I'VE ALMOST GIVEN UP BLOGGING. The time it takes, and the effort, are needed elsewheres in my life right now.

But then I read a post by John Rosenberg, whom I respect, equating the United Negro College Fund with Bob Jones. And my blood just boils.

I'm not fond of civic republicanism or its communitarian cousins, especially in First Amendment matters. But at some point we liberals (broadly construed) must figure out how to appropriately judge the moral content of not just our means but our goals.

To borrow from Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent discussion of Skokie and the Selma freedom march:

When Martin Luther King sought to leada march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, Alabama Governor Goerge Wallace tried to stop him. The case quickly made its way to the U.S. District Court, where it confronted Judge Johnson with a dilemma. the courts had upheld the rights of speech and assembly, but the states have the right to regulate the use of their highways for the safety and convenience of the public. As Judge Johnson acknowledged, a mass march along a public highway reached "to the otuer limits of what is constitutionally allowed. Nevertheless, he ordered the state to permit the march, on grounds of the justice of its cause: "the extent of the right ot assemble, demonstrate and march peaceably along the highways . . . should be commensurate with the enormity of the wrongs that are being protested and petitioned against. In this case, the wrongs are enormous. The extent of the right to demonstrate against these wrongs should be determined accordingly."

APPROPO ALDEN. Lawrence Solum has a great post on Justice Wilson's opinion in Chisholm v. Georgia.

For what it's worth, I think Wilson's view on sovereignty is almost as troublesome as Alden's. Maybe I can get to that later.

Also, my only regular reader (since Bob left) passes on this interesting quote regarding the majority's reasoning in Alden:

"In the past this Court has from time to time set its views of policy against that embodied in legislation by finding laws in conflict with what was called the "spirit of the Constitution." Such undefined destructive power was not conferred on this Court by the Constitution. Before a duly enacted law can be judicially nullified, it must be forbidden by some explicit restriction upon political authority in the Constitution. Equally inadmissible is the claim to strike down legislation because to us as individuals it seems opposed to the "plan and purpose" of the Constitution. That is too tempting a basis for finding in one's personal views the purposes of the Founders."

West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 666 (1943) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting).