Newly appointed lower-court judges are sent to a secret school where they learn the most important element of jurisprudence: Almost any civil suit, and most criminal cases, are a boring, distracting waste of time that clutter your courtroom and plug up the docket with nonsense. Your job, as a judge, is to declare a recess, drag the lawyers into chambers, and scream at them to settle the case and never darken your courtroom again.

If such action fails to prompt a speedy settlement, the judge’s response must be to schedule the cases to be heard every Friday afternoon, in the summer, when everyone would rather be on the Cape, sipping margaritas. That will teach them the error of their ways.

When lower-court judges take the graduate-level secret class, they learn that if a case that comes before them seems interesting, that means the issue has come up before, has been litigated to death, and no matter how you rule, some snot at the appeals court level will eventually tell you that you’re a moron.

One occasional solution to all this angst is the magic of discretion on the part of cops and regulators and school boards and zoning commissions and everyone else empowered to cause mischief that might someday stagger into court to be challenged.

Which brings us to the odd little prankster named Sean Harrington. He has embroiled the Arlington School Committee in weeks of nightmarish confusion over how to keep itself out of court on an issue sufficiently arcane to provide entertainment on hot summer days when we don’t have much to talk about except the Red Sox.

The high school student presented the school board with a petition signed by hundreds of patriotic Arlingtonians, requesting; no, imploring; no, insisting that the Pledge of Allegiance be recited every morning in every classroom in town.

 

Indivisible Ideals

As in most states, Massachusetts already sort of, kind of, wink-wink, has a pledge requirement, but towns obey, ignore or resist the nation, for reasons ranging from indifference, to Northeastern hostility to things that smack of militarism, to bewilderment over “pledge” litigation going back decades.

The first flag-salute statute in the nation popped up in New York in 1898. Public schools were required to begin each school day with flag worship – as well as “such other patriotic exercises as may be deemed…expedient…”

The ingenuity of young Harrington’s troublemaking is that it turns the “pledge” debate upside down. For decades, most of the debate and virtually all of the litigation involving the pledge has come from people attempting to opt out, or to challenge the implementation of a pledge requirement. Rather than running away from the pledge, Mr. Harrington embraces it with a big, sloppy kiss.

The star of the litigation Hit Parade for many years was the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which went to the U.S. Supreme Court not once, but twice, in pledge cases that prompted contradictory decisions.

In recent times, the litigants have objected to the “under God” phrase in the pledge.

The court record is littered with firm and murky decisions in pledge cases, with the apparent bottom line: yes, you can have a “pledge” requirement, but don’t actually require students to recite it – or even stand around listening to it – if they don’t want to.

If you were the Arlington School Committee, would you want to wander into court, stand before an irritated judge, and litigate a “pledge” case? No. The school folks actually crafted a fairly coherent compromise, requiring a daily, voluntary reciting of the pledge, over the intercom – so that anti-pledge students could pout, without anyone actually having to watch. The compromise deadlocked on a 3-3 vote, which threw the committee back into chaos not seen anywhere this side of Afghanistan.

The school committee team sort of had the right idea, though. You don’t want young Harrington marching to the courthouse, surrounded by American flags. In private, the cranky judge might well ask why in the world such a thing hadn’t been resolved in a noisy, incoherent public hearing of the school committee.

We all wish you well, Arlington School Committee. We pledge our allegiance. Oops.