Stanley Fish, the Truth and Judges (mental retardation topic, again)
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Stanley Fish, the Truth and Judges (mental retardation topic,
again)
Date: Jan 12, 2010 3:22 AM
NYT OP-ED BELOW, ABOUT MENTAL RETARDATION
AND LAWYERS.
==========================================
Well, that would be your job, Stanley Fish.
As a law educator.
The problem is that judges - not just the
local Corrupticourt's tards - but The Science
Unliker, Anton Scalia,
http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2006/11/scalia_idiocy_continued.php
"Trophosphere, ionosphere, blogosphere,
blah, blah, blah, stop talking scientifical
stuff, it gives my pin head an ache."
need to be trained in what is the scientific
truth, and then how to present it to retarded
judges, like Scalia.
We propose a one-two "expert" scenario:
Get Erol Fikrig and someone from the FDA
Bioanalytics Division, and sit one down
after the other (doesn't matter the order)
and aks em:
"Okay, What is a 'SCIENTIFICALLY VALID TEST'
and 'IS THIS ONE?'"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC258917/?tool=pubmed
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,618,533.PN.&OS=PN/5,618,533&RS=PN/5,618,533
Then, both the FDA person and Yale's
Erol Fikrig will answer, "Why wasn't this
test deployed to assess Yale's other patent
LYMErix?"
It's simple.
It fits the law.
You have an "expert" explaining 'Truth'
to lawyers. Or judges. 'Same underdeveloped
thing.
If then the issue of whether or not the
scientific truth trumps whether or not procedure
was followed when scientific proof of innocence
presents the problem of a fair trial, the
argument is that "NO, procedurally, there
was no one present to parse SCIENTIFIC
VALIDITY to the former judge," that being
the fault of the law school educators, like
yourself.
Like it or not, the likes of youz and
Scalia better either get a brain-on
or get the hell out.
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
=========================================
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/the-true-answer-and-the-right-answer/
January 11, 2010, 9:30 pm
The True Answer and the Right Answer
By STANLEY FISH
Stanley FishStanley Fish on education, law and society.
Tags:
banks, systems, the Supreme Court, Truth
At the beginning of the new year I resolved to leave off writing “old
grouch” columns, columns that chronicle my inability to negotiate
modern life. But resolutions rarely stand in the face of provocation,
and so here I go again.
My bank has been bought for the third time and once again I wasn’t
consulted, which was all right the first two times, but this time
everything went wrong in what was euphemistically called “the
transition.”
First, all the numbers on my accounts were changed and in the new
order the people at my bank (the same people who were there before)
have no means of retrieving the old numbers, which have been erased
from their institutional memory banks.
Second, the old credit cards were canceled, which meant that some
automatic payments weren’t made on time and I received a notice of
cancellation from my insurance company. The worst of it was that while
the new credit cards were sent, they were returned by the postal
authorities to the bank for reasons that remain a mystery.
When I called the bank in the hope of having the credit cards re-sent,
the person on the other end of the phone wouldn’t talk to me because I
gave the wrong answer to a question. The question was, “Where did you
open this account?” I thought back through the years and the various
names “my” bank had gone by and confidently said, “Chicago, Illinois,
the Broadway branch.” “Wrong,” I was told, and so I offered the name
of the branch I’ve been using since moving to Florida. “Wrong again.”
Well, I said, maybe what you want is the branch I’ve been talking to
in New York, where I’ve been spending a month. No, not that one
either. But those are the only possibilities, I protested; one of them
has to be right. “I’m sorry, sir, but the information in our records
does not match any of your answers and I cannot proceed any further.”
But your information is incorrect, I yelled. Needless to say I didn’t
get anywhere.
After many weeks without a credit card, I found out what was going on.
While I had indeed opened the account in Chicago, the computer record
stipulated that the right answer to the question was “Indiana” (a
state I had never lived in) because that was where my original bank,
now existing only in memory, had been chartered. So I was being
penalized for giving the true answer to the question I had been asked,
where what I should have done was give the right answer, the answer
required by the system, the answer I couldn’t have possibly known.
Thinking about this, I realized that the distinction between the true
answer and the right answer operates in many aspects of life. Many
years ago I took my first trip to Europe and purchased a car that I
sent back to the States when my fellowship was over. (Those were the
days when the exchange rate was so favorable that buying a car in this
way was economical.) When I picked up the car in New York I drove to
the local D.M.V., and presented my California driving license. I was
asked, “In what state do you want to register this car, New York or
California?” I sensed that the question was consequential, but I
didn’t know in what way. I dithered for a while and finally said,
“What’s the right answer?” She told me (I don’t remember what it was)
and I promptly gave it. Problem solved.
I should have learned my lesson — always give the right answer, not
the true answer — but last year I found myself talking to an insurance
company about a claim I was making. The person on the other end asked
me a series of questions (like when did the damage occur) and I
answered them truthfully. She took pity on me and told me that those
were not the answers I should be giving. I escaped from the
conversation and called a private adjuster, someone who represents
claimants and knows exactly what the right answers are. He told me
that I should never speak to “my” insurance company, but instead refer
everything to him. He was afraid I might say something true.
The right answer is the answer a system invested in its own machinery
will recognize no matter what the true facts may be. The New York Post
reported recently that in October a woman with a titanium rod in her
hip passed through a metal detector at J.F.K. airport without setting
it off. She immediately informed the appropriate officials, who had
her walk through the detector again, with the same results. She was
told by a T.S.A. employee, “I can assure you the tests are correct.”
She protested that nonetheless it was true that a titanium rod was
implanted in her (she knew it as I knew where I opened my bank
account). When the same thing happened at the same airport in December
she again alerted the screeners, and for her trouble the
transportation security manager sent her this e-mail: “We are
confident in the performance of the WTMDS . . . throughout the
aviation security system.” Once again the right answer trumped the
true answer.
This is almost always the case in the law, especially in a legal
system like ours that privileges procedure over substance. Lawyers
know that what they have to do is find the legal rubric that will
allow them to frame an issue in such a way that when the system’s
questions are posed, the right answer, not the true answer, will be
generated. Courts sometimes explicitly announce that the procedurally
correct answer is preferable to the true answer, which is, legally, of
no interest at all.
In Herrera v. Collins (1993), Leonel Torres Herrera, found guilty of
murder, claimed that because new evidence proving his innocence had
emerged his case should be reconsidered. Chief Justice William
Rehnquist, writing for the majority, replied that innocence or guilt
was not a question for his court to consider absent a demonstration
that the original trial was infected by error. Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor, in a concurring opinion, agreed. Petitioner, she said, does
not appear before us an “innocent man,” but as a “legally guilty
person” who is not “entitled to get another judicial hearing” given
his failure to demonstrate that the trial he received was unfair. The
trial was fair, and the question of his guilt has been determined in a
constitutionally correct procedure. That procedure provides the right
(if not the true) answer to the question, “was he guilty?” (Herrera
was later executed.)
Is this bad? Should we go off the right standard and return to the
true standard? A nice idea, but one that imagines a world where the
judgments reached by systems are tested against a truth that is
independent of any system. Where would that truth come from, how would
it be identified and how could the endless disputes about what it is
be resolved? (The law’s project is to hold such disputes at bay.) It
is because there are no answers to these questions that we will have
to settle for the truths that systems create, deliver and validate in
a sequence that may be reassuring but is finally without a foundation.
You may know as I did where you opened your bank account. You may know
the true answer. But you had better give the right answer.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci