Green on Legal Monism: An American History @WMLawSchool

Michael S. Green, William & Mary Law School, has published Legal Monism: An American History in Vienna Legal Philosophy 23-48 (Christoph Bezemek, Michael Potacs, and Alexander Somek, eds., Hart Publishing, 2018) (Vienna Lectures on Legal Philosophy).

Legal monism is the view that necessarily one, and only one, legal system exists. The legal norms of all past, present, and possible communities exist only within in an overarching legal system, which does not itself depend upon any community for its existence. Current legal philosophers — including those who might be described as natural law theorists — reject legal monism. They are legal pluralists, who believe that a multiplicity of discrete legal systems is possible (indeed actual). Although philosophers of law are pluralists, it is difficult to determine jurists’ views on the matter, for monism and pluralism are both compatible with most judgments that they make. Only in a few narrow areas do monistic and pluralistic judgments about the law diverge. One such area is the conflict of laws (or, as those outside the United States would call it, private international law) — in particular, judgments concerning what I will call rules of authorization, which distribute lawmaking power among the officials of various jurisdictions. Rules of authorization include rules determining when a court has personal jurisdiction and when a legislature has legislative jurisdiction — the power to extend its laws to a matter. In this essay, I argue that a commitment to legal monism is evident in American jurists’ views on rules of authorization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I offer as examples Justice Story, Joseph Henry Beale, and Justice Field. What is more, the subsequent choice-of-law revolution did not reject monism. What it rejected was a conception of rules of legislative jurisdiction as dividing lawmaking power into exclusive spheres. Such rules were now understood as giving the lawmakers of a number of jurisdictions concurrent lawmaking power. Whether these rules were understood monistically or not was left open. Indeed, it is possible that current jurists, if forced to take a stand between a monistic and a pluralistic understanding of rules of authorization, would choose monism.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Jens Meierhenrich on the Remnants of the Rechtstaat (OUP, 2018) @OUPAcademic

New from Oxford University Press: Jens Meierhenrich, London School of Economics and Political Science, The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat (2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book is an intellectual history of Ernst Fraenkel's The Dual State (1941, reissued 2017), one of the most erudite books on the theory of dictatorship ever written. Fraenkel's was the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of Nazism, and the only such analysis written from within Hitler's Germany. His sophisticated-not to mention courageous-analysis amounted to an ethnography of Nazi law. As a result of its clandestine origins, The Dual State has been hailed as the ultimate piece of intellectual resistance to the Nazi regime. In this book, Jens Meierhenrich revives Fraenkel's innovative concept of "the dual state," restoring it to its rightful place in the annals of public law scholarship. Blending insights from legal theory and legal history, he tells in an accessible manner the remarkable gestation of Fraenkel's ethnography of law from inside the belly of the behemoth. In addition to questioning the conventional wisdom about the law of the Third Reich, Meierhenrich explores the legal origins of dictatorship elsewhere, then and now. The book sets the parameters for a theory of the "authoritarian rule of law," a cutting edge topic in law and society scholarship with immediate policy implications.

 

Holtermann, Introduction to Alf Ross: On Law and Justice @JakovoHoHo

Jakob v. H. Holtermann, University of Copenhagen, iCourts, Centre of Excellence for International Courts, has published Alf Ross: On Law and Justice; Editor's Introduction, as iCourts Working Paper Series, No. 116. It is also forthcoming in Alf Ross, On Law and Justice (Jakob v. H. Holtermann, ed., tr. Uta Bindreiter, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

