UCI, the law (school) and Erwin Chemerinsky

First, I should make clear that I choose not to comment about my specific workplace on my blog — it’s a matter of public record that I work at the UC Irvine campus in their library system, of course, as I mention on places like my Myspace page (and as has been mentioned on my Wikipedia page, though I have to point out I am not a librarian but a library assistant; I have an MA but not an MLS degree) but that’s all I feel I need to say.

Larger questions about UCI are of obvious interest to me, though, and there’s been a pretty big to-do in the last couple of days about the abortive hiring of Professor Erwin Chemerinsky for the position of founding dean of the campus’s new law school, an institution that the campus has been pushing for for a long while, and which will officially kick in in two years’ time.

The larger issue will play out as it does. What’s been of most interest to me has been the commentary, specifically from any number of legal scholar/bloggers whose political position is in opposition to Chemerinsky’s, a noted liberal. As this page links and shows, figures like Instapundit, Hewitt, Professor Bainbridge, John Leo and others have all posted on their blogs strongly condemning what happened to Chemerinsky, based on what is known. Allowing for the fact that there could easily be a lot of professional companionship at work above all else, quite honestly I’d not expected that reaction from them, which shows how I can just as easily suffer from the blindness of knee-jerk conclusions as much as I feel many of the writers just mentioned can do in turn. Salutory reminders that conclusions aren’t always simply drawn as all that are good things (for instance, as Hewitt notes in his post, Chemerinsky is a frequent guest on his program, and clearly both host and guest would not have this regular match-up going if they did not both feel like it was well worth continuing). Based on some of the comments I’ve caught in response — not all, sadly, but a good amount — this is understood and appreciated by others across the political board too. Moments like that give at least a little hope in what can seem intractable times politically.