Law & Society Blog

One of my favorite descriptions of human nature is from Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. Here it is:
Let’s set the existence-of-god issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments […]

The morality of the market is one of the most significant issues not only in ethics but also, at least since Durkheim and Weber, in sociology. As is often the case, the more pervasive a practice, the harder it is to describe and analyze. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, in their forthcoming paper Moral Views […]

Scary that a wholesome law & order show from the 1960s can teach us a thing or two about civil liberties in 2007. So much for progress. (HT: BoingBoing)Technorati Tags: privacy

George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form are routinely cited in the context of theories dealing with self-referential processes, autopoiesis and second-order-cybernetics. Niklas Luhmann, in particular, refers to Spencer Brown all the time and makes extensive use of his terminology: law of calling, law of crossing, re-entry, etc. I never understood what the buzz was all […]

Commercial Aviation reports that:
Advertising in security checkpoints will be coming to an airport near you under a proposed Transportation Security Administration pilot program. … “TSA plans to launch a one-year pilot program where airport operators may enter into an agreement with vendors, who will provide divestiture bins, divestiture and composure tables, and metal-free bin return […]

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Michael Schorr’s movie Schultze Gets the Blues is a quiet meditation on the concept of home and belonging. Schultze is a salt miner sent into early retirement and into a life without purpose. Without family, he is going through the motions, trying to enjoy his bleak, unwanted freedom. (Not coincidentally, the story plays in former […]

More good news from New Jersey.
Amid growing unease about capital punishment and a state moratorium on executions, a legislative commission recommended today that New Jersey become the first state in more than 35 years to abolish the death penalty. With just one of its 13 members dissenting, the commission said there was “no compelling evidence” […]

Of all proofs for the existence of god, the teleological argument or the argument from design is the most commonly invoked: The watch proves the existence of the watchmaker. Of course, the argument from design is a non-sequitur and fails as a result of some well-known flaws documented elsewhere. But there’s another noteworthy weakness of […]

Here is a nice article on the contemporary free will debate by Dennis Overbye.
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it i€™s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.”
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