Law & Society Blog

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 […]

“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: […]

Matt posted a mini-essay recently in the comments section of the “10 Worst Books” thread which I think itself deserves discussion. After musing over a particularily apt headline on “The Onion”, he writes:
The central premise of American government is that all legitimate power flows from the Constitution. And yet the Constitution is not a self-executing […]

The outcome of a stronger analysis, I think, is that while total utilitarianism cannot be soundly accused of absurdity, it may be lacking in other ways.

The connection between law and morality (or the lack thereof) is one of the most debated issues in legal philosophy.

One of the critical questions of legal theory is that of legal irrelevancy, that is, under what conditions an event (E) is a legal or an extra-legal event. Under what conditions is it proper to apply the binary code of the legal system, lawful/unlawful, to E? The question is of obvious practical relevance, because it […]