Author: James Huffman

A Flawed Defense of Safe Spaces in the New York Times

Published by James Huffman

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth offers a defense of “safe enough” spaces on our college and university campuses. Roth seeks to establish a middle ground between proponents who aspire “to make sure all students are made to feel welcome in or outside the classroom” and critics who see safe spaces as “sanctimonious ‘safetyism’—counterproductive coddling of students who feel fragile.” So, he asks, “what’s a university to do?” “We should begin,” writes Roth in answer to his own question, “by destigmatizing the notion of safe spaces and stop talking about them as if they were part of a zero-sum ideological war.” He provides historic examples of space spaces for employees and managers in post-World War II manufacturing, group therapy in psychiatry, and later feminist and gay liberation community building. None of this was controversial, he suggests. But Roth’s examples are not really on point if the risk of safe spaces perceived by their critics, as Roth puts it, is of  “groups…enclosing themselves in bubbles that protect them from …

Previously Unrecognized Rights: Climate Change Lawsuits and the Rule of Law

Published by James Huffman

Citizens around the world are asking courts to override the climate-related policy choices of democratically elected legislatures and mandate the substance of future legislation. In the name of previously unrecognized rights, plaintiffs in hundreds of cases are asserting that judges have the authority to command action by their supposedly co-equal legislative and executive branches of government. Whatever the merits of the plaintiffs’ policy objectives, their campaign to circumvent the political branches poses a serious threat to the rule law and the constitutional principle of separation of powers. Since the beginning of the modern environmental movement in the 1970s, environmental advocacy groups in the United States have made regular use of the courts to advance their interests. Generally these environmental lawsuits have claimed government failure to comply with the procedural requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, other federal legislation addressing specific environmental problems like the Clear Air and Water Acts and the Endangered Species Act, the various public lands management laws, and the Administrative Procedures Act. The result is almost always delay, sometimes leading to …