The Personal Blog of Stephen Sekula

AIP summary of Dover Decision

The recent “139-page ruling by Judge Jones”:http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf in the case *Kitzmiller vs. the Dover School Board of Education* was remarkable. Not just broad, this was a deep ruling which every scientist and lawyer should read. The American Institute of Physics (“http://www.aip.org”:http://www.aip.org) has printed, in its most recent FYI bulletin, “a summary of the ruling with key highlights on ID and its role as religion, its mockery as science, its place in the classroom, and about the ruling itself”:http://www.aip.org/fyi/2005/177.html.

My favorite quote in this brief was the one the Judge made about himself, and the attitude he expected from supporters of ID as science:

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy” (p. 137).