Law & Society Blog

So recently my alma mater’s student paper, The Gazette, published their annual spoof issue. One satirical article, titled “Labia Majora Carnage”, included a mock-scene which involved the rape of a local feminist-activist by the chief of police. Many readers interpreted the passage to be trivializing rape, if not promoting it. It caught a lot of […]

Like most people interested in social science, I am a social misfit. That is, I have various and sundry habits that upset a certain type of person: I slurp my soup, swear publically, really don’t like ironing my pants, and sometimes I even wear a horrible moustache. These are all forgivable sins, I hope. But […]

Matt Wood argues:
After just reading two articles dealing with Jurgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, I think I can take a tentative step towards fleshing out my arguments for the role of dialogue in the definition of law. According to this helpful paper, which summarizes Habermas’s theory of communicative action (and quotes from his book […]

I would dispute the claim that law has been tacitly agreed to in anything like a social contract.
To see what I mean, picture in your mind the following scenario. A resident of a small, distant, isolated island of Tikopia is fishing off the coast as he does every year. Tikopia is ecologically self-sufficient, due to […]

It is common practice in university departments to evaluate texts by way of “the principle of charity”. Some formulations of this principle make for fantastic additions to our analytical toolkit(s). Other formulations are mere distractions, and they waste our time.
It is misleading in the first place to speak of one single principle of charity, as […]

Glenn Greenwald argues:
The basic mechanics of American democracy, imperfect and defective though they may be, still function. Chronic defeatists and conspiracy theorists — well-intentioned though they may be — need to re-evaluate their defeatism and conspiracy theories in light of this rather compelling evidence which undermines them (a refusal to re-evaluate one’s beliefs in light […]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003345862
I don’t really want to lower the tone of this blog, but I have to say, this story is revolting at a level I find hard to express.
Greg Mitchell reports:
The true stories of how American troops, killed in Iraq, actually died keep spilling out this week. On Tuesday, we explored the case of Kenny Stanton […]

In reply to a recent thread, Cosim had two pressing concerns over the ethics and legal philosophy behind free speech.

(1) “I’m not sure why the law should tolerate racist opinions; general propositions don’t decide concrete cases. For example, to take the Brandenburg case from American constitutional law, Klansmen spoke about sending “€˜the Black back to […]

“Manufacturing Consent” is a document written by Prof. Chomsky which tries to show that the institution of newsmedia is, and has historically been, beholden to the powers that be. The cornerstone of the book is a “Propaganda Model”, which explains the political slant of mass media according to five filters, all of them fairly sinister: […]

Thanks for J. Carter Wood at Butterflies and Wheels for bringing this gem of an article to greater attention. The title: “Deconstructing the evidence based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism“. Published in the International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare, written by health science Profs. David Holmes (also a registered nurse) and Genvieve Rail, […]