What about the environment?
Dear Editor:
I appreciated Caroline Wekselbaum’s reports last week on the Supreme Court’s upcoming term (“Sizing up the upcoming Supreme Court issues,” Oct. 17-19, 2005), especially given that Student Life as of recently has been concerned with inventing imminent controversies involving Emory and Professor Katz.
But this Court reporting suffered from a dearth of perspectives that would certainly make David Horowitz unleash another mind-numbing tirade. Though the perspective of Professor Lieberman is certainly valuable, it stuns me that a two-part story on the Supreme Court can be written with quotes only from a former Missouri A.C.L.U. director. To Professor Lieberman’s credit, her commentary is quite nonpartisan, and it is certainly not her fault that the story itself didn’t solicit input from any other political perspectives. But given the fact that we’re paying a bit more attention to the issue of “academic freedom” this semester, can’t we devote some of our 1,900 words to hearing from other knowledgeable observers?
Secondly, I’d like to point out an issue that is stunningly absent from Ms. Wekselbaum’s story: the environment and, more specifically, the Clean Water Act. For comparison purposes, the Washington Post devoted an entire editorial to this subject a few weeks ago, as did the New York Times a day later, but somehow Student Life seems not to have noticed. Though it’s certainly easier to write a story on ongoing, controversial subjects like the death penalty or abortion, the ability of the federal government to protect the quality of our nation’s waters and wetlands is a pertinent issue that distinguishes this term of the Supreme Court from past terms. If the Court sides with private citizens and developers against the federal government in these two cases, there is a danger that the 33-year-old Clean Water Act will be reduced to a shadow of its former self. Though I’m not about to go protest in front of the Supreme Court over this crucial question, it still deserves inclusion in any well researched report on the October 2005 term of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Matt Klasen
Class of 2006
‘Zorro’: writer’s take
Dear Editor:
My writing partner, Alex Kurtzman, and I wrote “The Legend of Zorro.”
I was surprised by Student Life’s negative review of the film. Ms. Yang’s continuing education seems to lack any appreciation for the accurate historical motives of the players involved. California was indeed voted into the union as a free state in 1850 because the Mexican population remembered the horrors of slavery under Spanish rule. The admittance of California into the union as a free state did in fact exacerbate the southern states’ desire for independence from the union. European aristocrats (yes, some actual knights) did in fact invest in and support the South’s right of secession because they feared the economic dominance of a fiscally independent UNITED States. In any case, I’m not sure the comparison to “The Da Vinci Code” is a bad thing.
Ms. Yang also calls the film soulless, despite the fact that it’s about a family doing all it can to stay together while the responsibilities of the modern world try to tear them apart.
All this in a movie that parents can safely take their children to and still have a few laughs.
I expect this kind of lazy angle for a bad review from the “professional” press. I expect better from you.
And congratulations on riling me up enough to the take the time to respond.
Roberto Orci