People v. State

Via this post at Above the Law, Florida Bar Examiners will start looking at applicants’ Facebook pages to evaluate their character and fitness to practice law, “and will of course check to see if you would like to overthrow the government.” Although Above the Law is kind of joking about that last part, it’s hard to imagine that a Facebook page or a blog like, e.g., this one, would not have raised a few eyebrows among the (non-Floridian) bar examiners who initially admitted me to the practice of law ten years ago. A couple points in my defense, should this blog ever provoke among that kind a second look:

First, I would not like to overthrow the government, at least not all at once. Some things perpetrated by minions of the State, such as waging wars of aggression, carrying out acts of terrorism by deploying weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations, and executing a demonstrably innocent man after his family was tragically killed in an accidental fire, are indeed deserving of the bitterest condemnation, and should serve to disassociate all patriotic sentiments from any attachment to the State. Other unnecessary evils regularly committed by the State are more banally destructive: taxing the poor and thereby obstructing their progress towards financial independence, locking people in cages like animals for their supposed vices rather than their crimes, prohibiting people from earning an honest living in the way that they choose unless they obtain a license from the State, etc., etc. But even in a libertarian paradise, we would still need the Judge, the Cop, and the Lawyer, although their roles would look much different in an ideal polycentric legal order. What we wouldn’t need is the Politician / Lawmaker. Nobody would miss him.

Second, I am not as far out of the mainstream as might be supposed. While the devout Democrat thinks the Republicans were taking the country to hell in a handbasket, and the devout Republican thinks the Democrats are doing the same, I ecumenically think they’re both right. I’m right there in the radical center of the common ground occupied by small-l libertarians. And as I explained a while back in this comment on Ann Althouse’s blog: “I consider myself an anarchist theoretically and a minarchist pragmatically. It’s the theoretical anarchism which justifies and enjoins the minarchism, rather than a mere unprincipled preference for less government.” Two of the very most popular blawgs, Instapundit and The Volokh Conspiracy, are run by libertarians. One of the Volokh Conspirators, Randy Barnett, is a well-known theoretical anarchist and the owner/operator of lysanderspooner.org, not to mention a law professor at Georgetown. Another prominent theoretical anarchist, John Hasnas, from whose legal scholarship along with Barnett’s I’ve drawn much inspiration, is likewise a professor at Georgetown.

Radical is respectable, and inherently so.

Follow