What Are We Teaching Our Lawyers?
One Maryland law professor has a very warped view of the Supreme Court
Wednesday afternoon The Baltimore Sun published one of the more disturbing editorials I’ve seen in a while.
University of Maryland Carey Law School professor Martha M. Ertman writes:
Many, if not most, Americans are furious and fearful at the idea of losing even more fundamental rights to make life-defining decisions. Like a bindweed, the Gang of Five has invaded part — but not all — of the garden.
What?
First off, you don’t have a “fundamental right” to kill a baby. No matter how much the left loves killing babies.
Second, if Ertman had not missed the day they taught law in law school, she would understand why Roe v. Wade was a poor decision by the Supreme Court for reasons that go far beyond abortion itself. Remember, Roe was a decision made up out of whole cloth that bestowed non-existent Constitutional rights upon the populace. Roe was the 20th century’s Plessy v. Ferguson.
It gets worse.
Another limit on SCOTUS’s reign of error is that the judiciary is just one branch of government. Legislatures, the president, agencies and governors all enact and shape law. So when the Court said on June 30 that the Clean Air Act does not authorize the EPA’s regulation of power plants’ carbon emissions, Congress can overrule the court by amending that statute to explicitly give the EPA that power and thus protect people and the planet.
It’s hard to imagine how this person has a job in a law school.
While I don’t dispute the fact that Congress can pass a law dealing with the Clean Air Act as she suggests, that would require Congress to act on something. It was the lack of Congressional action in passing laws on abortion, for example, that got us here with Roe.
But it’s beyond that. Legislatures make law. Nobody else does. The President and Governors can enforce the law, enact regulations, and issue Executive Orders. Agencies can issue regulations and guidelines. But it is only legislatures that actually enact law and establish the guardrails to keep Presidents, Governors, and agencies in line.
Somebody teaching at law school should know that.
There’s other garbage and nonsense in Ertman’s piece that reads more like it was written by a political activist than somebody who got a law degree from Northwestern. But then again, Ertman’s research areas are also on commodification and contracts, not lawmaking and the Supreme Court. But it’s distributing that somebody who lacks a fundamental understanding of basic decisions like Roe and who makes the law has been teaching Maryland’s future lawyers for the last fifteen years.