Wow! A New Haven Register opinion that is sensible! For those who refuse to join the the newpaper here is the text:

07/12/2005
EDITORIAL Slavery suit dismissed again
New Haven Register Editorial
Tenuous claim for corporate reparations is a social, not a legal issue. For the second time this year, a federal judge has dismissed a class-action lawsuit against more than 12 companies, including Aetna and Fleet Bank, seeking reparations from the pre-Civil War slave trade.
Although the African Americans who filed the suit say they will appeal, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Norgle’s decision was eminently sensible. In sum, the judge said that the reparation advocates had filed their claim far too long after slavery ended and that the social issues they raised were better left to Congress and the president to settle.Unlike survivors of the Holocaust or Japanese Americans interned during World War II, it is impossible to prove a specific harm done to the great-great-great-great-grandchild of a slave by a predecessor company to a modern corporation that is nothing like it was in 1820. By the suit’s logic, modern Tunisia could sue Italy for ancient Rome’s sacking Carthage.The suit’s dismissal does nothing to diminish the wrong of slavery. But, its claims were raised in the wrong forum.Slavery was the irreconcilable contradiction that the Founding Fathers ignored to achieve consensus on the Constitution. Ending the conflict between the ideal of liberty and the reality of slavery was to cost the nation the lives of some 420,000 on the battlefields of the Civil War. That toll was surely the most costly form of national reparation.

I like the analogy about Tunisia.

Bye.