantasySCOTUS will make predictions about the outcome of cases at the same time as Marshall. This will be our Man v. Machine, or Jeopardy v. Watson competition.

Stay tuned…

This is Chief Justice Roger Brooks Taney, the author of Dred Scott v. Sandford.

 

This is Dred Scott.

This is a cover sheet by the Supreme Court, summarizing the lower court disposition from Missouri, filed on December 30, 1854.

This is the Court’s judgment in Dred Scott, dated March 7, 1857, and seems to have been signed by Chief Justice Taney.