Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

If you have any sense of the recent history of the US presidency, the above sentence, applied TO that institution, will seem insane. It appears to seem sane, though, to William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe, authors of RELIC, a new book about the presidency and related constitutional issues. Excessive suspicion of executive power is the late 18th century "relic" that they would like to excise from the US Constitution by amendment, on behalf of "effective government." I haven't read the book, and am relying here on a review in the September issue of THE FEDERAL LAWYER. Unless the reviewer, Louis Fisher, is doing the authors an injustice, though, Howell and Moe seem headed down a dangerous road. Whether the next President is named Clinton or Trump, my own response to the suggestion at the top of this blog post is, "hell no!"

I have to say right up front: I haven't read Grob-Fitzgibbon's book. Nor do I plan to. Nonetheless, his is a really cool hyphenated surname, and that at least makes him and by extension his new book worth some mention here. The book, Continental Drift, is apparently about the drift of Great Britain's political self-image away from the continent of Europe. Chronologically, the sweep seems to be from Ernest Bevin to the present. Bevin was the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs under Prime Minister Attlee from 1945 to 1951. That is his photo, above. Bevin accepted the loss of India, but thought the British Empire had to compensate by holding more tightly onto its possessions in Africa and the Middle East. Bevin also hoped to encourage a united new political structure in Europe, with Britain of course to play the leading role. This would enable Britain to retain Big Three status alongside the US and USSR.   Britain's self-image as a member of this Big Three club...

Sort of a meta-theory of law. I like those. Jeremy K Kessler and David Pozen, both of Columbia Law School, have posted Working Themselves Impure: A Life-Cycle Theory of Legal Theorie s, which will soon be published in the  University of Chicago Law Review. I learned about it in the Legal History Blog, which I believe I've mentioned here before, and which once in awhile references my work in The Federal Lawyer. The life-cycle theory is this: "Prescriptive legal theories have a tendency to cannibalize themselves. As they develop into schools of thought, they become not only increasingly complicated but also increasingly compromised, by their own normative lights. Maturation breeds adulteration. The theories work themselves impure." That's the abstract. Here's a quote from the article, about why they limit that statement to prescriptive legal theories: "All that we have said so far concerns prescriptive legal theories; what of their descriptive cou...

I'm quite happy with the way my review of this book for The Federal Lawyer  turned out. Reviewing Khan Regular readers of this blog may remember the book, which I discussed with you here, this spring. I'll quote myself, only briefly: " Riba is always a negative.  Whatever exactly riba is, it is bad. Thus, any devout Muslim who believes as an empirical matter that interest is a critical part of a successful financial system will have to have an understanding of riba that allows him to support the charging of interest while still condemning riba."

I find that I have never yet discussed on this blog the issue of Islamic finance -- that is, the financial institutions and theories that have arisen out of the Koran's prohibition of riba ( roughly: usury). This comes as something of a surprise, because this blog has been around for almost a year now, I have opined and observed here on a wide range of subjects from the relationship between Murdoch and Ailes at News Corp. to the foundations of epistemology. yet during all this time Islamic finance has been a great curiosity of mine. I've never mentioned that here?  Really? Even at the precursor to this blog, Pragmatism refreshed, which I kept for more than five years before starting this one, I don't seem to have written anything squarely on point. I came close, noting certain relevant statements I had encountered in a listserv for example, here. And I have written of it more squarely elsewhere, for example in AOL's DAILY FINANCE. I wrote a piece on how "Du...

I'd like to thank Jack Schecter, of the "IP Insight" column of The Federal Lawyer. His column in the October/November issue of that periodical, called "Grand Theft Video: Judge Gives Gamemakers Hope for Combating Clones" proved surprisingly thought provoking. Regular readers of this blog and its precursor know that I follow IP issues at least casually .  Schecter discusses a case out of the federal district court for the district of New Jersey, Tetris Holding v. XIO Interactive, the fight over a clone of the famous video game "Tetris." The clone, by XIO Interactive, is known as "Mino." The case turned on the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law. The defendant contended that it could use the idea behind Tetris (which is accurate), plus any functionally necessary attributes of the game. Further, it contended that pretty much everything about Tetris fell into one or the other of those categories, so it was free to copy. For...