Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

To pick up on the thought with which I ended yesterday's entry: as I write these words, Richard Glossip is still alive. And that has to be considered good.  Glossip is alive because the US Supreme Court, in January of this year, agreed to hear his case. I mentioned that fact in this blog in February, but I'll say a bit more now.  In January 1997 (yes, more than a quarter of a century ago, and days before the second inaugural of President Clinton) and man called Barry Van Treese beat Justin Sneed to death with a baseball bat. In order to avoid the death penalty, Sneed testified that Glossip instructed him to do this.  Van Treese's sayso is virtually the whole of the prosecution case. Just about everybody who has looked into the matter believes that Van Treed was lying. Sneed's family members, and the Attorney General of the State of Oklahoma, are among the many who have drawn that conclusion. So ... why is Glossip still on death row?  The short answer is bureaucratic ...

By way of concluding this round-up, I'll address two decisions that themselves addressed the relationship between the United States and its territory, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. I'll also finish my discussion (begun earlier this year, well before this 'round-up series) of a controversy over US policy on the Mexican border and on the deportation of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. Further, I'll say something about the ability of Indian tribes to maintain their own reservation-based courts, which courts can hear at least some controversies involving persons who are not residents thereof. All these controversies speak in their various ways to the idea of sovereignty, which underlies not only the US constitution, but any nation state's constitution, written or implicit. Tribes and Reservations Reservations are the sovereign territory of the recognized tribe. Obviously the Choctaws are not sovereign in quite the full-throated sense in which the United...