Political philosophy
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The Faint of Heart
Justice Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States famously admits to being a “fainthearted” originalist, who would hold that the punishment of flogging is “cruel and unusual” and thus prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, even though, at the time of its ratification, the Amendment was not generally understood to Continue reading
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Les limites de la pureté
Une nouvelle rapportée par Radio-Canada hier me permet de revenir, une fois de plus, sur la bêtise de l’obsession actuelle de la classe politique québécoise avec la limitation du rôle de l’argent en politique. Selon ce que rapporte Radio-Can, le député Jacques Duchesneau―qui avait, par le passé, refusé d’une façon très ostentatoire de solliciter des Continue reading
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In Memoriam, Boris Strugatsky
Boris Strugatsky died on Monday in Saint-Petersburg, aged 79. The Guardian has an obituary which conveys something of his and his brother Arkady’s importance to Russian culture. The Strugatsky brothers are―are, since the books remain―among my favourite writers. I want to say something about them here. I have sometimes mentioned science-fiction on this blog, especially Continue reading
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The Future Is Creepy
I had the chance today to be at a talk by two of the members of the legal “brain-trust” of President Obama’s re-election campaign, NYU’s professors Rick Pildes and Sam Issacharoff. (I have to brag: it was one of those moments that make NYU the best law school in the world.) Yet although they spoke Continue reading
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Why Can’t They Vote?
At the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has a response to my post yesterday arguing that lowering the minimal voting age to 16 is a better way of redressing the exclusion of minors from the franchise than prof. Somin’s proposal to allow any minor to vote provided that he or she can past a test assessing Continue reading
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Federalism and Judicial Review
First of all, apologies for my silence in the last 10 days. I have a partial excuse in that I gave a guest-lecture in Fabien Gélinas’ constitutional law class at McGill last Thursday, about the Rule of Law and the legitimacy of the judges’ law-creating activity, which of course had me freaking-out to prepare. But Continue reading
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Religious Freedom Is (a) Right
The Globe’s Doug Saunders has produced a very unfortunate op-ed this morning, arguing that “religious freedom” is at best redundant, at worst positively harmful, and that Canada should not be in the business of promoting it. The occasion for his outburst is the upcoming creation of the Office of Religious Freedom within the Department of Continue reading
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Death Penalty and Dignity
The topic of tomorrow’s class in Jeremy Waldron’s Human Dignity seminar is the death penalty and, having blogged about the sorts of arguments that are made for and against it here and here, I want to come back to the topic, because a couple of things caught my eye as I was doing the readings. One Continue reading
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De la connerie
Je voudrais revenir sur une chronique qu’a publiée hier Alain Dubuc dans La Presse. Faisant allusion à la une récente de Libération qui, s’adressant à l’homme le plus riche de France, qui aurait demandé la nationalité belge dans le but de payer moins d’impôts une fois établi dans le plat pays, hurlait “[c]asse-toi, riche con!”, M. 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
Double Aspect 