argument
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Constitutional Job Placement
In a post on Concurring Opinions, Gerard Magliocca asks an interesting question about what importance, if any, should attach to the fact that a constitutional provision invoked in a case has never been applied by the courts, or has not been applied in a very long time. It is, arguably, a specific instance of the broader Continue reading
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Mass Confusion
There is a long article in the New York Times about the increasing opposition to the use of exceedingly long prison sentences―often life imprisonment without parole―as punishment for all sorts of crimes, often not involving any violence, including drug-related offences, resulting in the phenomenon of “mass incarceration.” The article highlights the findings of social scientists 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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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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Arguing with Death, Again
I wrote, three months ago now, about the sorts of arguments people make for and against the death penalty. Contrary perhaps to our intuitions, from at least the times of Thucydides, death penalty’s opponents have tended to resort to consequentialist arguments, while its supporters have relied on appeals to justice. A couple of interviews the 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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How to Argue about the Death Penalty
The NY Times has an interesting story today about two men who are leading a campaign in support of a ballot initiative that would abolish the death penalty in California – and who, in 1978, played key roles in the adoption of a ballot initiative that was meant to increase the use of the death Continue reading
Double Aspect 