Legal philosophy
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Words and Misdeeds
Following up on my musings here and here on the reasons why we think it is sometimes permissible to punish a person for saying something that is likely to cause others to act in a certain way, and sometimes not, my friend Simon Murray asks a very sensible question: in what other cases do we sanction people… Continue reading
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State, Means, and Ends
I am auditing Jeremy Waldron’s seminar on human dignity this semester. Since prof. Waldron’s rule is that auditors “must be seen but not heard” in class, I will use the blog as an outlet for thoughts and comments. One thing we did in yesterday’s seminar was to go through the rights-protecting amendments to the U.S.… Continue reading
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The Forms and Limits of Persuasion
There was a very interesting piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker yesterday in New York Times magazine, about the ways in which we make up and change our minds. The immediate context to which it is directed is U.S. presidential campaign, in which both contenders (though especially Mitt Romney) have had some notorious “flip-flops.” But of course the… Continue reading
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Brandishing Banishment
There was an interesting op-ed yesterday in the Globe & Mail, by Lorne Neudorf, a Cambridge PhD candidate, discussing the status and use of banishment as a punishment in Canadian law. Contrary to what we might be incline to suppose, banishment, understood as a legal injunction preventing the person subject to it from living in… Continue reading
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Googling Justice
Law review articles don’t make newspapers very often. But they do sometimes, as I noted in a post discussing the use of a certain four-letter word by Supreme Courts in the U.S. and Canada. Another example is a very interesting forthcoming paper by Allison Orr Larsen, of the William & Mary School of Law, called… Continue reading
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Ideology in Constitutional Scholarship
Is most writing about constitutional law and theory (in the United States, but perhaps also in Canada) “intellectually corrupt”? In a post on the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Jason Brennan, a philosopher and economist from Georgetown, says that it is. But, while his description of constitutional scholarship is, unfortunately, right, his explanation and evaluation of… Continue reading
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La primauté de la législation
La semaine dernière, la Cour supérieure du Québec a rejeté la demande visant, entre autres, à faire déclarer inconstitutionnelle la “Loi 204”, qui exempte rétroactivement l’entente sur la gestion du futur amphithéâtre de Québec, conclue entre la ville de Québec et Qubecor, de l’exigence d’un appel d’offre (dans la mesure où cette exigence s’y appliquait, ce que… Continue reading
Double Aspect 