MOST THAIS ‘LOOK FORWARD TO DEMOCRACY’
Nuanced discussions of the finer points of the law and reasoned argument cannot find a place in the social networking service
>> Most people want an elected prime minister rather than an nonelected one after the next general, a survey has revealed.
The Bangkok Poll conducted by Bangkok University on Jan 17-19 approached 1,114 people aged 18 and over throughout the country.
Asked about the selection of an outsider prime minister under the new constitution, 70.6% said they only wanted an elected prime minister.
Another 29.4% said they could settle for an outsider prime minister if an elected one could not be chosen from among prime ministerial candidates from political parties’ lists.
Asked whether Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha would have their support if they could vote for a prime minister right now, only 36.8% said they would back Gen Prayut to stay on as premier, compared with 52.8% in an opinion survey conducted in May last year.
About 35% said they would not support him while 28.4% abstained.
On the question of a “Thai-style democracy”, 29.1% did not think this would bring any change to politics while 27.9% said that it would usher in a quasi-military government.
Asked about the organic bill on the election of MPs, 43.9% said it would create a new electoral system which attaches more importance to parties than individuals while 29.6% thought the bill would result in a lack of variety in parties’ election campaign platforms.
We have our first confirmed federal Twitter judge, Judge Don Willett of the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. More than 500 legal scholars both young and old, as well as sophisticated practitioners, use Twitter to comment, analyse and argue. From a practical perspective, legal Twitter is thriving.
But is legal Twitter a good thing? The question has been bouncing around on (surprise) Twitter — but without (surprise) any very sustained engagement.
This matters because law professors serve a public function: They work out the meaning of the law before it goes to the courts, and they explain law to the public. If they’re doing a bad job, the legal system suffers.
As for whether that analysis should be happening on Twitter, the nature of the debate helps clarify the answer. Twitter is and remains a great way to connect people to longer forms of reasoned argument. But even the extended format of 280 characters isn’t a satisfying or enlightening way to engage in legal debate.
Twitter lends itself to compressed and judgmental writing on the order of, “X is right” or “Y is wrong”. That’s the beginning of a legal discussion but by no means the meat of it. Zingers work; nuance doesn’t. And legal scholarship is nothing without nuance.
What’s more, Twitter isn’t really democratising or promoting legal discourse that would otherwise occur invisibly among a narrow group. Many legal tweets that attempt complexity end up being incomprehensible, even to experts.
Legal Twitter is rather, a forum where you increasingly have to be in order to participate inadequately in debates that otherwise will go on without you.
Let me be clear that I’m not complaining about Twitter in general. I myself use it more than any other social media outlet. That may not be ideal Twitter behaviour, but it has always seemed to me less intrusive than emailing all my columns to a mailing list.
Nor do I think that law professors should be subject to some special norms or duties on Twitter. We’re no better or worse than anyone else, academics or otherwise. The general realities of the platform are good enough to keep us honest: What you write on Twitter you write for everyone to see, and if you make a fool of yourself, everyone will know that, too.
What worries me is the nature of the legal debates that arise on Twitter with increasing frequency: They’re being distorted or degraded by the medium and its limits.
It’s not who’s talking that is the problem. Most of the debates I have followed involve people who could genuinely be categorized as legal experts. Their fund of knowledge is broad and impressive. And they are opinionated — the way most good lawyers are.
All this should be a perfect opportunity for meaningful interaction. Yet somehow, it isn’t, at least not compared with the modes of communication that prevailed in the recent past.
Two decades ago, large amounts of quasi-formal expert debate over legal issues took place on message boards and listservs. Those had the advantage of allowing extensive interaction, but were of limited accessibility beyond scholars.
Then came legal blogs, both for law professors and legal experts more generally. Those blogs were controversial among professors 15 years ago. But today I think it can be squarely said that they are a nearly unmitigated good.
To give just a few examples, Balkinisation, one of the first to catch on, named eponymously for Yale law professor Jack Balkin, is a terrific venue for serious constitutional discussion. Lawfare, begun by my Harvard colleague Jack Goldsmith with Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, has transcended blog status and become the go-to publication for national security law matters and beyond. PrawfsBlawg highlights the ideas of young and young-ish academics. Scotusblog is a professional necessity for Supreme Court scholars and practitioners. Above the Law shows the lighter side of the law but adds heavy content when appropriate, as in founder David Lat’s deep and urgent coverage of the investigation of the terrible murder of law professor Dan Markel.
These and many other legal blogs invite discussion that can range from generally interesting to highly technical. People post and counter-post and engage in serious discussion and exchange. For the most part, the blogs supplement law reviews, where articles can run to what in other fields would be considered the length of a short book. Using the blogs effectively has become a good way to carve out policy positions on important legal issues and to gain a broader audience for academic work.
In contrast to the legal blogs, Twitter doesn’t allow for much subtlety in expressing legal ideas — including complex ones. When I receive replies to posting that I have made on Twitter, sometimes I can’t fully follow the counterarguments being made. I do my best to reply — but I struggle with the realisation that I frequently sound like an idiot while doing so.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Try reading the exchanges that followed a recent column of mine arguing that the federal judge who blocked President Donald Trump from rescinding DACA got the law wrong. I defy you to make sense of what my critics and I wrote to each other. I barely can, and I wrote some of it.
It should be obvious that Twitter isn’t good for everything. You wouldn’t use Twitter to explicate poems or write love letters, at least not well. Add legal argument to the list. Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard University and was a clerk to US Supreme Court Justice David Souter. His seven books include ‘Cool War: The Future of Global Competition’.