Category: Law & Philosophy
-
I don't know if you are aware of or have paid any attention to the raging debate over the arrest of director Roman Polanski in Switzerland at the behest of the California courts on charges that stem from the rape of a child thirty years ago. The facts of the case are little in dispute but…
-
A few quick thoughts: 1. Calling it "ObamaCare" is demeaning and stupid. There's no possible universe in which that's even decently descriptive, if accuracy is any (not even the) goal. (This is similar to my objection to referring to George Tiller as an "abortion doctor.") I'm not sure if this is a smart political description:…
-
Can someone tell me how Ireland plans to enforce this law without turning into a country like Saudi Arabia? The weird thing is that the law was passed last month and not in the past century. When a modern Western country whose economy is based on science and technology adopts an absurdly medieval law, one would…
-
Stephen Bainbridge, a conservative law professor at UCLA, in response to Brian's veganism poll: [T]he efforts by some vegans to turn the issue into a political one, using the state to regulate food choices (see, e.g., foie gras bans), needs to be resisted at every opportunity. But the same Professor Bainbridge on gay marriage: I…
-
The first casualty in war is truth, closely followed by the rule of law. In the run up to and during the Iraq war the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration bombarded us with lies and their war efforts were riddled with unlawful actions that skirted or directly violated US as well as international laws. Among the extra-legal methods…
-
I happened to catch parts of Tuesday's Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor. The most fascinating exchange of the day took place when Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) questioned the judge. Sessions, a southern right winger, whose own nomination to federal judgeship was blocked in 1986 partially because of his attitude towards racial issues,interrogated Sotomayor about her opinions on race…
-
I just love this quote: "How dare she be smart and aggressive? Wait, she’s a lawyer and a judge."
-
It seems Alvin Plantinga has written a popular account of his evolutionary argument against naturalism, viz. that evolution selects beliefs for survival value, not truth, so that while our beliefs may be useful we've no reason to think them true. I've nothing much to say about the argument itself…lots of people have written about it,…
Accidental Blogger 