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Headings: In the Freshwater Case, the Ohio Supreme Court Dodges Ruling on Academic Freedom to Critique Darwinian Evolution
In the Freshwater Case, the Ohio Supreme Court Dodges Ruling on Academic Freedom to Critique Darwinian Evolution
Content: It’s simple. Perhaps they didn’t like the liberties they’d be forced to protect. Courts sometimes don’t want to rule on controversial legal questions, especially when doing so might force them to rule in favor of viewpoints they find distasteful, like the rights of teachers to teach scientific critique of evolution. As a result, you see narrow, hair-splitting, fact-intensive rulings like this one which do everything they can to settle the case on other issues, and avoid any explicit finding that it might be legal to critique Darwin. The ruling thus did not assess the constitutionality or legality of teaching about the scientific controversy over neo-Darwinian theory. That legal question was already ba