Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  The term seems odd. Free the law from what? Well, from the statute books, chiefly.  The term was the favorite of an early 20th century academic movement typified by Hermann Kantorowicz. The idea apparently was to develop a conception of law that would allow judges to strike some of them, statutes, down -- what the US had had for a century by that point, thanks to Justice John Marshall.  Kantorowicz called his pre-Great-War manifesto "Der Kampf um die Rechtswissenschaft." The remnants of my high school German course still living in my brain suggest that this means "The Battle for Jurisprudence." Some translations render it "The battle for the Liberation of Legal Science."  One gathers from the title that the author's interest was more in liberating legal science, law professors and what they do, rather than in liberating law, that is, judges and what they do, from the statute books.  Here is a passage. After making the rather obvious point that most p...

  What might a discerning historian of , say, twenty years from now write about Covid-19? He might have in front of him a primary source like this:   https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/vaccines-should-end-the-pandemic-despite-the-variants-say-experts/  That is an optimistic appraisal from a month ago. Perhaps despite all the deaths, all the devastated families, and all the long-haul injuries even of survivors, much of the worries about the "variants," at least, was overdone. The vaccines that have been developed can, it seems, cover a wide rage of Covid-19-ish infections and allow us as a species a chance to give ourselves herd immunity. We as a species will get through this without too much more damage. The following statement might seem more shocking than the above: All the social distancing and mask wearing and locking in seems to have come out a wash. There is no consistent correlation between the rules in place in the area and its susceptibility to t...

On Friday, March 12, the president of Microsoft testified before the antitrust subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives.  The panel is investigating the news business. Traditional newspapers are dying off, and they are being replaced by digitized news sources that seem few and overly powerful. This was, indeed, the point Microsoft's Brad Smith was making. Google is the big bad monopolist. Nobody else can compete in the world of digital news because Google has blocked all the avenues for doing so. There oughta be a law!!! The wheel of fate has turned. Not too many years ago, it was Microsoft that was the big bad monopolist, and the forces of government were needed, so we heard, in order to cut MS down to size. But the government lost those cases, and the markets did find a work-around.   Let's pause and contemplate the turn of the wheel. Back in the day when Microsoft was the defendant, these were the arguments: digital computers are a new th...

 So ... Eric Bolling is think of running against Rep. Tom Rice (R - SC). This, if it happens, will be one of those intra-part fights where some GOP-er primaries an incumbent claiming that he is a Republican in Name Only. (Wow, the initials spell the name of an animal -- one that looks sort of like a reduced elephant -- I never noticed that before.)  Rice, pictured above, represents the northeastern corner of the state, which includes Myrtle Beach. He has a very conservative record, but (gosh horrors) voted in favor of the impeachment of Donald Trump the second time.  So: who is Eric Bolling? Almost nobody. Bolling was an ardent Donald Trump supporter on Fox News who was fired from that network after an investigation into the "dick pics" he had been emailing to female colleagues. Now he is looking for something else to do with his life and the 7th congressional district of SC may be just the ticket. I think a Billing versus Rice primary might be a battle of wits between un...

  This will be my fourth and final comment on James Lundberg's book about Greeley. I'll have nothing inspiring to say. I'm tying up a loose end. Hence the photo of shoelaces.  This discussion on which I am focusing today is on p. 93   and concerns events of 1855. That year, the Know-Nothings  were meeting in convention. Like the Republicans, the Know-Nothings were a new life from the carcass of the Whigs. Greeley was worried that the Know-Nothings would be strong enough to foil the Republicans in the following year's election and would throw it to the Democrats. In 1855 the Know-Nothings held a convention in Philadelphia in order to firm up a unified party position more elaborate than their shared nativist sentiments. Greeley's Tribune sent correspondents to Philadelphia. Lundberg says they were there to expose rifts over slavery within that party. The rifts were, in fact, potent, and presumably to Greeley's delight the anti-slavery Know-Nothings were expelled ...

Here is a photo of the campus of the University of Akron. It is the alma mater of Deborah L. Cook, federal judge, US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.  It is also the site of an ongoing test case of academic freedom. Academic freedom is a moral conception arising from the confidence that freedom of inquiry by faculty members is critical to the mission of colleges and universities   Scholars ought to have to contractually protected right to communicate, to their students or the public at large, ideas that are offensive to the authorities or political groups without that serving as the cause for job loss or demotion.    I'll let Leiter Reports take up the subject from here.  https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2021/02/faculty-purged-at-university-of-akron-need-our-support.html

Some institutions and inventions are great precisely because they make trust irrelevant. Charlie Brown keeps trying to kick the football. Lucy keeps pulling it away. Yet Charlie still has to trust her: he doesn't know how to kick a football without someone holding it, and it seems no candidate for holder presents him/herself except Lucy.  But isn't there an obvious solution? There are small plastic kickoff kicking tees. As above. They sell for about $5 each. Doesn't Charlie get enough of an allowance to buy one?  Cryptocurrencies exist because no one trusts central banks any longer.  "Distributed ledgers:exist and find applications beyond the cryptos because people distrust a lot of other institutions.  Covid-19 creates a difficult problem because people mistrust regulatory agencies, the medical profession, the big Pharma companies, etc. The problem may be to work through the distrust, not against it. Use cryptos and the like. Cryptos can handle supply chains for ven...

