Turley, Obama and the Appeal to Authority

During discussions of constitutional issues in this forum, the logical fallacy “Appeal to Authority” is sometimes employed.

The most usual form is, “I think Obama knows a little more about the constitution than you… he’s a professor of constitutional law.”

The problem with that argument is that Antonin Scalia knows a lot more about the constitution than Senator Obama does, and Scalia is almost always wrong. Credentials do not make a person’s view of the Constitution correct.

Constitutional interpretation is not like trigonometry, with formulas and formally “correct” answers. There is no law school (except maybe that Jerry Falwell law school) where the faculty agrees on all constitutional matters, despite all being highly credentialed scholars.

Constitutional interpretation is a mode of argument, akin to Talmudic scholarship. And sometimes even “right answers” aren’t right. One of my favorite constitutional arguments was in a 1990s case about whether the police can subject drivers at random checkpoints to examination by drug sniffing dogs. Justice O’Connor was the deciding vote, and her argument boiled down to (paraphrasing, of course), “I can’t see anything in the constitution or precedent to bar this. We allow random checkpoints, and we allow drug sniffing dogs… but the combination just sounds too much like something from Nazi Germany.”

After all the sophisticated argument, the matter was decided by the Nazi-vibe test.

That’s a hopeless constitutional argument (O’Connor’s specialty), but in that instance her sub-competent mode of interpretation yielded the right answer, in my view.

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Jonathan Turley has an excellent track record on Bush era abuses. I happen to agree with Turley’s FISA stance, but not because he’s a professor of constitutional law.

Appeals to authority on constitutional matters should be limited to what we can rationally deduce from a person’s credentials.

Turley’s credentials are significant insofar as 1) we know that he is capable of reading statutes correctly and can understand both sides of the sophisticated constitutional arguments in play, and 2) he has sufficient reputation and professional vanity that he will not willfully misread legislation, or stake out an intellectually disreputable position, and 3) he’s a tenured professor who is not running for anything or required to cater to any constituency.

That said, there are probably conservative professors about whom one can say much the same.

The best reason to give Turley’s interpretations some weight is that he has been on the right track on all Bush-era constitutional abuses, and most of his views on those abuses have subsequently prevailed in even conservative courts.

(I have certainly not always agreed with Turley on everything, but at least his belief that Bush belongs behind bars is consistent with his unfortunate support of Bill Clinton’s impeachment. He seems to have a non-partisan zero-tolerance policy for Presidential misconduct, unlike those partisans who wanted Clinton impeached but excuse and enable Bush’s crimes.)

wrong side of this argument.

But at the end of the day, it's one argument in a series of many. Nobody's perfect. It's one bad vote. And no, the Iraq vote was not why I supported Obama over Clinton.

how ironic! :rofl:

The OP is not attempting to persuade anyone to a position on FISA.

Taking authorities into account in ones own thinking is basic to all of us. I use a dictionary, for instance. But there are limits to intellectual authority that should be recognized.

If, for instance, I dismissed something you said because it disagreed with a Yale and Harvard graduate like George W. Bush, that would be asinine.

I give Turley some weight, based more on his track record than his credentials. That's kind of the whole point. The fact that he is a professor of constitutional law doesn't make him right, so one has to look deeper than his credentials to see what weight--if any--his opinion merits. I do not demand that you to give him any weight at all.

This post is two days old, and was inspired in defense of Obama. Many people were posting the Maddow/Turley video, and citing Turley's credentials. I found that silly, since there are thousands of law professors with a whole range of opinions, and folks on both sides didn't seem to fully understand that constitutional law is not mathematics.

I merely ask that you (not YOU, but the reader in general) not invoke one man's education or professional background as meaningful in a dispute with countless people with equal, or even more impressive, credentials on the other side.

It's silly to do so.

(But since you are the sort who expresses his or herself through derisive cartoons, I suppose I might have been wiser to have skipped the exercise of explaining to you what is and is not silly.)