Richard Abel
        Law            

            If shock-jock Howard Stern is the indisputable King of All Media, then Law Professor Richard Abel is, at UCLA, the undisputed King of All Petitions.

            Unlike other slacker UCLA academics who have only publicly committed themselves to say, three or four radical positions, a complete online review reveals that Abel has signed no less than twenty-two different public petitions.  In fact, after taking a closer look at the signed dates, it’s evident that at certain junctures in the past few years, Abel was signing petitions as often as once a month.  One truly pities his students if Abel’s classroom teaching reflects even a handful of the radical ideas enumerated in the petitions.

            A psychologist (armchair, professional or otherwise) will detect a certain streak of negativity in the petitions Abel has signed.  Not one of them is in favor of anything, other than favoring the end of a certain practice, or favoring the rejection of political nominees.  In Richard Abel’s world, all is doom and gloom.  And it’s his right, nay, his duty, to pass considered judgment on all he surveys.  The judicial nomination of (UCLA alum!) Justice Janice Rogers Brown?  No!  The judicial nomination of Miguel Estrada?  Never!  The nuclear option in the Senate to prevent Democrat obstructioneering?  No again!  And the War on Terror?  Don’t even get Abel started.  Scanning down this long list, one wonders how Abel finds time to teach in between his petitioneering.

            While Abel is nominally a professor of law (and the faculty coordinator for the Public Interest Law Program), Abel has saw fit to involve himself in a wide variety of public policy questions, as if his role in placing students into organizations that deal with public policy provides him an authoritative voice on public policy itself.  Abel’s flawed logic in this is akin to an unemployment office clerk rendering pronunciamentos on why the Federal Reserve should raise the prime rate this quarter.  In short, tangential connections don’t imply an authority to speak on a subject.

            However, little of what comes out of Professor Richard Abel’s mouth, no matter how ignorant, is of any particular surprise.  Unfortunately, it’s his students who bear the brunt of his political neuroses.  Instead of getting the education they deserve (and are paying so handsomely to receive), they are treated to fare like his Law 555 course, “Law and Social Change.”  It’s a typical UCLA example of the personal becoming political becoming educational.  The seminar course looks at the recent radical phenomenon of “community benefits agreements” (CBAs), which Abel describes as “contracts negotiated by community organizations with developers.”  The authority of an unelected “community organization” to speak for all of an area’s residents is certainly questionable, but by contrast with this unique power grab, such groups’ goals are rather pedestrian: “living wage…affirmative action…worker retention…[and] affordable housing.”  In times past, we would call such CBAs “extortion.”  But it’s a new millennium.  It’s okay for self-appointed “community organizations” to arm-twist a developer into economic concessions.  And it’s also just fine to create “social justice” by judicial fiat. 

            Abel’s “Law and Social Change” course is just the beginning, however.  In 2002, along with fellow radical law Professor Gary Blasi, Abel won an $11,336 grant from UCLA to develop a law course on the “Special Problems of Workers in the Low-Wage and Contingent Labor Markets and Structured Opportunities for Students to Work with Community-based Organizations.”  Shades of Kent Wong, the course to be developed sounds an awful lot like a professional version of the infamous “Union Summer” program offered by Wong’s Center for Labor Research and Education.  It only makes sense, of course, since Abel serves on the Faculty Advisory Committee of the UC Institute for Labor and Employment.  The UC ILE is better known for being, coincidentally enough, the parent organization of Wong’s CLRE.  This is synergy, folks; all we commoners can do is stand back and gawk at the beauty of it all.

            In 2003, Abel, along with CLRE Professor Carol Bank, won a $14,828 grant to study the impact of Social Security no-match letters, which are the forms sent by the Social Security Administration to those employees whose identification as provided to their employers did not match any internal SSA records.  According to the project’s abstract, “employers have used these letters to threaten and intimidate workers, as well as fire them.”  That’s a contention that defies common sense.  Even if the letters are indeed accurate, indicating that a given worker’s information matches none known at the Social Security Administration, where is the motivation for a company to fire a low-paid, presumably illegal worker, then spend more money pursuing one whose number does clear?  Companies want to follow the law, but they also like the low wages provided by illegal immigrants. 

Moreover, even if we accept Abel’s hypothetical that companies are scrupulously firing workers with shoddy documentation, this is the least they ought to be doing.  Deportation for breaking American immigration law should be the next step.  Instead, Abel and Bank, with their union-centric political outlooks, are more concerned with the fact that “little research has been done on the actual impact of these letters on both organized and unorganized workers.”  In other words, two of UCLA’s top academics want to know how the proper functioning (for once) of a U.S. government agency, is affecting labor unions’ ability to retain and increase membership.  As with the first grant Abel won, the underlying goal is increasing political power for radical labor unions.  And it’s all courtesy of UCLA research funds.

            But Abel doesn’t just Fight the Power by signing petitions or developing labor-union propaganda on the taxpayer’s dime.  In presumably private time, Abel also served as a “community organizer” for the union-backed SMART group (Santa Monicans Allied for Responsible Tourism).  SMART unsuccessfully pressed for the 2002 passage of Proposition JJ, a citywide “living wage” ordinance that solely targeted the large hotels located on beachside property.  Despite that electoral failure, the City Council in June 2004 imposed a living wage ordinance on all city-contracted business over $50,000.  Somewhere on the UCLA campus, surrounded by tall stacks of petitions still to be signed, Abel must have smiled at this victory for the ‘working class.’

            Abel also takes a frosty view of intra-departmental dissent.  In December of 2004, the Stanford Law Review published a study that examined the negative effects of affirmative action on its black student beneficiaries.  While the identity of the study’s author was surprising (UCLA Law Professor Richard Sander, a life-long Democrat) the resulting vituperation from his more radical Law School colleagues was not.  Abel snarled to the Daily Bruin, “His explanations are entirely divorced from the findings; they are not empirically tested.  He finds that African Americans do less well in law school, (but) there are multiple explanations: accuracy of undergraduate institution, financial need, demands made by the family on the student.”  Divorced from reality?  That’s an awfully big stone for Abel to be throwing at Sander from his own glass house of political assumptions.  A much better example of a separation from reality is Abel’s supposition that only black students experience financial troubles, family and personal demands, or undergraduate educational difficulties.

            As with too many UCLA professors, Abel long ago fell onto the other side of the educational Bell Curve.  His level of formal education is undeniably high, but somewhere on the road to becoming a law professor, the intelligence of both his public pronouncements and his academic work declined precipitously.  Without some kind of administrative intervention in the coming years, we can expect to see a complete cessation of Abel’s scholarly work; all his communications with the outside world taking the form of petitions.  Can’t UCLA do something for this man before it’s too late?