Category Archives: Random Blogging

More from Vilnius

We’ve been in Vilnius two days now–hardly enough time to see a city in any depth, but enough time to form impressions, so here are mine:

Unlike many other historic cities, Vilnius is a genuine metropolitan area–not a museum. While there are scads of tourists, you don’t get the feeling that the city or economy revolves around them. It isn’t a place that seems fixated on homage to the past.

This is an enormously attractive, sophisticated, urban place. Why? Much of the city is walkable; there is ample public transportation and taxis are plentiful. There are lovely parks everywhere. New buildings blend well with the old, without aping the older, and the architecture is generally very good. And there is ample evidence of attention to the city’s infrastructure–not just maintenance, but use of quality paving materials to begin with. As a result, the built environment has held up well. (This is a pet peeve of mine in most of the US–we tend to use the cheapest possible materials for public improvements. It’s a phony way to look frugal, because the work doesn’t last, and re-doing it is expensive.)

We walked a few blocks to one of the quirkiest parts of Vilnius–an area that proclaims itself “the Republic of Uzupis.” It was established by artists, who wrote a ‘constitution’ and posted it in several languages. The constitution proclaims ‘rights’ like “a dog has a right to be a dog,” and “everyone has the right to be an individual.” it is an area filled with galleries and cafes. Vilnius has cafes everywhere, and most have outside seating. That, too, adds to it’s charm.

We also visited the Holocaust Museum, and were surprised to see how much more emphasis was placed on the soviet occupation than on the Nazis–even though the latter murdered 240,000 people–200,000 of whom were Jews. (Admittedly the soviets were here much longer.)

Finally, I have to repeat an earlier observation–people here are thin! I don’t think I realized just how obese Hoosiers have become until I watched people here. Lithuanians are attractive people to begin with, and I have yet to see anyone truly fat.

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Travel Notes

It has been a couple of days since my last post, because we’ve been traveling…I am writing this from the bar in our hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania–the Shakespeare, a hotel I enthusiastically recommend. Vilnius is a wonderful city, alive with cultural actvities, buzzing with commerce, and very walkable, at least in the old city. There is even an artists’ area they call the Montmarte of Vilnius.

We flew to Chicago, then Heathrow, then Copenhagen, where we discovered our direct flight to Vilnius had been cancelled and we had to fly through Riga. All in all a very long travel time–we calculate about 36 hours in all.

Some observations:

people are much thinner in Europe.

customer service has been uniformly excellent–everywhere we’ve been, airline personnel and waiters, etc., have been helpful and courteous and multi-lingual.

it is hard to miss the degree to which the world has truly globalized.
To the naked eye, everyone looks American–we dress alike, shop at the same stores, express common mannerisms….True, we’ve lost a great deal of the charm of indigenous cultures, but it is impossible not to recognize how rapidly globalization is homogenizing the world–at least, the western world.

blogging will be sporadic, as we will be traveling pretty consistently for the next month.

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There’s Law and There’s Politics

A lawyer friend of mine recently sent me an email commenting on the Recount Commission’s ruling on Charlie White’s residency.

“Contrary to what I repeatedly heard from the Commission members yesterday, mostly Wheeler, Indiana law does not state that residence is totally a function of one’s intent.  While important, the Supreme Court in the Evan Bayh case said these things about the role of intent in domicile cases.  First, it said that “a self-serving statement of intent is not sufficient to find that a new residence has been established.” (“I intended to live at Broad Leaf at the home of the woman I divorced 3 years earlier, while I was engaged to another woman, and after I’d leased and then purchased a condominium with a 30-year mortgage and paid all the utility bills while my fiancé was living there.”) Second, the Bayh case held that residency requires both intent and “evidence of acts taken in furtherance of the requisite intent, which makes the intent manifest and believable.”  In other words, one’s professed intent, to be made believable, requires conduct that is consistent with that professed intent.  And third, the Court in the Bayh case emphasized that a location cannot be one’s domicile unless it is one’s “true, fixed, permanent home,” not a place (like one’s ex-wife’s home) where one goes occasionally to “crash”, i.e. a purely temporary arrangement.”

The Commission essentially ruled that all White needed to do was profess an intent to reside at his ex-wife’s home.  But as my friend pointed out, his ex-wife explicitly testified that the arrangement was “never intended to be permanent but only temporary.” Furthermore, White’s contemporaneous conduct and the circumstances surrounding his divorce and engagement to another woman was–in any world most of us inhabit or recognize–totally inconsistent with his testimony that he intended to take up permanent residence with his ex.  He leased and then purchased the new condo and moved his fiancé into it at no charge to her; he represented to his lending institution, to his future employer, to his prior employer and to the IRS that this condo would be his permanent residence. If this were a made-for-TV movie, the obvious question would be: “Were you lying then or are you lying now, Mr. White?”

