Legal Commentary

Mark Tushnet once wrote about the "'lawyer as astrophysicist' assumption, namely that the generalist training of lawyers allows any lawyer to read a text on astrophysics over the weekend and launch a rocket on Monday."  We might add to this the "public intellectual as sage" assumption, under which any academic who has achieved a certain amount of general renown or infamy considers himself ready, able, and all too willing to pronounce on any subject, no matter how far outside of his expertise it happens to be.  (Yes, hypocrite lecteur, that category also includes bloggers.)  

For some reason these lines came to mind when I read, courtesy of a referral from The New Republic, this musing by John Yoo at the National Review's online site about last week's election, in which he considers data (for which I will take his word) suggesting that the Democrats won among possessors of more than a single college degree and less than a high school degree, and lost among those whose educational credentials fell in between.  He writes:

"I?ve been trying to figure out what this means (aside from the amazing educational achievements of the electorate ? 97 percent had a high-school degree or more). Does it mean that the over-educated have no more common sense than those with no education? Does it mean that Obama only really appeals to the extremes of the educational distributional curve, because neither end is really responsible for making ends meet and balancing budgets?"

Now, I am no statistician, and I haven't drilled down into the data, so I'm not able to draw an educated conclusion about this.  But I'm guessing that this last sentence applies to John Yoo as well, and yet it hasn't stopped him from armchair speculation.  So let me add a speculation of my own: if those are the only two conclusions you can come up with, it is just possible that you haven't "been trying" very hard to "figure out what this means."