The Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court Wallace B. Jefferson, the president of the state bar, and the dean of the UT school of law (Lawrence G. Sager) have written this opinion piece expressing support for the judiciary of Pakistan.

Jefferson, Walton and Sager: Think like a Pakistani lawyer:”

To be sure, the age of terrorism may occasionally require extraordinary measures. But the wholesale destruction of constitutional government is a price too precious to pay for it purchases despotism at liberty’s expense.

We see all of this and feel a kinship with the lawyers of Pakistan. But it is difficult to stop just there; it is difficult to avoid reflecting upon our own responsibilities as lawyers in our own backyard.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to dispute the sentiment. But it’s a little odd, especially for a former state lawyer, to see the enactment of the federal Eleventh Amendment suggested elsewhere in the same article as being a similarly “harrowing” moment in American history. I would have suggested the court-packing plans of the 1930s or perhaps Andrew Jackson’s reputed statement about the Court’s judgment about Cherokee lands. By contrast, the enactment of an amendment through the normal constitutional process seems to me to just be the normal constitutional process.