As my friend conceded, the process is and was intended to be political rather than judicial in nature, so that a political rather than a judicial outcome would result.  And that is precisely what happened here. If White thinks he will have as easy a time of it when the criminal charges against him are heard, he’s likely to be very disappointed.

The great irony is that, by refusing Republican and Democratic demands that he resign, White is continuing to embarrass the same Republican party that provided him with last week’s Pyrrhic victory.

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Facts, Law and Mike Delph

A friend who uses Twitter sent me a series of Tweets from Mike Delph today. Most railed against “activist” judges (beginning with Chief Justice Marshall’s decision in Marbury v. Madison) and the “elites that control them.” Others were–frankly–incomprehensible, not to mention ungrammatical. The one sentiment that came through loud and clear is that Delph is highly pissed off that the courts would dare strike down provisions of his pet legislation. (Putting this as politely as possible, if he has even a rudimentary grasp of the constitutional architecture, that grasp was not on display in these tweets.)

I thought about Delph’s war on immigrants when I read a recent article from the Atlantic.

The article was titled “Safety in Diversity: Why Crime is Down in America’s Cities.” A couple of relevant paragraphs will give its basic thrust, but the entire article is worth reading.

In the popular imagination, crime is frequently associated with big, densely populated cities. Here again, we can separate fact from myth.  Primary cities and older high-density suburbs exhibited the largest decreases in crime between 1990 and 2008, according to the Brookings study. And the gap between city and suburban violent crime narrowed in two-thirds of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas. Our own analysis turns up no association whatsoever between metro size or metro density and the overall level of crime, though we do find a modest correlation (.25) between density and violent crime.

……

It might be hard to wrap your mind around this–especially with all the demagoguery about immigration. But the numbers tell a different story than our alarmist pundits and politicians do. “Since 1990, all types of communities within the country’s largest metro areas have become more diverse,” Elizabeth Kneebone, one of the authors of the Brookings report, wrote in The New Republic. “Crime fell fastest in big cities and high-density suburbs that were poorer, more minority, and had higher crime rates to begin with. At the same time, all kinds of suburbs saw their share of poor, minority, and foreign-born residents increase. As suburbia diversified, crime rates fell.” Along with their entrepreneurial energy and their zeal to succeed, immigrants are good neighbors–cultural and economic factors that militate against criminal behavior, and not just in their own enclaves but in surrounding communities as well.

Don’t you just hate it when the facts smack you down?

Appearances of Impropriety

Yesterday, following the announcement of the Recount Commission’s finding that Charlie White had been eligible to run for Secretary of State (or, more accurately, their conclusion that they couldn’t conclusively prove otherwise), I got a call from a reporter. Her question was not about the Commission’s conclusion; instead, she wanted to know whether the chair should have recused himself from the deliberations, since he had hosted a fundraiser for White, and his firm had donated $5000 to White’s campaign.

My answer, of course, was yes.

It is perfectly possible that–as he claimed–the contribution and prior support did not influence the chairman’s decision. But that is irrelevant. The facts of the matter raised an appearance of impropriety, and that appearance alone was enough to require recusal. Citizens have to be able to trust that their public institutions are operating impartially and fairly; otherwise, suspicion and cynicism will undermine our faith in the legitimacy of government and erode respect for–and compliance with–the laws.

Instances of what we might call “ethical insensitivity” seem to be proliferating: recently, commentators have reported on activities of Clarence Thomas (and especially his wife) that raise serious questions about the Judge’s impartiality. A couple of years ago, Justice Scalia shrugged off criticism of his cozy vacation with Dick Cheney during a time when a lawsuit against Cheney was pending at the Supreme Court.  Closer to home, we have the President of the City-County Council insisting that his vote to award a lucrative city contract to a client of his law firm did not constitute a conflict of interest.

In each of these cases–and many others–the person accused of a conflict insisted that the relationship at issue didn’t affect his judgment. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn’t. But that isn’t the point. The point is that such relationships inevitably cast doubt on the integrity of the proceeding.

Think about it: If you were a party in a lawsuit, and you knew that the opposing party regularly played poker with the judge, and had supported him politically, how confident would you be that the Judge’s ultimate ruling would be impartial?   Wouldn’t you ask for a change of venue, or a different judge? If you were a taxpayer whose elected representative was voting to spend your tax dollars on a deal that benefited his brother-in-law, or a big client, how confident would you be that he cast that vote based solely on policy considerations?

And how reassured would you be if such public servants pooh-poohed your reservations?

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