The first criminal trial of DJT is underway

Many were despairing of such an event. But jury selection is now underway.

The former President, Donald Trump, is now being tried in a court whose judgment is not subject to any presidential pardon. He is not being tried for insurrection. He is being tried for falsifying business records. But he is on trial -- his odd de facto immunity from any such proceedings is at an end.

Nothing even remotely like this has happened in our country since 1807, when Aaron Burr went on trial.

Burr was not a former President, of course. Burr was a former Vice President. Another difference: Burr was tried by a federal court. He could presumably have pardoned himself had he been convicted there and had somehow thereafter been elected President. So ... not an exact likeness to the current situation.

But let's talk a bit about Burr. He was the guy who inspired the 12th amendment, changing the way vice presidents are selected, largely so that Jefferson could replace him with George Clinton.

Dramatically dumped in that manner by the Democratic-Republicans, despised by Federalists over the death of their leader three years before in an affair that would one day be featured as the climax of a Broadway musical, Burr was arrested for insurrection and treason on February 19, 1807.

Burr was acquitted at that trial -- the gist of it was that after the infamous duel Burr went west, and he seems to done a lot of indiscreet talking and writing about a plot to create a new country for himself, one that would have combined parts of newly-purchased Louisiana with the Mississippi Territory, controlling both banks of the lower Mississippi. The plan never got beyond talk so it involved none of the "overt acts" that the constitutional definition of treason requires. On the basis of the absence of such overt acts, Burr was acquitted.

The alleged insurrectionist plot itself seems largely to have faded from American history education in our public schools. But it could make a great Broadway play, maybe after they close Hamilton.

I seem to have wandered from the point. Anyway: we might imagine this as the case that might have arisen if Burr had been put on trial, AFTER his apparent efforts at insurrection, NOT for insurrection at all but for an earlier incident in his life. Let us say he had been tried for dueling. My understanding is that a (successful) participant in a duel was not then treated as a murderer in the laws of New Jersey, though he was guilty of a crime, the duel itself.

So if Burr had been able to delay the federal trial, I suppose he might have been arrested and put on trial in New Jersey. And the one trial might have been regarded, sensibly, as a sort of karmic substitute for the other.

Trump might in time be tried for treason/insurrection, if we can keep him from the Oval Office. But to the end of doing so, and despite the less compelling charges, I am very happy this day has come at last!

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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