Thursday morning reads.

Don't miss Linda Greenhouse, whose legal column in the NYTimes sometimes gets hidden online on the editorial page*...

IT wasn’t surprising that a man named Joshua Braam, who died in November in Muskego, Wis., at the age of 36, didn’t make the engaging “lives they lived” lists that appeared at year’s end. The life he lived was constricted in the extreme. A series of savage beatings by his father, who had obtained custody after a divorce and whose history of abuse had been reported to the local child welfare authorities to no avail, left Joshua comatose and permanently brain damaged at the age of 4. At 12, he was adopted by Richard and Ginger Braam, who cared for him for the rest of his life.

His biological mother, acting on his behalf, sued the Winnebago County, Wis., Department of Social Services for depriving Joshua of the “liberty” protected by the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court’s rejection of that claim, in a 1989 opinion written by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, provoked Justice Harry A. Blackmun to exclaim in dissent: “Poor Joshua!”
...
The academic literature has not treated Justice Blackmun’s dissent kindly. One law professor, Laura Krugman Ray, referred to it as “institutional emotionalism,” the product of “understandable but undisciplined sympathy.” Judge Richard A. Posner pronounced it “maudlin.”

Justice Brennan, a great dissenter, observed:

“Today’s opinion construes the Due Process Clause to permit a state to displace private sources of protection, and then, at the critical moment, to shrug its shoulders and turn away from the harm that it has promised to try to prevent.”

Greenhouse writes:

All these years later, the decision continues to immunize government from the kind of accountability that common sense and justice would seem to require.

I wonder... if the public taxpayers were constantly subject to lawsuits against public-sector actors -- ie/the State -- who were negligent in performing their duties, active and bureacratic, would we be in the mess we're in?

 In the end, it begs the question: how much responsibility should the government assume?

A Colorado woman ... tried to steer around the DeShaney obstacle in a case she brought against the town of Castle Rock after her estranged husband snatched their three children from her front lawn and murdered them.  She had obtained a protective order against her husband, but even though she knew he had taken the children and knew where he had gone with them, the police ignored her repeated pleas to find and intercept him. The Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that she had no constitutional claim against the police.

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* After weeks of having maybe one or two regular columnists writing, today they have 5 up -- Greenhouse, Blow, Collins, Douthat and Krisoff. 

Is it so difficult to space vacations -- even during the holidays when more people are likely home reading -- so that the editorial output is more consistent?  Please don't tell me the Thursday after the holidays there is suddenly something to write about and no news was occurring before...

Doesn't anybody like to write and work then, and use their vacation time in October or March, say?  Thankfully, there's little overlap in the 5 columns today -- no one big topical issue to glom onto, like they sometimes do, tripping over themselves repeating one another...

By the way, when is Maureen Dowd due back?  Seems like she's been gone for ages.