Comments Elsewhere

“well could you just clarify you question? What exactly are you asking?”

Sure. Here’s what I mean: you’re recommending a particular strategy by the ACLU on behalf of Hoppe because it’s “practical, real world stuff.” But I don’t know what “practicality” means unless you are choosing about different possible means to get something that’s worth having. If you manage to pull off getting something that isn’t worth having, you haven’t been “practical”; you’ve been wasting your time and effort.

But whether a particular result in court for Hoppe is worth having or not depends, in part, on what he does or doesn’t have a right to. Now, either it’s true or its false that UNLV’s decision to punish Hoppe is a violation of his rights (by breaching contract).

It’s not clear at all that the First Amendment ought to have anything to do with the matter at all: the First Amendment is a protection of speech from government censorship, not an entitlement to keep your job and your same salary no matter what you say. (You might point out UNLV is tax-funded. True, but so what? At the strongest that’s an argument to de-fund UNLV—which is a good idea on its own merits. In the meantime, though, state-funded Universities rightly punish professors all the time for Constitutionally-protected speech that doesn’t fall within the bounds of acceptable scholarly work or appropriate faculty conduct.) But the ACLU’s argument on behalf of Hoppe (I assume that Hoppe is consenting to the arguments that the ACLU is making on his behalf) is based, in part, on the First Amendment. So one of two things is true:

(1) Hoppe’s allowing the people representing him to make a crappy argument in court in order to force results that he doesn’t have a right to force, or

(2) Hoppe’s allowing the people representing him to make a crappy argument in court as a legal feint in order to force results that he does have some right to force, for other reasons.

Now of course you can say, “Hey, Hoppe is trying to get by in the real world, not in Libertarian La-La Land, so he has to try to work with the prevailing winds.” But if (1) is the case, then victory in court isn’t anything that would be worth winning at all (since it would be unjust); and if (2) is the case, then why use the deceptive argument when you could just point to the other reasons you have for seeking redress? (Is achieving some result dishonestly when there are honest means to come by it something that you should want to have?)