Unlike my Tax class I have not blogged a whole lot about Professor Post's "The First Amendment". (By First Amendment, he means freedom of speech and of the press. Religion is never touched except to the extent it shows up when a religious fellow wishes to speak).

This isn't because I don't find the class endlessly engaging, but because I mostly dissipate the resultant energy by pestering Steve Sachs with email. At any rate, I am posting now because the course is over, and I wanted to offer a brief thought about the "theory of the First Amendment".

Say what you will about Justice Holmes, but the man could write:

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution.

This isn't really a political blog, of course, but I can't help noting the President's new social security plan. As I argued on my own blog before, I would much prefer a heavily means tested safety net for the elderly than the current paternalist self insurance program.(Matthew Yglesias responded here) I'll pay the (hopefully) less tax for it - just leave me and my savings alone. The new Bush plan seems to go in that direction, and I'm glad.

But amid the predictable outrage from much of the left about the plan (arguing, apparently, that universality is good because it keeps those nasty republicans from cutting benefits), I just wanted to note something about the man who designed the program, Robert Pozen. I was lucky enough to take a class with Mr. Pozen last year, so I have something of a sense of him, I think. Even though I should be suspicious of the Democrat Mr. Pozen on this subject, there couldn't be a more fair, results oriented, person to devise such a system. He knows his stuff. His goal, as far I could tell, was to produce value. And if this is what he came up with, I think the burden of proof has to shift to the other side. I don't mean to say that Pozen is infallible, obviously. But my guess is that ar the very least, his plan works - and the seemingly furious responses of some commentators are probably unjustified.

Additionally, I observe a little ruefully that a lot of the left's argument against changing social security is grounded in how venerable it is - even "hallowed", in the words of Mr. Cohen of WaPo. And yet, when it comes to marriage, these preservers of a mere century's tradition find opposite sex marriage's millenial tradition of efficacy unpersuasive. Now, it just so happens that I think both institutions should be changed. But I don't think our current defenders of tradition should be taken very seriously, at least not in their protests of conservation.

The ctrl-F debate recurs in tax today. Professor Alstott was quite by surprise to learn that there was a rule forbiding us to search within our own word documents: "I didn't know that this was a rule; it sounds silly to me." She wondered what the point of an outline was if one couldn't search it.

Alstott, being the deputy dean, might actually be able to exact an answer from the Registrar about why we have this rule. All I could elicit when I asked was:

There have been many complaints from students in the past few years about the unfairness of hyperlinking. The honor system is at work, and we are not moving to using exam software that blocks many features of laptops, including spell checking, for example, although most states are using such software for use of computers on bar examinations.