Law school professors with anything resembling a fondness for Constitutional freedoms are getting harder and harder to find.
Referring to the case of a white-haired florist from the state of Washington depleting her life savings going to court after court because she would not do floral arrangements for a gay wedding, Robin Fretwell Wilson of the University of Illinois Law School, said, “We need Baronelle Stutzman’s business to be regulated but not her.”
Wilson made this assertion in an appearance at the libertarian Cato Institute. In that same forum, she said of the founder of the Masterpiece Cake Shop who would not make a cake for a gay wedding, “We need to find a way that Jack Phillips can exercise his convictions but where no one is turned away.”
It apparently never occurred to her that businesses have the right to turn away business. Bar and restaurant owners, for example, try to make a point of not serving customers who are drunk.
At that, she was a beacon of sympathy compared to a professor on the previous panel. “I don’t see the cake baker as a free speech case,” Martin Redish of Northwestern Law School said. “It’s like the hypothetical example of someone who supports segregation religiously but cannot implement it legally.”
Assertions like that make one wonder if lawyers like to use hypothetical examples because real ones don’t prove their point.
