Crime & Federalism

Having read the complete dialogues of Plato, I loved the Socratic method.  In law school, professors supposedly used the Socratic method.  It seemed that law professors, unlike Socrates, did not try to bring the students to the truth, or to show them that no rule could be crafted to cover every situation,* but rather, to confuse them.  I often wondered whether those using the Socratic method had ever read Socrates.  Anyhow, the resulting confusion was not deliberate.  Rather, many law professors in the past 40 years, haven't been properly using the Socratic method.  Details here.

* The beauty of the common law is that judges expand (or contract) a rule based on changing facts and new technologies.  This libertarian is a judicial conservative because I have never seen, in law or philosophy, a Rule of Everything.  Judges apply and modify rules when circumstances change.  Given that I'm a judicial conservative, I care very much about judicial selection and judicial process, since we must have judges who will apply existing law in good faith.  A cruel judge will disregard clearly-established precent to reach his or her desired results.  (I'm being vague, since I'm not about to call out, by name, certain judges on the Fourth, Fifth and Ninth Circuits who refuse to apply the Fourth Amendment.)

On an unrelated note, my judicial conservatism is why I enjoy reading lower-court opinions more so than Supreme Court opinions.  The Supreme Court states broad proclomations (Rules of Everything, that frequently, are meaningless).  The Supreme Court then runs-and-hides, as evidenced by the confusion regarding Crawford v. Washington and United States v. Booker.  The real action is in the lower-courts.