This paper constitutes the editor’s introduction to the new English translation of Alf Ross’s main work On Law and Justice forthcoming on Oxford University Press (2018). On Law and Justice is a classic work of twentieth-century legal philosophy. The original Danish manuscript (Om ret og retfærdighed) was first published in 1953. The first translation into English (1958) was notably poor – significantly abridged and misrepresenting Ross’s views. Translated in full from scratch, this critical edition sheds new light on Ross’s work and resituates it firmly in the context of current debates in the field. In recent years, Alf Ross (1899-1979) has attracted increasing levels of attention. Not only is he, in HLA. Hart’s words, “the most acute and best-equipped philosopher” of Scandinavian legal realism. On Law and Justice reveals why Ross is by prominent scholars considered one of the three or four most important legal philosophers of the past century – and why his relevance is on the rise again. On Law and Justice provides the most convincing take on a consistent legal realist position. Grounded in a moderate version of the logical empiricist philosophical outlook, the mature Alf Ross outlines a purely empirical legal research programme, which simultaneously fully recognizes the distinctly normative character of law. In this way, Ross’s legal realism avoids the standard critiques against behaviorist reductionism while remaining categorically distinct from legal positivism and natural law. This editor’s introduction to the new edition clarifies Ross’s general philosophical project and details his position including Ross’s sophisticated dual distinction between internal and external aspects of law which essentially anticipated and surpassed Hart’s celebrated but more crude analysis. Holtermann connects Ross’s work with the ongoing empirical turn in legal scholarship, and with related attempts to associate legal realism with more broad philosophical trends under the label naturalized jurisprudence. This paper also includes the editor’s “Note on the translation of ‘gyldig’ and ‘gældende ret’ as ‘valid’ and ‘scientifically valid law’”.

Download the introduction from SSRN at the link.

"The Good Place"'s Good Profs--Philosophically Speaking @chronicle @CQuintanaDC @UCLA @ClemsonUniv

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a discussion of the profs who help the TV series The Good Place find its philosophical footing. 

Call for Papers: International Conference on Ways of Knowing: Epistemology and Law, May 31, 2018 @UniWestminster

One-day International Conference
Ways of Knowing: Epistemology & Law

Announcement and Call for Papers

Thursday, 31^st May 2018: 9.45am – 5.30pm
The Pavilion
University of Westminster
115 New Cavendish Street
London W1W 6UW

Organised by The Westminster Law and Theory Lab in association with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London.

Invited Speakers

Professor Maria Drakopoulou, University of Kent
Professor Peter Goodrich, Cardozo Law School
Professor Anna Grear, Cardiff University
Professor Geoffrey Samuel, University of Kent
Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos, University of Coimbra

Academic Co-ordinators

Dermot Feenan, Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, and Professor Andreas Philipopoulos-Mihalopoulos, University of Westminster.

Purpose and Context

The Conference will provide a forum for presentations and discussion on the place, significance, and further potential of epistemology within socio-legal studies.
There has been little exploration of epistemology in legal scholarship generally, including in journal and book publications – with some notable exceptions. There are infrequent and sporadic references to epistemology in socio-legal studies.
Epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with what is knowledge and how it is accessed (which includes, typically, topics such as fact, truth, evidence, justification, and memory) might seem, to some, removed from the social concerns of socio-legal studies. Such a view is misplaced: epistemology deserves greater attention in the field.

The infrequent and sporadic attention that epistemology has received in socio-legal studies belies its importance in informing the understanding of well-established concepts in legal studies, such as legal personhood, legal consciousness and agency, and issues of obedience and resistance.

Epistemology complements theory. As Powell observes: ‘If theory provides intellectual frameworks for establishing and evaluating factual claims and relating them to one another, epistemology provides frameworks for constructing, evaluating, and organizing theoretical claims’. It is also widely recognised, typically outside legal research, that epistemology bears upon methods. Important, too, is the role of praxis in knowledge production, and its relationship to epistemology.

There remains a need for socio-legal counterpoints to traditional formalist accounts of law that eschew the social dimensions of knowledge. Recent political shifts globally underline the importance of analysing epistemology with especial reference to race, class and other historically subordinated or vulnerable epistemic communities.

Questions and Issues

The Conference will seek to address a range of questions/ issues, including:

1. How has epistemology informed legal studies?
2. How might diverse approaches to epistemology be understood collectively in relation to their contribution to socio-legal studies?
3. What continuing relevance, if anything, can epistemology have for socio-legal studies?
4. How should the concept of epistemology be understood in respect of, and if necessary distinguished from, broader concepts such as knowledge construction?
5. How specifically can epistemology inform socio-legal theory, methods and praxis?

Welcoming your contribution

We welcome all contributors, especially from doctoral, emerging, and early-career scholars, to submit papers for presentation in parallel sessions (estimated: three in number, each comprising three papers). These sessions will seek to build the capacity of doctoral, emerging, and early-career scholars by pairing those scholars with established Chairs and by inviting the day’s invited speakers as discussants to the papers.

