Nobel Prizes usually ignoble event

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This week, the Nobel Prizes will be awarded in Stockholm.

It really is a banner year. Liu Xiaobo receives the Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights work in the repressive nation of China, and Mario Vargas Llosa receives the Nobel Prize for Literature, “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”

I spent the long Thanksgiving weekend reading Mr. Vargas Llosa’s novel, “Death in the Andes,” and I recommend it highly. I might even loan you my copy, if you promise to return it.

It’s all got me thinking about why there isn’t a Nobel Prize for Law.

Think of all the worthy potential recipients out there. There’s U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for example. His concurrence in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), arguing for incorporation of the Second Amendment to the states via the Privileges or Immunities Clause, rather than the Due Process Clause, alone would make him worthy of the honor.

So would his brilliant concurrence in U.S. v. Lopez (1995), arguing for limits on Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause.

There’s University of Chicago professor Richard Epstein, who would be a worthy honoree even if he had done nothing in his life but publish his 1985 book, “Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain.”

Then, there’s attorney Clint Bolick, whose groundbreaking public interest litigation at the Institute for Justice, and more recently at the Goldwater Institute, would make him highly deserving of such an award.

Nevertheless, despite all these worthy honorees, I’m actually glad that there is no Nobel Prize in Law. The fact is, it is unlikely that anyone worthy of it would actually receive it. Instead, it would be an annual embarrassment to the legal profession, much as the peace and literature prizes are usually an embarrassment to human rights activists and serious readers.

The award of the Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, for example, is noteworthy primarily for its oddity. Normally, the prize goes not to those who fight for human rights, but to those who repress human rights.

Consider that the murdering thug Yasser Arafat once received the award. I shudder to think what sort of lawyers and judges would receive a Nobel Prize for Law, if honorees were selected by the sort of people who think a terrorist like Arafat deserves an award for peace.

So, too, with literature. The selection of Mario Vargas Llosa is noteworthy primarily for the fact that he is a great novelist, rather than the sort of hack who usually wins this award for disseminating socialist propaganda rather than literature.

Once upon a time, the Nobel Prize was awarded to great novelists and writers, such as Boris Pasternak, Par Lagerkvist, William Faulkner, and Eugene O’Neill.

But in recent years, the award almost invariably goes to propagandists and apologists for tyranny and murder. You know, like Harold Pinter.

Again, I shudder to think what sort of lawyers and judges would receive a Nobel Prize for Law, if it were awarded by people who consider Pinter a great writer.

No, it is better that great judges like Thomas, great professors like Epstein, and great lawyers like Bolick should do their work without recognition, than that a prize be given routinely to lawyers and judges who spend their careers defending and propping up the oppressors, rather than helping the oppressed.