Political problems deserve political solutions.
By Robert F. Nagel Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has effectively stopped the Florida recount, it is natural to believe that the justices have once again saved us from political and legal disaster. There is no doubt that the Florida Supreme Court's stunning decision to order manual recounts across Florida created the specter, as Chief Justice Wells said in dissent, of chaos. What the Florida decision did was demonstrate how legal argumentation in America has metastasized. When even the plainest meaning is subject to the relentless pressure exerted by all those urgent words streaming from the mouths of lawyers, our institutions are exposed to something close to intellectual anarchy. To get a clear view of the nature of that chaos, recall one detail from the Florida court's work.