The curious case of Kelley Williams-Bolar

Kelley Williams-Bolar, an African-American woman from Ohio, will spend 10 days in jail and be placed on probation for two years for having falsified papers so that her children could attend school in a wealthier white neighborhood. As the linked post puts it: "A poor BLACK woman on public assistance is being jailed for sending her kids to the rich white school. I’m not arguing whether this is how it should be looked at–I’m saying that's how it is looked at."

Yes, some of the commentators have invoked the point that she broke the law, and yes, the rule of law matters. At the same time, this still feels like a stunning example of the well-documented toward the overcriminalization of everything. Why, precisely, is a civil penalty not an appropriate remedy for the alleged wrong that the taxpayers have suffered? Why is jail time a necessary deterrent? Should this not worry us regardless of the race of the defendant? (Reading this brought back childhood memories of reading and re-reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, in which the poor Irish-American heroine Francie Nolan's mother similarly bent the rules to get her daughter into a better school. I remember specifically a scene in which Francie picks out the house she was supposed to be living in for enrollment records purposes and how she subsequently regards it with special loving care every time she walks by it.)

And why in heaven's name does this need to be a felony? That the felony conviction might prevent Ms. Williams-Bolar from being able to get a state license to practice her profession of choice is just so much more grist for the libertarian mill.*

Finally, is it too cheap and glib to point out that this is an argument for a system with a greater degree of school choice? If Ms. Williams-Bolar had been able to use education tax credits and/or vouchers toward the $800 cost of attending the school in the wealthier district, all of this might well never have happened.


*ETA: the one thing that gives me pause about this case is that if there's an argument for denying licenses to any type of professional based on prior felony convictions, it's in the case of teachers and school aides. At the same time, however, it is also illegal for convicted felons to teach kickboxing classes at the local YWCA and can make it more difficult to get barber's or cosmetologist's license. At a gut level, I find none of this necessary for retributivist reasons, and though I lack the data, I also doubt that any of this does much to serve in the way of deterrence.

Miscellany

1)Here is a good piece about whether the repeal of DADT will lead to increased ROTC presence at elite universities.

2)There's a movement afoot in New York to ban i-pod use while jogging and crossing streets. It's rare that Adam Serwer and I agree about anything, but he is completely right that music is one of the best ways of alleviating the dullness of exercise. I highly recommend Teaching Company lectures as well.

3)What happens when a professor tries to take an easy class and make it hard? One of my college roommates repeatedly enrolled in legendary "gut" classes only to find that the class was being taught by a professor determined to shake things up and make the class harder, much to her frustration.

As for me, attempts to take the easy way out academically never worked that well. Apparently I have a comparative advantage at dealing with curmudgeons, who tend to want to make me a special pet. In dealing with normal, well-adjusted professors -- let alone popular and beloved ones -- this advantage seems to fall away entirely. It's true that this might be partially ideological - faculty who share my political views are perhaps more likely to be curmudgeonly and difficult, whereas lefties are more likely to be touchy-feely -- but I don't think that explains this phenomenon entirely. Not that it matters anymore, however, given that I'm probably out of school forever barring a sudden, unexpected rush of desire to obtain a Ph.D.

Notes on eminent domain and urban renewal

I was re-reading Berman v. Parker, the landmark 1954 eminent domain abuse case that paved the way for the infamous Kelo v. New London, just this week. I got distracted trying to find photos of the condemned property on Google Maps; in lieu of the condemned department store, it appears that there is a little-used baseball diamond and some hideous 1950s apartment buildings. So I was intrigued to see these photos showing the extent of the destruction... er, "urban renewal."


View Larger Map


If you're unfamiliar with the history of eminent domain and urban renewal, the NAACP/AARP amicus brief in Kelo is an excellent short introduction. To summarize: eminent domain power has historically often been abused to target racial and ethnic minorities. For a particularly chilling example, see the quotations from the Minnesota AG at p. 8 of it. While it's unclear if the Southwest D.C. condemnations at issue in Berman were as clearly motivated by racial animus, they nonetheless fell disproportionately on racial and ethnic minorities.

And with what result? Well... nobody I know seems to like the revitalized Southwest; mostly, people seem to work in the socialist realist government office buildings that exist there and then go home as soon as possible. Well, I did take two Russian classes at the USDA grad school facility in that area. The classes were cheap and relatively useful, but again, L'Enfant Plaza was just dispiriting. There's not much in the way of food and drink aside from a good French sandwich place in the basement of the building. Also, it was all too easy to find myself getting out of the Metro at the wrong stop and find myself wandering around some barren windswept plaza that the 1950s urban planners fancied clean and modern, a full seven blocks away from where I was supposed to be. I am glad that I never actually wandered onto a clean and efficient highway ramp into oncoming traffic, although I may have come close once or twice.

Someone should write a long article comparing and contrasting the failure of SW with the revitalized areas of D.C. where people actually like living. Take the U Street Corridor, which was probably a far more blighted slum at its nadir in the 1970s and 80s than Southwest ever was. Yet it's become a place where people do actually want to live again, and all that accomplished without any use whatsoever of eminent domain. In fact, the 19th century architecture is often cited as an important element of the area's charm. So, too, do some of the less-than-super-upscale businesses that have been there forever, like the iconic Ben's Chili Bowl. And the density of the buildings is actually a feature, not a bug; it's easy to find a place to grab a cup of coffee or a sandwich.

(Yes, OK, I concede various pompous Yuppie and Yuppie-hipster affectations afflict U Street. In spite of them, I maintain it's a vastly more interesting place to live than Southwest. Nor do I mean to minimize some of the conflicts that inevitably arise following waves of gentrification. Again, though, the gradual change associated with gentrification seems preferable to the shock and displacement associated with having one's property taken directly.)

