Law & Society Blog

After an eye-opening trip to Toronto earlier this year, we’re now exploring Montreal, another truly great city.

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 […]

Here is an inspired cartoon by the Australian artist Bill Leak.

Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.10…. It is liberals who have demanded and continue to demand legal protections to avoid the conviction of innocent people in the criminal justice system, reasonable restraints on government surveillance of American citizens, and fair procedures to ensure that alleged enemy combatants are in fact enemy combatants.

In “Letter to a Christian Nation,” Sam Harris refers to a Gallup polls according to which[f]orty four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. (p.

Access to the internet makes pornography more readily available—not only cheaper and easier to find, but more private and so less likely to lead to embarrassment and other negative social consequences…. There was no similar relation for murder, which suggests that the result is not simply picking up the effect of some third variable that correlates with both internet access and violent crime.

Since 2003, the war in Iraq has been the dominant political issue.

Ola Endre Reitstøen presents this collected a library of interviews and presentations by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet (among others).

I have long been critical of the tactics that are sometimes employed by left-wing activists on college campuses, and also of the kind of thinking (or perhaps more accurately not thinking) that tends to motivate the use of such tactics. This criticism has earned me much scorn from members of the campus left, and […]

Scott Horton has written a powerful essay on the moral and legal responsibilities of lawyers in a time of war.