“A fooling consistency,” Oliver Wendell Holmes Ralph Waldo Emerson [this should teach me not to blog on the road, but probably won't] famously wrote, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” All too often abbreviated to leave out the first two words (which of course imply that much consistency is not at all foolish), the insight captures something deeply true and more than a little unsettling about the evolution of the common law. The common law does change to fit the times and to fit new circumstances. The price of this capacity to mutate is indeed some occasional illogic and some inconsistency with precedent. When things are going well, we at least manage to treat like cases alike for the moment, remaining fully conscious that our ideas of what is “like” and “different” are things we lawyers both construct and soak up from the legal and social cultures we inhabit. And we fight about which sorts of consistency are wise, and which are foolish.
I was thinking about Holmes's Emerson's aphorism this morning as I read the news about Washington and Iraq. It seems we need to reverse the aphorism to capture something more than a little true and deeply unsettling about the course of United States foreign policy. I don't mean the Bush doctrine of US supremacy and unilateralism, which is certainly consistent and arguably foolish. Rather, I mean the Bush policy towards the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. Having said loudly and often that the US must stay the course, not cut and run, etc. etc., the Administration now shows disturbing signs of what the Brits call 'wobble'.
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