Evolving Legal Arguments

Last year’s decision in Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School Board caused quite a stir. Evolutionists loudly trumpeted their victory, while others spoke out in disagreement with the ruling for a variety of reasons.

Some attacked Judge John E. Jones III for his decision, saying he was a judicial activist. According to the ruling, Jones anticipated that.

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court.”

In this case however, it seems the Judge is protesting too much, at least authors of a new book about the decision think so.

Reading another statement from the decision, an arrogance and overreach is distinctly apparent:

“[T]he Court is confident that no other tribunal in the United States is in a better position than are we to traipse into this controversial area…[W]e will offer our conclusion on whether ID is science not just because it is essential to our holding that an Establishment Clause violation has occurred in this case, but also in the hope that it may prevent the obvious waste of judicial and other resources which would be occasioned by a subsequent trial involving the precise question which is before us,” Jones writes in the decision.

David DeWolf is a professor of law at Gonzaga Law School, Dr. John West holds a Ph.D in Government and chairs the Department of Political Science and Geography at Seattle Pacific, Casey Luskin is an attorney and a scientist, and Dr. Jonathan Witt holds a Ph.D. in English.

Together, these four men wrote Traipsing into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision, the title coming from Jones very own words. It was released by Discovery Institute Press in May.

Criticism of Jones as a judicial activist is only one of the points made in Traipsing. In the short, 103-page book, the men detail the case’s one-sided history of the Intelligent Design Movement, the poorly made case against I.D.’s status as science, the failure to treat religion neutrally, why it has limited value as precedent and then offer up evidence for their conclusions with three appendices.

The authors point out many things including the fact that Intelligent Design proponents “neither sought nor supported the policy adopted by the Dover School Board.” The Discovery Institute, a leading organization in the Intelligent Design movement, disagreed with the Dover Board’s method of introducing I.D. in classrooms, promoting instead a “teach-the-controversy” approach.

They state that in his decision, “Judge Jones repeatedly misrepresented both the facts and the law in his opinion, sometimes egregiously (e.g., he asserted that scientists who support intelligent design have published no peer-reviewed articles of research, which is demonstrably false). When cross-checked against the evidence and arguments presented in the court record, many of Judge Jones’ key assertions turn out to be erroneous, contradictory, or irrelevant.”

And on the issue of judicial overreach, the authors explain “it is a standard principle of good constitutional interpretation that a judge should venture only as far as necessary to answer the issue before him. If a judge can decide a case on narrow grounds, then that is what he ought to do.”

Simply put, when Jones found that the school board was acting without a legitimate secular purpose all he needed to do was rule the policy unconstitutional. That would have been the end of it.

Instead, as Traipsing points out in detail, Jones put the intelligent design movement on trial and ruled against it even though it was unnecessary and unfair. But if you want to know the whole case against Jones’ flawed reasoning, you’ll have to read this book for yourself.

Julia A. Seymour is a staff writer for Accuracy in Academia.