The Alliance for Justice produced a film called “Quiet Revolution” that is, according to an accompanying booklet, pitched at informing viewers about the “transformative legal agenda that movement conservatives are pursuing” through the political process generally and the judiciary particularly.
While I applaud the motives and the effort that went into it, I’m not all that enthusiastic about the film itself. The beginning set my teeth on edge right away when narrator Bradley Whitford invoked revisionist tropes about the glorious freedoms bestowed upon us by the Founding Fathers that conservatives now are stripping away. As filitered through the judiciary established by those wonderful framers, men who were not white didn’t have rights or freedoms; white women had very few rights or freedoms, and could benefit from things like property ownership only if they were able to attach themselves to benevolent white men; and women who were not white were in completely desperate straights. There was no rosy, idyllic past of freedom or equality for the majority of the population, and I don’t understand the point of engaging in this sort of intellectual dishonesty. The part where the viewer is warned that conservative judges “want to distort key sections of the Constitution, like the Commerce Clause” actually made me laugh out loud, though I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the intent. Return to the halcyon days of Lochner, shall we?
Though it does highlight issues like the racial segregation of the past, at certain points the film makes it sound like things were great until the conservatives started taking over about 25 years ago, and maybe they were in Supposedly Liberal White Dude World, but for the rest of us, progess was happening then, but it was slow and it wasn’t only conservatives who were standing in our way. By way of illustrating this point, refer to the list of participants on page 15 of the Quiet Revolution booklet. In addition to the male narrator, it lists nine participants, six men and three women. Watch the actual film, however, and you will see a number of additional men who are not listed as participants for some reason. Indiana law prof Dawn Johnsen gets a lot of air time and does a nice job with it. She is the only law professor from a “non elite” law school in evidence. The only other female law professor is Yale’s Judith Resnik, who appears very briefly. Male law professors appearing include Cass Sunstein and David Strauss of the University of Chicago Law School and Harold Koh and Bruce Ackerman of Yale Law, all of whom are listed as participants, and Peter Edelman and David Cole, both law profs at Georgetown, who are not lised as participants in the booklet. Writer Dahlia Lithwick participates and is listed; writer James Bamford speaks and is identified in the film, but is not a listed participant. By my count, the true gender ratio of the participants is nine males to three women, and I’m curious about why the participant roster doesn’t reflect this. Are we not supposed to notice the imbalance?
I’m also not really sure who the target audience of this production is. Nonlawyers will generally not understand the fairly extensive case law references, but lawyers may feel insulted by the scary music, polemical rhetoric and oversimplification of the issues. I know I did. I wanted to like “Quiet Revolution,” but I think the Alliance for Justice needs to rethink its approach.
Via Orin Kerr, who reports that Nan Aron is his cousin, and is rather hard on Dahlia Lithwick. Warning: That’s a Volokh Conspiracy link, because Orin is still playing hooky from his eponymous blog for some reason.
–Ann Bartow
