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...