Professor Obama

I know just enough law to be dangerous, I suppose. But let me respond to the angst I see among progressives over the Obama administration's response to a law suit about invasion of privacy/wiretapping.

Here's my premise: if the President wanted to get rid of bad law, one of his routes would be to get the courts to rule the laws are unconstitutional or otherwise illegal.

If there is a lawsuit aimed at a bad law, his Justice Department has two choices. One is to accede to it and not contest it. That might mean a particular case is no longer "on the books" and the plaintiffs win.

The problem with that, according to my limited knowledge f law, is that the case makes no precedence and therefore the legal flaws which allowed for the dropping of the case are not really settled.

The other option is to press the opposition to the suit and let the matter get the full attention of the court and get settled there after full argument so that a precedent is set which has a lot more weight of law than a "settlement out of court" which is essentially what would happen under option one above.

And if the case is to have even more weight, every possible, obscure, and arcane law that could have been used to support the bad law has to be adjudicated in the course of the case.

With any luck, the judge and the plaintiffs do their job more effectively than the Justice Department, at least in terms of being the more legally persuasive so that the final result will stand throughout appeal. In fact, to really nail it down, the full appeal of a particular law all the way to the Supreme Court could end such a law for the foreseeable future.

Don't forget, we went through something like this during the Nixon presidency so maybe we need to go through this every quarter century!

If my premise is correct, the Justice Department is going further than the Bush people with an eye to clearing the decks so that no future administration can go back to some old law to justify such invasion of privacy in the future.

President Obama is pushing our legal system to function properly.

What do you think?