I was born and raised in Québec, love the city of Montréal, and remain fond of the French language, but I found it much easier to leave the province half-a-lifetime ago because of things just like this:

One of Montreal’s hip restaurants on St. Laurent Boulevard has caught the eye of the language police.

Buonanotte was paid a visit recently by the people at the Office Quebecois de la langue francaise. They followed up with a written complaint about a couple of words on the Italian restaurant’s menu. One being “pasta”, the other “bottiglia” to indicate its wine selection by the bottle.

It seems these words are violations to Bill 101 because there are no French words describing what they mean.

Yes, there are better ways of discouraging the tourism of freedom-loving Canadians and Americans, but this will do quite well.

Almost as offensive as the trampling of free speech is the insulting assumption that Montrealers who patronize “hip” Italian restaurants are unfamiliar with the word “pasta” and cannot deduce the meaning of “bottiglia”… when it appears at the head of a wine list.

That such petty villany against liberty can be perpetrated in Canada is due to the “notwithstanding clause” of its Charter of Rights and Freedoms—Canada’s equivalent to the U.S. Bill of Rights. In essence, it allows provincial governments to abrogate “fundamental” rights “guaranteed” by the Charter (and to quote Pricess Bride, I don’t think they know what those words mean).

It’s hard enough defending individual liberty in a nation whose most basic laws expressly protect it. How much more difficult it must be in a nation where they don’t….

In the early 1900s, the German public was fascinated by a mathematical Mr. Ed named Clever Hans, an Orlov Trotter horse that seemed to be capable of counting, doing basic arithmetic, and even solving elementary word problems—which, lacking the dexterity to grasp a number two pencil, it would answer by stamping its hooves. Eventually, of course, it was proven that Hans was doing nothing of the sort: the horse was perceptive rather than clever, and had been picking up on subtle, subconscious cues from his handler that let him know when to begin stamping and when (having arrived at the correct answer) he should stop.

A century later, academic researchers have shown that even well-trained drug-sniffing dogs are subject to the “Clever Hans Effect,” often alerting to non-existent drugs or explosives in locations where their human handlers have been falsely told they were present. Nor are those findings strictly academic. A recent analysis by reporters at the Chicago Tribune found that field records showed that drug-sniffing dogs produced a disturbingly high level of false positives: in only 44 percent of cases where dogs alerted did a subsequent search turn up contraband. Their success rate was even lower when it came to certain minorities: when dogs alerted on a Hispanic driver, only 27 percent of ensuing searches found any drugs, suggesting that the pooches may be picking up on their handlers’ subconscious bias, effectively legitimizing a form of racial profiling.

All this should make the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision today in Florida v. Harris disappointing to anyone who cares about the Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. Overturning a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court, the decision holds that a well-trained drug dog’s alert during a traffic stop generally provides probable cause for a warrantless search of the vehicle—even though, as in this case, the dog repeatedly alerted at a car that turned out not to contain any of the chemicals it had been trained to detect. Urging the need for a “flexible” standard, the Court saw no need for police to maintain or provide any record of a dog’s reliability in the field—such as a count of false positives—and even suggested that apparent “false positives” might not be errors at all, since a dog might be picking up “residual odors” from drugs that had previously been in contact with the vehicle. Even if that’s true, however, it’s not clear why it cuts in the government’s direction here: if the dogs are that sensitive, it seems like an additional reason to doubt that an alert provides probable cause to believe contraband is currently present.

The bigger problem, however, is that the controlled conditions in which dogs are evaluated don’t typically match field conditions very well: the handlers there often know where on the test course drugs are located—and even when they don’t, have no incentive to want the dog to alert at any particular location, which removes those subconscious signals from the equation. Bizarrely, the Court nevertheless held that the “better measure of a dog’s reliability… comes away from the field, in controlled testing environments.” Worse, the opinion also provides police deparments with an added perverse incentive to avoid collecting data on the real-world reliability of their sniffers: while a dog’s alert provides prima facie probable cause for a search, the Court held, defendants must be given an opportunity to challenge the reliability of a particular search in court—with field performance as one potential grounds for challenge. But, of course, if that’s the case, keeping records of false positives can only serve to give defendants grounds to invalidate a search that would otherwise be presumed valid. In effect, then, the Court has handed police what may well be a blank check for pretextual searches, while discouraging the collection of data that might prove that’s what they’ve done.

The influential legal philosopher has died in London at age 81 (Lawrence Solum, Godfrey Hodgson/Guardian). Adam Liptak’s sharp obituary for the NYT sums up some of the virtues that quickly carried Prof. Dworkin to the academic peaks where he remained through his life: passionately held views, close engagement with the arguments of figures like Hart and Rawls, a flair for exploring complications in a relatively accessible way. Yet Liptak does not stint the view of exasperated critics like judge/scholar Richard Posner: “Dworkin’s dominant bent as a public intellectual,” Posner wrote, “is to polemicize in favor of a standard menu of left-liberal policies.”

I’ve taken a less-than-reverent view of Dworkin’s work myself on occasion, but obituaries make a suitable time to emphasize the positive, and the fact is that over decades of intra-Left legal debates, Dworkin repeatedly took the better side, arguing for the importance of individual rights, free speech and the integrity of law as a discipline in itself. His forceful arguments on First Amendment values were important in preventing the anti-speech feminism of Catherine MacKinnon from becoming the dominant view in American progressive circles. He warned appropriately against the temptation on both left and right to abdicate questions of jurisprudence to simple majoritarianism in one form or another, and argued eloquently on behalf of both formalism and constitutionalism (legal reasoning yields correct answers for adjudicating particular cases, and law is not merely an extension of politics by other means). True, he tended to fill these honorable vessels with very different contents than I or my Cato colleagues might. But better that than to smash the vessels and leave us with no inheritance of law or constitution or legal principle or rights at all, as not a few others on the Left were attempting to do over Dworkin’s long heyday. 

For those who would like to learn more, let me recommend this fine short essay by the late Norman Barry at FEE’s The Freeman sketching out areas where classical liberals might and might not find common ground with the late Prof. Dworkin.