Abstract guidelines

Up to 300 words. Add title & contact details. Email by 26 February 2018: Dermot.Feenan@sas.ac.uk.

Programme

Preliminary programme available on the 28 February 2018.

Pricing

Full £89.00
Student/Unwaged £35.00
Westminster Staff and Students Free (who can select option free and provide details)
BOOKING: http://store.westminster.ac.uk/product-catalogue/law/conference/ways-of-knowing-epistemology-law

International Conference on Jacques Lacan's Ecrits: Call For Papers

Via @thomgiddens:

21-22 September 2018 the Department of Psychoanalysis at Ghent University organizes an international conference on Jacques Lacan’s Écrits. 

Keynote speakers at the conference include Bruce Fink, Patricia Gherovici, Adrian Johnston, Dany Nobus, Ed Pluth, Manya Steinkoler, Paul Verhaeghe, and Eve Watson. The conference chairs are Derek Hook (Duquesne University), Calum Neill (Edinburgh Napier University), and Stijn Vanheule (Ghent University).

A call for papers and panels is open at http://lacanecritsconference.psychoanalysis.be

We invite you to write papers focusing on:

*Specific conceptual topics and texts from the Écrits

*Themes from the Écrits in relation to philosophy, history, arts, literature, gender studies, organization studies, education, psychology…

* The clinical use of ideas from the Écrits

Szifris on Socrates and Aristotle: The Role of Ancient Philosophers in the Self-Understanding of Desisting Prisoners @KirstineSzifris @LoaderIan

Kirstine Szifris, University of Cambridge, has published Socrates and Aristotle: The Role of Ancient Philosophers in the Self‐Understanding of Desisting Prisoners at 56 Howard Journal of Crime and Justice 419 (2017). Here is the abstract.

This article argues that providing a forum for philosophical conversation within prison education is relevant to the self‐understanding and desistance of prisoners. Semi‐structured interviews with 20 participants of an in‐prison philosophy class in Scotland investigated the personal relevance of engaging in philosophical dialogue. Findings demonstrated that philosophical dialogue develops participants' self‐understanding, providing vocabulary for alternative self‐definition. The philosophy class achieved this by encouraging self‐reflection, developing communication skills, and providing a forum for positive prosocial interaction with peers. These skills are essential in reframing self‐understanding which is, in turn, essential to desistance. 

The full text is not available from SSRN.

Theilen on Philip Allott's Legal Utopianism @jtthei @ChloeJSKennedy

Jens T. Theilen, Walther Schücking Institute, University of Kiel, has published Of Wonder and Changing the World: Philip Allott's Legal Utopianism at 2017 German Yearbook of International Law 60. Here is the abstract.

Utopian perspectives on law are rare – both within legal theory, which generally eschews utopianism as frivolous and unrealistic, and within utopian studies, which have largely neglected to analyse the role that law plays in utopia or on the path towards it. Philip Allott’s work, and his latest monograph 'Eutopia' in particular, constitutes a notable exception which is positioned at the intersection between law and utopianism, and this paper aims to explore that intersection with a view to identifying the conceptualisation of law that it implies. To tease out the utopian elements in Allott, I suggest reading 'Eutopia' in light of Ernst Bloch’s 'The Principle of Hope'. Three related utopian themes can thus be identified: the orientation towards the future based on dreams, imagination, and educated hope; the defamiliarisation from the present to open up possibilities of change; and the situation of utopian thought in relation to present reality, dynamically construed, with an emphasis on the need for action by human beings to propel society towards a utopian future. I argue that this framework leads to a specifically utopian account of law which is critical of the law as it stands, dynamically oriented towards an open future, and in the hands of human beings who have the power to shape and transform its content. The conclusion considers the implications of this analysis for the genre of text to which 'Eutopia' belongs: if the point is to transform law and society by way of human action, then it constitutes a utopian manifesto that aims to instigate a sense of responsibility among its readers, and thus achieve the world as it could be.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

d'Aspremont on What Was Not Meant To Be: General Principles of Law As a Source of International Law @JdA_IntLaw ‏

Jean d'Aspremont, University of Manchester, School of Law, and Sciences Po Law School, is publishing What Was Not Meant to Be: General Principles of Law As a Source of International Law in Global Justice, Human Rights, and the Modernization of International Law (R. Pisillo Mazzeschi and P. De Sena, eds., Brill, 2018). Here is the abstract.

