Balkinization  

Monday, April 02, 2012

Bad News for People Who Want to See Koppelman Fight With Lawson and Kopel

Andrew Koppelman


As an April Fool’s day joke, Larry Solum yesterday posted on his blog parodies of the work of a number of scholars, such as this cute parody of Fred Schauer’s very good article on the vehicles in the park hypothetical.  He also included a parody of my work on health care reform.  It is easy to tell that it’s a parody, since if you click the link, you get, not an article by me, but a piece on jokes and hoaxes in cyberwarfare.  But the abstract managed to fool my frequent sparring partner David Kopel on the Volokh Conspiracy, at least for a little while, eliciting an energetic response to what I didn’t say.  (David appends a correction at the end of his post.)

I’m grateful for this episode if it brings attention back to the merits of our debate.  But I’m done with this specific engagement.  David is right that I’ve called his argument against the mandate “insane,” which isn’t a pleasant thing to say, but that unpleasant adjective is a reasoned conclusion that follows a lengthy analysis.  It stands or falls with that analysis.

Randy Barnett was also fooled

[Correction:  Randy advises me that the post just linked to is itself an April Fool joke, and that I'm the one who was fooled; he even vetted Larry's parody in advance.  Touche, Randy.]

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