Legal Analysis of the Kitzmiller Case

Several law papers were written regarding Judge Jones’s application of relevant caselaw and subsequent effect upon legal precedent. As I am not a lawyer (yet) I am unqualified to offer an educated opinion on these legal papers, but I will include some relevant quotes.

Brenda Lee, Harvard Law Review. Link

“Although the opinion was excellently written and reasoned, its broad conclusions will not have a great impact on the public debate about teaching evolution and thus will fail to fulfill its hope of preventing judicial waste. Given the vast divide in American society over the role of religion in public life, the influence of high profile individuals who favor creationist teaching, and the limited precedential value of a district court’s opinion, lawsuits will continue to serve as the primary check on new and improved methods of including creationism in the classroom. ID is representative of a huge cultural divide in America that a court, despite ambitious goals, cannot mend prophylactically.39 In fact, the opinion’s decisiveness in finding that ID was not science, based on the overwhelming evidence of the Board’s religious motivations, may encourage critics of evolution simply to repackage their next attack to avoid any mention of religion and thereby escape negative Establishment Clause analysis.” (page 4-5)

David K. DeWolf, et al, Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzimiller v. Dover. University of Montana Law Review, volume 68. Link

After several months of testimony, Judge John E. Jones III issued an opinion that appeared to be just what the plaintiffs wanted. The opinion was immediately hailed by opponents of ID as having driven “a stake into the heart of the ID proponents’ crusade to circumvent the Establishment Clause.”4 Initial commentary on the case seemed to assume that Judge Jones had ruled correctly, and that the only question for the courts would be how to identify and stop further evasions of the Establishment Clause.5 But announcements of the demise of ID were greatly exaggerated. As even Judge Jones acknowledged, his opinion has “no precedential value outside the Middle District [of Pennsylvania]”;6 its influence will depend heavily upon its persuasive quality, and close inspection of the opinion reveals many fatal flaws.

In the end, the debate over ID in nature cannot be resolved through either coercion or court decisions. ID arose because of new scientific evidence in cosmology and the life sciences, and this scientific evidence cannot be ruled out of existence by court order.

As biochemist Michael Behe has observed of Judge Jones’s ruling, “[it] does not impact the realities of biology, which are not amenable to adjudication.” On the day after the judge’s opinion, December 21, 2005, as before, the cell is run by amazingly complex, functional machinery that in any other context would immediately be recognized as designed. On December 21, 2005, as before, there are no non design explanations for the molecular machinery of life, only wish ful speculations and Just-So stories. ID will survive Kitzmiller not only because the ruling itself is unpersuasive and is owed no deference, but because the scientific evidence pointing to design in nature is just as powerful today as it was before Judge Jones ruled.

Peter Irons, Disaster in Dover: The Trials (and tribulations) of Intelligent Design. University of Montana Law Review, volume 68. Link

There is a certain whistling-past-the-graveyard tone in the title of the article to which this commentary is a response. In predicting that “Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover,” its authors seem to concede that the decision of U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III in the Kitzmiller case inflicted a serious wound on the intelligent design (ID) movement.2 More to the point, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute (DI), with which all three authors (DI authors) are affiliated, has been “scrambling to rebound” from this judicial rebuke to its decade-long and heavily financed efforts to promote ID as a legitimate scientific “alternative” to Darwinian evolution in public school science classes.3 Despite the blithe assurance of the DI authors that ID will survive the Kitzmiller ruling because of the “many fatal flaws” in Judge Jones’s opinion, a more candid assessment of its impact (and the source of this commentary’s title) came from the Discovery Institute’s own president, Bruce Chapman: “Dover is a disaster in a sense, as a public-relations matter. . . . It has given a rhetorical weapon to the Darwinists to say a judge has settled this.”

In the end, I suspect, neither the preceding article nor this commentary on it will sway any minds that are already made up on this issue, on one side or the other. For those readers who remain undecided, if there be any, let me once again urge a careful reading of Judge Jones’s opinion. It is, in my view, a masterful distillation and analysis of thousands of pages of trial testimony, hundreds of exhibits, and dozens of pleadings. We can ask no more of a judge who must deal with such a controversial issue. The Kitzmiller opinion is neither biased nor sloppy, and will easily withstand the assaults the DI authors have launched against it.

David K. DeWolf, et al, Rebuttal to Irons. University of Montana Law Review, volume 68. Link

We wrote a serious critique of the Kitzmiller ruling. Rather than deal with the substance of our arguments, Peter Irons responds primarily with red herrings, personal attacks, and erroneous statements. With merely 1,000 words to rebut, we highlight merely some of the problems.

1. Irons tries to refute intelligent design (ID) by smear and innuendo rather than substantive argument.

2. Irons misrepresents our critique of Judge Jones.

3. Irons misapplies the Lemon test

4. Rewriting the history of DI’s involvement with Dover.

5. Irons defends Judge Jones’s double standard on motives.

6. Irons repeatedly misrepresents and misstates facts.