Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Instead of working on today's blogpost, I'll simply use something I've already written. It appears in Quora, where one poster asks, "What are some famous writers who have had a negative view of lawyers, like Shakespeare did?"  Well ... "as" would work better than "like" there. But that was not the big problem. The problem was ... Shakespeare didn't. So far as we know. This is what I wrote in response to that poster: So far as I know, Shakespeare did NOT have a negative view of lawyers. He does have a character in one play say “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” But that character is a member of an unruly mob. The Bard clearly did not mean for us to sympathize with the statement. Many writers do have negative views of lawyers. It should not be too difficult for you to find real examples. I suggest you leave Shakespeare out of it. Guess I told HIM. I was about to go on and discuss an equally famous Dickens line, but that might ...

Another term of the U.S. Supreme Court has come and gone. This year as in most years the court has issued a lot of decisions that are, in their own several ways, fascinating. One will be remembered in the history books as THE decision of this term, and it also plays into a number of my own web of obsessions. That would be NFIB v. Sebelius, also known as “the Obamacare decision.” But I’ll put off my own discussion of that one until next week. Today, I’ll do a round-up of five others of this term’s cases, ordered by the date of decision. I will also leave out of discussion an important patent law decision from this term, because I have had something to say of that one here. This leaves the following decisions as of great importance: Filarsky v. Delia (April 17) –This is an unfortunate case in which the court gave municipal immunity to a private attorney with whom the municipality contracted for a specific investigation.   Generally speaking, municipalities...