((Does anyone know the name of the department store that was taken in Berman? It doesn't appear in either the SCOTUS case or in the opinion of the lower court. It would require digging through microfiche copies of WaPo, I suppose, but I don't really have that kind of time or inclination...)

Baking Project: Almost No-Knead Whole Wheat Bread

Via (what else?) Cooks Illustrated. Getting the timing for the 8 to 18 hour rise, followed by two more hours, is definitely complicated and kind of weekend only territory. Still, it was pretty delicious.

INGREDIENTS
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (10 ounces), plus additional for dusting work surface
1 cup whole wheat flour (5 ounces)
1/4 teaspoon instant or rapid-rise yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons table salt
2 tablespoons honey
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons water (7 ounces), at room temperature
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons mild-flavored lager (3 ounces)
1 tablespoon white vinegar

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Whisk flours, yeast, and salt in large bowl. Stir honey into water, then add water, beer, and vinegar to the dry ingredients. Using rubber spatula, fold mixture, scraping up dry flour from bottom of bowl until shaggy ball forms. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 8 to 18 hours.

2. Lay 12- by 18-inch sheet of parchment paper inside 10-inch skillet and spray with nonstick cooking spray. Transfer dough to lightly floured work surface and knead 10 to 15 times. Shape dough into ball by pulling edges into middle. Transfer dough, seam-side down, to parchment-lined skillet and spray surface of dough with nonstick cooking spray. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature until dough has doubled in size and does not readily spring back when poked with finger, about 2 hours.

3. About 30 minutes before baking, adjust oven rack to lowest position, place 6- to 8-quart heavy-bottomed Dutch oven (with lid) on rack, and heat oven to 500 degrees. Lightly flour top of dough and, using razor blade or sharp knife, make one 6-inch-long, 1/2-inch-deep slit along top of dough. Carefully remove pot from oven and remove lid. Pick up dough by lifting parchment overhang and lower into pot (let any excess parchment hang over pot edge). Cover pot and place in oven. Reduce oven temperature to 425 degrees and bake covered for 30 minutes. Remove lid and continue to bake until loaf is deep brown and instant-read thermometer inserted into center registers 210 degrees, 20 to 30 minutes longer. Carefully remove bread from pot; transfer to wire rack and cool to room temperature, about 2 hours.

According to Google Ads, I'm male.

Heh. I'm surprised, given the number of fashion and baking type sites that I visit. Ah well.

Our not-that-superficial scholars

Because I have sometimes written blog posts about the manners and mores of my generation, Pnin sent me an editorial titled "Our superficial scholars" by former Congresswoman and ex-Rhodes Scholar Heather Wilson. In it. Wilson laments the over-specialization and excessive pre-professionalization of today's college curricula. She seems to base her indictment on her interviews with Rhodes Scholar candidates. This may not be the best pool of evidence; Rhodes Scholarship interviews are high-pressure situations (duh), and it's natural for candidates to try to play to their strengths. There are few settings in which it is a worse idea to shoot one's mouth about topics about which one knows little. I recommend happy hours instead.

Of the examples of alleged hyper-specialization that Wilson gives, two don't actually look much like examples of hyper-specialization. Take the student who started a chapter of Ground Zero on campus, an organization that advocates the elimination of nuclear weapons, yet "hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral." There, the problem seems to be that the student hasn't thought about basic objections to a cause that's important to her. (It's possible that Wilson's point is that the student is so devoted to her academic work that she hadn't any time to reflect on her extracurricular activities -- even one that was important enough to her that she was willing to undertake the hard work involved with starting a club. That seems unlikely, though.) The same thing seems true for the young service academy cadet. That person's weakness seems to be that she's thought too little about basic concerns about her profession, not that she is overly pre-professional or too narrowly specialized.

Her other two examples are trickier. To start with the aspiring comparative government scholar -- yes, it is probably good that she know more about the American constitution, but I'm not really sure it's necessary. And as for the biochemist, I understand completely why an aspiring biochemist might not want to say much about the PPACA. It was a thousand-plus page of highly complex legislation that was confusing even to experts. Nancy Pelosi's much-ballyhooed "We need to pass the health care bill so that you can find out what's in it" underscored the legislation's inscrutability. It was also of course deeply politically controversial. There's no reason why an aspiring biochemist, whose real interests lie elsewhere, should be expected to have any special insight into this thicket. I can understand entirely the decision to say, "You know, I'm inclined to support it, but it's not really my area of expertise. Let me tell you about X part of my research."

Indeed, there is a real danger of underspecialization -- thinking that one knows more than one does about a complex topic. Wilson's biochemist example suggests that she may be too inclined to risk underspecialization for my taste.

Richard Posner's anti-Bluebook broadside

"There is an argument for a uniform understanding of signals of case authority (such as “accord,” “see,” “see also,” “cf.,” “but see,” “contra”), and The Bluebook offers a set of definitions. In fact there is little uniformity in the use of the signals by law clerks and other legal writers. The Bluebook’s effort is unobjectionable and takes up little space, so I am not disposed to criticize it. But what is the point of such rules as that “[i]n law review footnotes, a short form for a case may be used if it clearly identifies a case that (1) is already cited in the same footnote or (2) is cited (in either full or short form, including ‘id.’) in one of the preceding five footnotes. Otherwise a full citation is required. This reads like a parody, but is not. There are more than 150 pages of such 'rules.'"

The rest is available here.