One of Opinion Journal's features today is part of the dissenting opinion by Judge Dennis Jacobs, chief judge of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a case involving the decision of a college president to order a student election to be re-run. He concluded that the college student newspaper had been used as a campaign flyer to promote a particular student organization. The student journalists alleged that the president's decision was a freedom of speech issue.
The majority found for the student journalists on appeal. Judge Jacobs, in dissent, didn't bother to read the majority opinion.
With due respect to my colleagues in the majority, and to whatever compulsion they feel to expend substantial energies on this case, I fear that the majority opinion (44 pages of typescript) will only feed the plaintiffs' fantasy of oppression: that plutocrats are trying to stifle an upsurge of Pol-Potism on Staten Island. Contrary to the impression created by the majority's lengthy formal opinion, this case is not a cause célèbre; it is a slow-motion tantrum by children spending their graduate years trying to humiliate the school that conferred on them a costly education from which they evidently derived small benefit.
The "oppression" at issue took place at the College of Staten Island in 1997. So for ten years the courts have been engaged in the weighty decision of whether or not the plaintiffs should be awarded two dollars.
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