As a parting consideration, consider this detailed post from How Appealling on the juvenile death penalty. Thanks again to all the readers who wrote in, and to Walter Olson.
Farewell.

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Of course, these decisions don’t contradict one another at all, but they do betray an interesting theme in the law’s treatment of children. The Kennedy case is interesting because the Supreme Court has already held (in Coker v. Georgia) that the death penalty cannot constitutionally be applied for the rape of an adult woman. The Louisiana decision, if it stands, will mark a decision that children need more protection from the law than adults do.
Similarly, the Missouri case, if it becomes the law of the land, will do for juveniles what Atkins v. Virginia did for the mentally retarded. This, too, is based on a decision that juveniles are less culpable for their actions.
What’s intriguing about this trend (if these two examples do mark a trend) is that it doesn’t seem to be tracking some shift in public opinion or understanding. So far as I know, most people don’t think kids today are less culpable, less able to defend themselves, or less autonomous than kids of previous generations were. If anything, the perception is the reverse. This will be a path of the law worth watching.
UPDATE: The New York Times continues to handle the controversy.

CORRECTION: The crime involved in Coker v. Georgia was incorrectly stated in the original version of this post. We’ve corrected it.

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While it is appropriate that justice is blind, that does not mean the Bracks Government is blind to the needs of the Victorian public.

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Place yourself in the original position and ask: if I didn?t know how old I would be when the veil is lifted, what principles of political representation would I favor? One-(adult) person, one vote?

Now, I have always thought this was a silly intellectual exercise. If I didn’t know how old I was, I also wouldn’t know what I thought about a lot of things. When I was younger I thought some things, and now that I’m older (but not that old!) I think some other things. When I’m 30, 40, 50, I’m sure I’ll think some other things. So I’m skeptical about our ability to honestly place ourselves behind a veil of ignorance in such an unfalsifiable enterprise.
Should children be allowed to vote? Schwartzman makes a good argument against “Voting by proxy”– that is, letting parents vote on behalf of their children– but doesn’t really deal with whether we ought to allow children to vote outright. Would 3-year-olds toddle en masse to the booth to support Cookie Monster? It seems unlikely. On the other hand, consider this argument from Richard Posner in a 2001 opinion overturning Indianapolis’s video game ban:

Children have First Amendment rights. This is not merely a matter of pressing the First Amendment to a dryly logical extreme. The murderous fanaticism displayed by young German soldiers in World War II, alumni of the Hitler Jugend, illustrates the danger of allowing government to control the access of children to information and opinion. Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old’s right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well-functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.

Judge Posner’s argument is that children ought to be allowed freedom of conscience before they are allowed freedom of franchise, to ensure that they exercise that franchise intelligently. But consider the difficulties of deciding– whether on a large scale or a small one– when people are “ready” to exercise their right to control the lives of others. In the end, it’s a mess.
I would have been just as good (or as bad) a voter at the age of 16 as at the age of 20. While it makes sense to keep the right to vote the same as the obligation to be tried as an adult, what should we do given how many jurisdictions now try select troublemakers as adults? Maybe we should allow select children the right to vote as well.

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Update: The McGuiness piece isn’t inconsistent with the idea that something needs to be reformed about litigation, but it does seem (at least to me) much friendlier about litigation, and the overhauls that McGuiness proposes seem less fundamental than those Senator McConnell suggests, and his piece spends more time talking about fixing the system and less talking about what’s wrong with it entirely. But it’s wrong of me to try to cast them as inhabiting opposite sides of the litigation coin.

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Update: If the above is a little unclear, I don’t mean to imply that Saleh is being charged with harassment. But what’s intriguing about this case is that Saleh is getting in trouble pretty much for the content of his emails, even though the things he said to the women didn’t upset him, it was the sense of abandonment they had later.
This isn’t an unheard-of legal theory (though I’m no expert in common-law marriage, breach of promise to marry, or the tort of seduction), especially since it’s a “conduct unbecoming of an officer” charge. So it isn’t precisely an example of litigation gone rampant in our society, but it does seem to be pushing just a bit against the bounds of comfort.

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