These are the sorts of situations that arise when one defends a particular theoretical position that one then belies in one's actual life. My favorite example is how, in the mid-1980s, libertarian philosopher Robert
Nozick went to court to protect his rent-controlled Cambridge apartment -
after voluntarily signing a lease agreeing to pay rent above the rent-controlled rate. (See "Anarchy, State, and Rent Control,"
The New Republic Dec. 22 1986 pages 20-21.)
Currently we are witnessing a similar sort of contradiction. This time the perpetrator is Supreme Court Justice
Anontin Scalia. It turns out that
Scalia, who has expressed rather cavalier views about the privacy of personal
information that might be gathered from the
Internet, is perturbed that students in a course on
Information Privacy Law at
Fordham Law School have completed a class assignment that produced a 15 page "dossier" on
Scalia gathered from information freely available on the
Internet. The dossier (which has not been made public) allegedly contains
information ranging from the Justice's home address and phone number to pictures of his grandchildren to details of his food preferences. A report from the
ABA Journal is
here; you can find various other blog discussions
here and
here and
here and
here.
Scalia is complaining that the course instructor - who came up with the assignment in response to public comments the Justice has made about the privacy of personal
information - has been irresponsible and shown "abominably
poor judgement."
I simply do not see that
Scalia has
any complaint. Some of
Scaliia's admirers, however, apparently
think that he has shown great consistency and character because he has not taken legal action against the professor. But if it is, as
Scalia publicly stated, "silly" to worry about others gathering any information about oneself from the
Internet - unless the
information somehow is
embarrassing - he really ought to have shrugged this off completely. Silly is as silly does.
Although
Nozick remained something of a libertarian, he eventually came to admit that the arguments he presented in
Anarchy State & Utopia are "seriously inadequate." Unfortunately,
Nozick reconsidered too late for all those whose lives have been impacted by free-market policies gleefully
implemented by ideologues influenced by his "inadequate"
arguments. Perhaps
Scalia will reflect just a tiny bit and see that his views on privacy are problematic for others not just for himself.
Labels: Legal, libertarians, Political Theory, SCOTUS