The air today is a boiling soup, so you can imagine the surprise of my classmates and me when we walked into Room 240 expecting barely-tolerable heat, only to find it pleasantly chilled. That seems to be the recurring theme of the day thus far. Prof. Kahan’s left hand needs to be propped above her heart; it’s resting on two pillows. The interview is this afternoon, actually, so I packed a tie in my bag before heading out to the make-up class in the Integrated Sciences Building.
We continued with zoning (the topic of champions™); the most interesting cases we covered were State ex rel. Stoyanoff v. Berkeley, 458 S.W.2d 305 (1970) and Moore v. City of East Cleveland, 431 U.S. 494 (1977). The former concerned purely aesthetic regulations on what can and cannot be built in the fabulously wealthy suburb of Ladue. It’s well known that I’m not exactly the biggest fan of modern or postmodern architecture, but one of the sticks in the bundle is that people have the right to use and enjoy their property as they see fit. If they have bad taste, that’s their problem, not the local government’s. Richard used to live there, and he pointed out that the lots are so big that you can barely notice your neighbors. Plus, he also pointed out that modern architecture has made its way in, provided it raises property values, which is really what it all boils down to. Moore concerned a grandmother who was criminalized for living with her grandson (his parents weren’t living in the home). The opinion in Moore contrasted East Cleveland’s ordinance regulating occupancy with that in Village of Belle Terre v. Boraas, 416 U.S. 1 (1974). In Belle Terre, where some college students tried to rent a house, family was defined as “one or more persons related by blood, adoption, or marriage,” whereas here it was defined more or less along nuclear-family lines. In Belle Terre, the ordinance was upheld, while in Moore, it was deemed unconstitutional and reversed. This was the correct decision, but in my view, freedom of association should have even stronger protections (I’m not the biggest fan of Belle Terre).
We also covered Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Township of Mount Laurel, 336 A.2d 713 (1975), which dealt with exclusionary zoning. It’s kinda grim that, even though the court found that municipalities should use their zoning powers to provide low- and moderate-income housing, it took another case [456 A.2d 390, 410 (N.J. 1983)] and over twenty years- approved in 1997, completed in Y2K- to get the housing built, at which point Ethel Lawrence had been dead for six years.
We’re moving on to eminent domain today. Fun fact: the Framers viewed eminent domain as an inherent attribute of sovereignty, and that’s why the Fifth Amendment (Takings Clause) places a limit on that power: “[N]or shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
There’s an event for MHLS today, very exciting! Speaking of mental health, we’re gonna be covering the insanity defense in Crim tomorrow; Prof. McGrain assigned us an optional article, “When ‘Not Guilty’ Is a Life Sentence” (Mac McClelland, 2017), and it made my blood boil more than the air outside.
Stephen Seager, a 67-year-old psychiatrist who was at Napa for five years, writes openly about his own reactions to his patients in his 2014 memoir, “Behind the Gates of Gomorrah: A Year With the Criminally Insane.” He describes being in the hallway with a group of them heading to lunch as being “engulfed in a wave of hungry psychopaths.” When one of his patients tells him a story about his childhood, he writes, “I didn’t like thinking that some of the men even had childhoods.” Asked in court about a patient’s diagnosis, he gave the admitting diagnosis — bipolar disorder, manic with psychotic features — though he writes that he knew he wasn’t currently mentally ill. But he did think he was dangerous. When I asked him about this, he said: “The point is they’re supposed to be dangerous because they’re mentally ill, but if they get better and they’re still dangerous, what do you do?” He is well aware of the import of expert testimony in retention decisions. “Most of the time,” he said, “judges take our opinion on it.
“I look for the safety of the community,” he went on. “I live here. Sometimes you just have to say something for everybody’s best interest, regardless of whether they’re mentally ill or not.”
Of patients who “just never quite get better,” in doctors’ estimations, Seager said: “Oh, they’ll be here till they die.”
The only psychopath I see is Dr. Seager.
It actually got me thinking about anger. It’s a universal experience; it’s also a shameful one, but anger can be valuable and even correct. Anger at Dr. Seager’s dehumanization of his patients, for instance, is correct. Anger can be an ugly emotion- by definition, it doesn’t feel good– but that doesn’t make it intrinsically bad. That goes for other “ugly” feelings, too; there’s no shame in feeling them.
It’s noon, so I’m gonna post, but I might provide an update after the interview. We’ll see. I have more to say.
Sierpinski Tetrahedron 