This paper reflects on the modest role fulfilled by general principles of law in contemporary international legal thought and practice. It submits that the tepidity with which international lawyers have resorted to general principles of law in practice and legal thought — and especially in their expansionist enterprises — is the result of the inability of general principle of law to operate a source of international law. In particular, it is argued here that the miserable fate of general principles of law can be traced back to a choice by early 20th century international lawyers to locate and organize the prevention of non liquet as well as analogical reasoning within the sources of international law. The following will show that the doctrine of sources of international law may not have proved the most adequate framework for the prevention of non liquet and gap-filling function that was bestowed upon general principles of law. It is only once general principles of law come to be construed and deployed in international legal thought and practice as an argumentative technique of content-determination (i.e. a mode of interpretation) and thus not as a source of international law that they have a chance to play a meaningful role in international legal argumentation.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Conference on Philosophy of Customary Law, May 14-16, 2018, Nice, France

From the mailbox:

The Centre de recherche en histoire des idées is organizing a conference on the philosophy of customary law, to take place in Nice (France) from May 14 to 16th, 2018.

The conference It aims to gather a wide range of competencies that are crucial to properly analyze the many facets of customary law, from John Austin to contemporary applications and issues such as de-colonization: not only history of law and sociology, but also history of art and anthropology.

The conference has a few grants to cover travel expenses, especially for early career researchers. At this link, you will find the complete call and details. Deadline for abstracts submission is November 15th, 2017.

The description of the Call for Papers provided by Edoardo from AIR (Atelier Ideas & Research).

Burazin on Brian Leiter and the Naturalization of the Philosophy of Law

Luka Burazin, University of Zagreb Faculty of Law, is publishing Brian Leiter and the Naturalisation of the Philosophy of Law in The Province of Jurisprudence Naturalized (Jerzy Stelmach, Bartosz Brożek, and Łukasz Kurek eds. Warsaw: Wolters Kluwer 2017).

The paper opens with an exposition of the basic ideas of the philosophical school of naturalism and its most widespread version, methodological naturalism. This is followed by three of Leiter’s proposals for the naturalisation of questions of the philosophy of law: the first consists in naturalising the theory of adjudication modelled on replacement and normative naturalism in epistemology, the second consists in turning the philosophy of law into the abstract and reflective part of the empirical social sciences on law, and the third consists in colonising the philosophy of law with experimental philosophy. The thesis that the last version of Leiter’s naturalism is, in fact, reduced to a so-called modest methodological naturalism is put forward. The paper closes with the most important criticisms of Leiter’s naturalistic methodological approach, as well as with the thesis on the complementarity between conceptual analysis and modest methodological naturalism.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Sherwin on Vico's Providence Today @RKSherwin

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published Vico's Providence Today. Here is the abstract.

According to Vico, it is piety, the way divine providence breaks into fractured time, that teaches the ideal patterns of history. Today, we stand in need of a post-secular, metaphysical framework for this Vichian insight in order to counter the nihilist impulse that has swept through late modernity. Vico had already identified nihilism as the dark secret of Cartesianism. Indeed, it is the historical vicissitudes of that dark secret for which he presciently sought to prepare us. Piety finds its roots in something beyond the subject, beyond the will. It is that disruptive, ineffable force that resists the impulse toward totality (the will to power) in whatever historic form it may take: from the totalizing mechanics of Hobbes’ Leviathan state to the totalizing algorithmic programming that covertly constructs and drives today’s digital social media and the so-called ‘Internet of Experience.’

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Kellogg on the Trolley Problem, Pragmatism, Moral Particularism, and the Continuum of Normative Inquiry

Frederic R. Kellogg, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, has published Take the Trolley Problem . . . Please! Pragmatism, Moral Particularism, and the Continuum of Normative Inquiry. Here is the abstract.

