“Food for the hyenas” (February 18th) misrepresented the work carried out by the Kenyan government in battling jihadism. Our domestic security operations are not the renegade actions that you portray. They form part of a national strategy to counter violent extremism, launched in September 2016. The suggestion that they will lead to election violence is not credible. The vote in 2013 passed off peacefully despite the doom-mongering of many international observers and Kenya today is even more secure.
Our plan includes the reintegration of returning jihadists and pre-emptive anti-radicalisation measures. It is formulated in tandem with the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy and integrates ideas put forward by the UN secretary-general and the African Union.
Like many countries, Kenya faces serious challenges with domestic and international terror networks. But attacks have decreased and co-operation between police and informants is on the up. We will face down extremism forcefully, diligently, and fairly.
MAJOR-GENERAL (RTD) JOSEPH NKAISSERRY Interior cabinet secretary Nairobi
Legal opinion
Your review of Stephen Presser’s book was far too simplistic on the liberal-conservative divide over how to understand the “rule of law” (“Whose rules, whose law”, February 4th). You said that Republicans see this as “based on precedent and written statutes”, whereas Democrats think it should “be discretionary values and allowed to incorporate external information”. But liberal legal thinkers, like conservatives, also believe in precedent and following statute. Disagreements arise over the scope of precedents and interpretation of statutes, but no one (save possibly Clarence Thomas) gives no weight to precedent.
Moreover, it was Republican appointees on the Supreme Court who abandoned a century of precedent in the Citizens United campaign-finance decision. The same five-to-four majority also gutted the statutory Voting Rights Act, holding its core provision to be unconstitutional based in part on the “external information” that, in the Republican appointees’ view, “things have changed dramatically” 50 years after its enactment.
As for Antonin Scalia’s focus on “original intent” to keep the constitution and laws from being “stretched by unelected judges”, it seems impossible to adhere fully to that view. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v Board of Education (1954), holding that racially segregated public education violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, is universally accepted as the right decision. Yet when Congress sent the 14th Amendment to the states for ratification in 1866, schools in the District of Columbia, established by Congress, were segregated by race.
THOMAS ROWE Professor of law emeritus Duke University Durham, North Carolina
* The conclusion that law professors have played a more prominent role in America than in any other country is as sadly parochial as it is plainly wrong. The examples that drew most of your attention—Barack Obama and Antonin Scalia—were eye-catching precisely because they were a president and a justice on the Supreme Court. Their flirtations with the academy have next-to-nothing to do with their significant impact on American law.However, law scholars in Germany, from their ancient, ivy-covered faculties in Heidelberg, Jena and Freiburg, have enjoyed and continue to enjoy outsized importance in German society. It is possible to mark the flow of German history through intensely pursued and assiduously followed debates in Rechtswissenschaft, the study of jurisprudence. For example, the Thibaut-Savigny controversy on the codification of German law marked and shaped the 19th-century forces pushing for German unity and the embrace of economic liberalism. The Schmitt-Kelsen debates, which unfolded in the years before the rise of the Nazis, embodied the struggle between rationality and will-to-power raging at Germany’s core in the middle of the 20th century. In recent years German law professors have been central to imagining and implementing European unification.
RUSSELL MILLER Washington and Lee University School of Law Lexington, Virginia
Voting block
Being myself 15 years old, I read with interest your leader calling for the voting age to be lowered to 16 (“Vote early, vote often”, February 4th). You argued that “A lower voting age would strengthen the voice of the young and signal that their opinions matter.” Although that may be true, you must consider precisely what citizens of my age would be inclined to vote for. For example, the vast majority of Democratic primary voters aged 18-24 supported Bernie Sanders, in part because of his irresponsible promise of free college education.
Adding a large number of people like me to the voter rolls, all of whom have little experience in the workforce, would increase support for Sanders-style populism over Clinton-style pragmatism. Job experience helps develop economic literacy. Lowering the voting age to include people who lack such experience would do more harm than good.
JACOB LADNER Phoenix
The obvious answer to apathy among millennials is to turn voting into a video game. At the start players would be able to vote for, say, dog-catcher. But as they acquired more points for experience, they would be entitled to vote in more important elections.
Joking aside, there is something to be said for “earning” the right to vote by requiring at least a token effort. People who are disinclined to vote are also disinclined to study the issues. Your opinion of measures aimed at making voting effortless depends on whether you think the primary purpose of democracy is fostering the illusion of participation, or fostering good government.
CHRIS TRUAX San Diego
* Your article on the problems with young people voting gives short shrift to the system in Australia and other countries that have compulsory voting. To begin, voting is not compulsory, rather being recorded as attending a voting place is. What you do with the ballot paper is your own business though informal votes are still low. Arguably requiring citizens above a certain age to participate in a country’s democracy is not an onerous burden and gives the result far greater legitimacy. The majority for Brexit was just under 52% of a turnout of just over 72%. Hardly the resounding mandate that Mrs May seems to regard it as.
Millennials in Australia may be as sceptical of the political process as in many other countries, though at least they are obliged to consider casting their votes, including in state and local government. Problems that plague America in regards to registration are overcome by an apolitical body, the Australian Electoral Commission, that administers voter registration and the boundaries of electorates. No system is perfect, though arguably countries that have compulsory voting can point to greater legitimacy in the results of elections than those where turnout and registration remain problematic. Perhaps Mr Trump might care to consider the views of his predecessor on this issue, after all he seems to crave legitimacy. PETER HENDERSON Wingello, New South Wales
Back to reality Grand bargains are very rare in international life, and the atmospherics for one between America and Russia couldn’t be worse (“Courting Russia”, February 11th). Ministers and even sensible commentators talk glibly of a new cold war, without really reflecting on the costs and hazards of the old one. The relationship between Russia and the West sank dangerously low last autumn; there was a real possibility of military confrontation. We need to find a way back from all this. And the initiative will need to come from the overwhelmingly stronger, and thus less at risk, of the two sides. The real question is not about grand bargains but whether Donald Trump should be looking for less dramatic ways to improve relations.
The list of problems where common ground is worth looking for is long: Islamic extremism, cyber-warfare, strategic arms reduction and nuclear terrorism. But the key issue where polite opinion continues to insist on obduracy is economic sanctions. Really? I have not met a Western official who can explain what sanctions are now for. They have changed Russian policy not a jot. The economy, predicted to implode, is now growing again. Vladimir Putin is still president and rides high in the polls. Indeed he may be quietly relying on the maintenance of sanctions to get those extra nationalist voters out on his behalf at the presidential election in March 2018. Are they really worth it?
SIR TONY BRENTON British ambassador to Russia 2004-08 Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
Data is no singular exception
A letter from David Chaplin in the February 11th issue promoted the use of “data” as a singular noun. This missed the point that the word is routinely awarded its due as a plural noun in scientific and medical literature in accord with its Latin etymology. Pointing to other plurals that have been reduced to singulars is like saying that several crimes against the English language justify yet another.
The use of “datum”, I admit, is unusual. However, the attribution of “data” as a singular noun would yield sentences such as “The editors of The Economist is uneducated in the Latin derivation of English terms.”
BARRY MALETZKY Portland, Oregon
* Letters appear online only
From the February 25th 2017 edition
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