How Dull it Must Be in Gene Nichol’s World

CPR is committed to honest policy arguments, rigorously defended, that align with our organization’s philosophy.

In our view, the best policy debates attack a question on its merits. Credible advocates – honest brokers – don’t amend foundational principles to fit whatever argument they’re making.

The same can’t be said for UNC-Chapel Hill’s former law school dean and current Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor of Law, Gene Nichol.

At every turn, Nichol demeans himself and the university he represents by amending his “principles” to fit whomever happens to be the target of his ire that day.

To Nichol, it’s simultaneously true that the judiciary is the “bulwark of a limited Constitution” and that the U.S. Supreme Court “should be preemptively removed” from judicial review.

Nichol has both claimed the mantle of norm-defender (“we are in a fight for our very decency”) and accused sitting Supreme Court justices of “procedural terrorism.”

When Nichol likes a court decision, he writes that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial branch to say what the law is.”

When Nichol doesn’t like a court decision, he writes that judges “should be impeached.”

Sometimes, Nichol rages against lawmakers who say judges are politicians in black robes. Other times, Nichol himself calls judges politicians in black robes.

Nichol last year asserted that “direct and repeated attacks on [judicial] independence” are attacks “on the rule of law itself.”

Not thirty days later, Nichol called on Congress to “postpone the next term of the Supreme Court” and to “remove the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to hear abortion cases.”

By Gene Nichol’s own standard, then, Gene Nichol attacked “the rule of law itself.” And according to Gene Nichol, when someone attacks the rule of law itself, “democracy itself [is] under siege.”

Keeping up?

How dull it must be in Gene Nichol’s world.

He views the participants in our political order as black and white, good and evil, patriots and tyrants – usually centering himself, oddly enough, as the courageous warrior.

He’s called those who harbor different beliefs bigots, racists, and autocrats who seek to wreak havoc on the world.

Just last week, he said the state Supreme Court “cheated in order to help crush poor kids’ educational opportunity,” as if the justices’ motivation in deciding legal cases is to bully children.

He relegates the ideas of his enemies to an untouchable caste. How, after all, could a racist autocrat offer anything of value?

That’s no way to operate in any environment, much less in front of future lawyers at the state’s flagship university.

Nichol declines to engage thought that may challenge his worldview. He refuses to accept that the people he insults so viciously might have a reasonable basis for sincerely held beliefs that differ from his own.

His world, sadly, is bereft of what makes life so fascinating:

Diversity.