Departing from hypothetical dilemmas and drawing on examples from law, this paper offers a pragmatist account of normative induction that characterizes moral particularism and generalism as stages of inquiry into ethical problems, rather than rival accounts of moral knowledge and motivation. Ethical particularism holds that the evaluative cannot be “cashed out” propositionally, that it is descriptively “shapeless.” Real moral problems occur in a continuum, and at first encounter a shapeless particularist context of seemingly unlimited non-moral properties. But normativity is driven by repetition of similar situations toward shared practices and descriptive predication. Rather than a Dancian retention of epistemic status by defeated reasons, this illustrates retirement of relevant properties and accompanying reasons, transformation of the reasons environment, and a pluralist normative ontology. This paper contends that pragmatism’s response to analytical moral theory lies in understanding the transformative nature of John Dewey’s social continuum of inquiry. The actual continuum is unrecognized in the analysis of hypothetical dilemmas, like the trolley problem, but can clearly be seen in studies of law. Real moral dilemmas represent actual conflicts, the solution of which cannot be addressed through the analysis of cleverly balanced moral puzzles. Repeated over time, real problems drive the consensual formation and revision of social practices and the predication of general moral rules and principles.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

"Star Trek" and Revolutionary Socialism @nytimes

A. M. Gittlitz examines Star Trek's links to revolutionary socialism, here, for the New York Times.

Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Jurisprudence, edited by George Duke and Robert P. George--New From Cambridge University Press @deakin @McCormickProf @CambridgeUP

New from Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Jurisprudence (George Duke, Deakin University, Victoria, Australia, and Robert P. George, Princeton University, NJ, USA), eds., CUP, 2017). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This collection provides an intellectually rigorous and accessible overview of key topics in contemporary natural law jurisprudence, an influential yet frequently misunderstood branch of legal philosophy. It fills a gap in the existing literature by bringing together leading international experts on natural law theory to provide perspectives on some of the most pressing issues pertaining to the nature and moral foundations of law. Themes covered include the history of the natural law tradition, the natural law account of practical reason, normativity and ethics, natural law approaches to legal obligation and authority and constitutional law. Creating a dialogue between leading figures in natural law thought, the Companion is an ideal introduction to the main commitments of natural law jurisprudence, whilst also offering a concise summary of developments in current scholarship for more advanced readers.

Brings together leading international experts in the field • Provides a comprehensive overview of cutting edge scholarship in the area • Can serve as an introduction to the central area of legal theory, or the first port of call for scholars and students of natural law

Includes contributions by George Duke, Robert P. George, John Finnis, Knud Haakonssen, Jonathan Crowe, Christopher Tollefsen, Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco, Thomas Pink, Jacqueline Laing, N. E. Simmonds, Mark Greenberg, Robert Alexy, Mark C. Murphy, Gerard V. Bradley, and Kristen Rundle.

 

Spaak on Legal Positivism, Conventionalism, and the Normativity of Law @Stockholm_Uni

Torben Spaak, Stockholm University, has published Legal Positivism, Conventionalism, and the Normativity of Law. Here is the abstract.

The aim of this article is to investigate and see whether we can account for the normativity of law within the framework of legal positivism and whether the idea of a social convention could be of help in this endeavor. As I shall explain, I do not believe that it is possible to offer such an account; and to illustrate the difficulties involved in trying to do so, I am going to consider the accounts of the normativity of law proposed by three prominent jurisprudents, who all work in the tradition of legal positivism, namely, Hans Kelsen, Gerald Postema, and Andrei Marmor. I argue (A) that we need to distinguish carefully between (a) the problem of accounting for the normativity of law, conceived as a necessary property of law, and (b) the problem of accounting for the use of normative legal language on the part of judges, attorneys, legal scholars, and others; (B) that the contemporary debate about the normativity of law, which mainly concerns (a), is in substance, if not in form, more or less identical to the old debate between legal positivists and non-positivists; (C) that one simply cannot account for the normativity of law, conceived along the lines of (a), within the framework of legal positivism, whether or not one invokes the idea of a social convention, and that the problem of the normativity of law thus conceived and considered within the framework of legal positivism, is not an open, and therefore not a very interesting, legal-philosophical question; (D) that the important question for a legal positivist is whether a given legal order (or legal system) is in fact normative, in roughly the sense of justified (or authoritative) normativity (a notion to be explained below), and that to determine whether this is so, one needs to consider the content and the administration of this legal order; and (E) that the idea of conditional normativity, or normativity from a point of view, although of considerable interest when discussing (b), is of little or no interest to those who are concerned with (a). As regards claim (C), I argue, more specifically, (C1) that Kelsen’s theory of the basic norm offers no solution to (a), because it offers nothing more than normativity from a point of view, and that it is better understood as aiming to solve (b), (C2) that Gerald Postema’s coordination convention account, although in many ways a very fine account, cannot (as Postema is well aware of) generate obligations for the citizens, as distinguished from the legal officials, and (C3) that Andrei Marmor’s constitutive convention account, which capitalizes on the idea of conditional normativity, does not and cannot take things further than Kelsen’s basic-norm account does. On route to establishing claims (A)-(E), I also argue (i) that when discussing (α), we should focus on the level of legal orders (legal systems), not on the level of individual legal norms, (ii) that the claim that law is necessarily normative is to be understood as the conceptual claim that necessarily, if x is a legal norm, x is normative, not as the essentialist claim that if x is a legal norm, x is necessarily normative, and (iii) that we should think of the concept of a legal ‘ought’ as having the function of connecting grounds (or conditions) and consequences in legal norms and of the import of the concept of ought (or, roughly, the meaning of the word ‘ought’) as being the same in different fields. Furthermore, I argue (iv) that we should distinguish between different grades (or degrees) of normativity; (v) that the most interesting grade of normativity when discussing (α) is what Joseph Raz has called justified normativity; and (vi) that we may think of moral philosopher David Copp’s notion of authoritative normativity as an illuminating specification of the somewhat loose idea of justified normativity.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

