Some Agreement, Lots of Division in New Law School Poll Results

“Our old friend, polarization” – that was the phrase Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, used at one point in describing the results of a fresh round of polling released Tuesday. It was the first poll since shortly before the November elections.

This was the first time in 15 rounds of the Law School Poll, starting in early 2012, that there were no “horse race” election questions involved. The questions this time were focused on issues such as regulating some aspects of gun control, education funding and school choice, how to pay for road construction, and residency rules for government employees.

There were some issues where opinion was strongly in favor of one position. For example, background checks for all gun purchasers were strongly supported by both Republicans and Democrats and people living in every part of the state.

But on many issues, Wisconsin remains sharply, and sometimes close to evenly, divided.

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Some Thoughts on Violence in Israel and the U.S.

I was part of the group of students and faculty that recently visited Israel. It was truly an amazing trip, and it reshaped my perception of everything from the Syrian civil war, to Biblical history, to the contemporary political dynamics that complicate efforts to secure peace between Israelis and Palestinians, to life in the United States. I do not purport to be an expert on anything pertaining to Israel, and my thoughts on the trip are still a bit scattered, but I thought I would share at least one major impression: Israel felt more secure than I thought it would. Having read about the country’s various security problems for years, I started the trip with some anxiety about traveling in what was for me unprecedented proximity to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria. To borrow the title of an 1980s sitcom, I thought that anti-Western groups would be a little too close for comfort.

But I felt completely secure, and I think everyone else did, too. It appeared that Israel’s citizens manage to live normal lives in basic safety notwithstanding the various security challenges they face. Markets, tours, businesses, restaurants, and schools all operate without any apparent sense of danger. The external threats are serious, but none of them appeared to be terribly consequential on a day-to-day basis for the individuals who live there. 

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When Rules Are Invisible

HiggsResearchers at CERN laboratory in Switzerland announced this week that they believe they have evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson, or Higgs particle. The Higgs boson and the associated Higgs field help to explain, among other things, how particles achieve mass. In 1964 physicist Peter Higgs and five other researchers theorized the Higgs boson. Researchers at CERN have been colliding particles in the Large Hydron Collider to look for the Higgs boson.

The Higgs boson is part of the Standard Model theory, which explains the interactions and characteristics of subatomic particles. Researchers had accounted for the Higgs boson in their Standard Model calculations over the years. In November 2011, a CERN physicist said, “’For our theory to be right, we need the Higgs to exist. If it doesn’t, we need something to replace it.’” The question now appears to be what kind of Higgs boson researchers have observed.

Reading about the Higgs boson announcement reminded me of Professor Lawrence Tribe’s book The Invisible Constitution. The Higgs boson and the United States Constitution don’t at first glance have much in common, but the way Tribe approaches interpreting the Constitution parallels the approach of theoretical physicists in creating models that explain the invisible rules that govern the physical universe. In fact, Tribe himself draws an analogy to physics throughout the book.

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