  It would be a great irony if, after decades of nominating Supreme Court Justices more-or-less specifically on an abortion litmus test, the Republicans still haven't managed to get a court majority that is ready to repeal ROE v. WADE.  I say "it would be" rather than "it is" because we don't know whether that is the case. I am beginning to have that suspicion though,. If, with a court that is made up one-third of Bush family nominees and one-third of Trumpets, where the remnants of the Obama and Clinton administrations together get only that last third, still upholds the paradigm "liberal elitist" decision as stare decisis ... something is very wrong with the way people surrounding the Bush and Trump families think about the law.  Now I hear some of you snickering about that last sentence ("he thinks the Trumps actually think???" ). Well, I'm not committed to that view but I'll entertain it for now.  This year's most likely v...

More today about Lundberg's book on Greeley. On pp. 64-65, he is discussing Greeley's opposition to the war with Mexico.  "When the issue became apparent, Greeley was sure [in 1847] that a long-silenced Southern majority would overthrow Calhoun and his cabal." Greeley formed three critical views at about this time, while opposing war with Mexico. First, that the aristocratic planters who owned most of the south's slaves were a powerful conspiratorial force, extending themselves not just west but north. Second, that a unified "north" had to be called into existence by the force of his own paper and such allies as could be mustered, to oppose this force (to oppose those he would soon start calling the Slave Power). Third, that the downtrodden southern whites, who owned few or no slaves, would before long join forces with the North and overthrow their social superiors in that region. One great theme of Lundberg's book is that Greeley was wildly mistaken...

  This is a good thing.  Supreme Court shadow docket: Congress scrutinizes it and considers reform. (slate.com) The whole idea of opinions issued at 2 AM with only sketchy explanations, of that, and no real sense of what the breakdown was among the Justices ... is just wrong. Congress certainly has sufficient supervisory authority over SCOTUS to crack down on this as necessary. Indeed, there is specific language telling us that the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is itself subject to "such regulations as the Congress shall make."  Why could Congress not create a law saying that under any case in its appellate docket (the "original jurisdiction" docket is rather small) every Justice who votes on a particular decision shall indicate how     that vote went?   That would be enough to throw a little light in the shadows, already?  The image above? It's a Shadowscape Tarot Deck. That has nothing to do with anything I just said, except t...

  The whole theory-versus-practice thing. Here is a link from Existential Comics.  Fireworks and a Theory of Language - Existential Comics   When people say, "X works in theory, even though it fails in practice," what do they mean? The phrase is on its face open to the rather facile reply suggested by the above link: if the theory leads to disastrous practice, it is surely also bad as theory, and needs to be abandoned.  There is no split, there is only a feedback loop. If you are reading this blog post on your phone you can simply turn the phone around and the above calligraphy will say "Practice," right?  Well, maybe. But what people mean by a cliché is itself context specific. Meaning is defined, as Wittgenstein above all would remind us, by use. Use is not limited by meaning.   

  Looking again at Lundberg's book on Greeley. The Tribune's first printing was a run of 5,000 copies, only about 500 of them sold. That was only one of the snowballs of bad news that nearly buried the new project at its start.  This was 1841. Greeley had enthusiastically supported William Henry Harrison's campaign for President the previous year. But that victory turned sour when Harrison, barely inaugurated, took ill and, weeks later, died.  When the company started its life in the red, Greeley looked to political allies for help. But he was caught between two sets of Whigs -- an Albany-centered crowd associated with the state government and the New York City crowd -- and neither was solidly behind the new project. Fortunately, help came. In May.  Greeley found a business-savvy partner: Thomas McElrath. McElrath infused an immediate $2000 and took over management duties, leaving to Greeley all decisions about content.  Fourteen years later, an enthusiastic adm...

  A tribe and an individual with a role in the government of the tribe sued the producers of the television show Billions . They have lost.   And I've just posted a photo of one of the lead characters in the show, presumably celebrating victory in this matter.  I am happy. That is all I wish to say about it. Bye. 

  Peter Baron, paraphrasing J.L. Mackie, offers an argument against the intuitionism that W.D. Ross and G.E. Moore (and I) share, in meta-ethics or (what is it seems to me the same) moral epistemology.  The Baron/Mackie argument runs thus: 1. Objective moral values and the faculties that intuitionists posit to detect them are strikingly queer, or as Mackie put it, "utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else." 2. We should not believe in such a queer concept without very strong evidence. Lemma: We should not believe in objective moral values or a moral sense without very strong evidence. 3. There is little or no evidence in favor of these queer things. Conclusion: We should not believe in them. Notice that the article proceeds as two syllogisms, with the conclusion of the first serving as one of the premises of the second.  The whole thing seems to me to be a bit of evidential gerrymandering. It is strikingly odd, even queer, that bright highly-tra...