McCormack on How and When Canadian Courts Cite the Major Philosophers @QueensULibrary

Nancy McCormack, Queen's University Faculty of Law, has published When Canadian Courts Cite the Major Philosophers: Who Cites Whom in Canadian Caselaw. Here is the abstract.

This paper discusses the results of a search of Canadian case law from 1860 to 2016 to determine which major philosophers (born before 1900) were cited most and least often (or never), as well as which judges and courts cited them. The survey indicates that judges from every level of the Canadian courts have, over the years, made explicit references to major philosophic figures in their decisions. Many of the citations deal with eminently practical matters, but the courts have also thought it beneficial to call upon the philosophers for a variety of more strictly “philosophic” notions, for example, Thomas Aquinas on the doctrine of free will, and Bertrand Russell on logical constructions. Who cites whom and in what context and jurisdiction is set out in detail.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A New Book From Philip Allott on Philosophy and Law (Elgar Publishing) @ElgarPublishing

New from Elgar Publishing:

Philip Allott, Professor Emeritus of International Public Law and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, has published Eutopia: New Philosophy and New Law for a Troubled World.  Here is a description of the book's contents.

The human world is in a mess. The human mind is in a mess. And now the human species is threatening its own survival by its own inventions and by war. For thousands of years, human beings conducted a great debate about the human condition and human possibilities, about philosophy and society and law.

In 1516, Thomas More, in his book Utopia, contributed to the ancient debate, at another time of profound transformation in the human world. In our own time, we have witnessed a collapse in intellectual life, and a collapse in the theory and practice of education. The old debate is, for all practical purposes, dead.

In 2016, Philip Allott’s Eutopia resumes the debate about the role of philosophy and society and law in making a better human future, responding to a human world that More could not have imagined. And he lets us hear the voices of some of those who contributed to the great debate in the past, voices that still resonate today.

 

A New Book on Tocqueville From Jean-Louis Benoît

Newly published: Jean-Louis Benoît, Dictionnaire Tocqueville (Editions Nuvis, 2017). Here is a description of the contents.

"Je plais à beaucoup de gens d'opinions opposées, non parce qu'ils m'entendent, mais parce qu'ils trouvent dans mon ouvrage, en ne le considérant que d'un seul côté, des arguments favorables à leur passion du moment", écrit Tocqueville. Jean-Louis Benoît, spécialiste reconnu de la pensée d'Alexis de Tocqueville, nous donne ici un outil précieux : un dictionnaire qui, en précisant minutieusement les thèmes et les concepts, en les remettant dans leur contexte, permet d'acquérir une véritable compréhension de l'oeuvre de Tocqueville.

A New Blog on Law and Language @LloydEsq

ICYMI: a new-ish blog from Harold Anthony Lloyd, Professor of Law at Wake Forest School of Law. It's called Law & Language; Professor Lloyd publishes on philosophy, poetry (including his own work), legal education, rhetoric, politics, and other things that interest him. Check out his blog here.