LawCulture

Looking for a Leader of the Democratic Party?

For engaging reading, see Garry Wills' review of former President Jimmy Carter's book "Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis" -- not only for its teachable content (it provides a host of accessible statistics and anecdotes that touch on issues addressed in most first year law school curricula) but also for its implicit claim that Carter is a model of a leader for today's democratic party.  (Perhaps the claim is not so implicit.  The article ends with the following:  "Carter is a patriot. ... He defends the separation of church and state because he sees with nuanced precision the interactions of faith, morality, politics, and pragmatism.  That is a combination that once was not rare, but is becoming more so.  We need a voice from the not-so-distant past, and this quiet voice strikes just the right notes.")

At 82 years of age, Jimmy Carter is too old (and likely too wise) to attempt a second term as president.  But, to pick up on an earlier post by Rosa Brooks questioning the assumed incompatibility of fervent religious faith with "the American tradition ... [of] skepticism [and] rebellion," Carter may be the rare model of a personality who inhabits both perspectives and who is well-regarded as a moral and political leader.  Or, am I short-sighted?  Are there those from a younger generation who might fit (or improve upon) Carter's current example?  Or, perhaps the glorification of Jimmy Carter is an inevitable consequence of a regretful populace (worse yet, a populace that doesn't  learn from its past)?  Maybe the likes of Jimmy Carter are rare because the seeming incompability of religious faith and skepticism is too complex an alchemy for the electable American political leader but is otherwise acceptable in a philospher-guide whose authority springs from his peripheral posture?

Evidence in Conflict: Repatriating Native American Human Remains

I spent Saturday morning on the reservation of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. I parked near the massive casino, the engine powering the housing boom in evidence all around the reservation. Many of the spacious homes, mostly typical mcmansions like those dotting any suburban gated community, were still works-in-progress .  Our meeting was held in the community center, itself a well-appointed facility with a cheerful outdoor children’s playground and an impressively large scale.

I was there for a conference, and I was almost certainly the person in the room who knew least about matters Native American.  My task was to moderate and comment on a panel on evidence issues that arise under NAGPRA – a statute I had never heard of until recently, which stands for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act – and, as the name suggests, regulates the repatriation of those remains and funerary objects presently in the hands of museums, universities and other institutions that receive federal funds, if they are found to be ‘culturally affiliated’ with particular native American groups.

NAGPRA says that in determining whether cultural affiliation has been established by a preponderance of the evidence,  many kinds of evidence should be considered, including:  “geographical, kinship, biological, archeological, linguistic, folklore, oral tradition, historial evidence, or other information or expert opinion.”   But NAGPRA provides no further insight about how these various kinds of evidence should be aggregated or compared.

You can probably already see where this is going.  What happens when the evidence conflicts?  What happens when the biological evidence points in one direction and the oral histories of the native people point in another? Whose truths count, and why?