Law & Society Blog

There is an animated discussion at PeaSoup in response to a post by Robert Johnson.
The standard view of Kantianism has been that it firmly denies that the right is grounded in the good. But recently it has become almost de riguer for Kantians to reject this priority of the right and embrace the good as […]

The New Jersey Supreme Court today ruled that New Jersey has no business denying “committed” gay couples the benefits of marriage. Here are some quotes from the syllabus:

Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court […]

The French parliament has passed a law, making it a criminal offense to deny the Armenian Genocide of 1915-17, as the BBC reports:
The bill, which provides for a year in jail and a heavy fine, still needs approval from the Senate and president.
Turkey called the decision a “serious blow” to relations with France. It has […]

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, […]

There have been a gross number of critiques of Wikipedia, the encyclopedic source online that anyone can edit. Most of them have been sourly negative, because the Wiki system has certain disadvantages. A common (and correct) complaint is that experts are not given incentives to participate in the process of making great articles, and are […]

Every night, a raccoon goes through our garbage.

This is from the NYT:Coffee is not usually thought of as health food, but a number of recent studies suggest that it can be a highly beneficial drink. Researchers have found strong evidence that coffee reduces the risk of several serious ailments, including diabetes, heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver.There you have it!

If our only valid benchmarks are the past and the minimally extrapolated near-future, then we tend to see our world as the best of all worlds…. The courage to use an utopian benchmark, a long run ideal world, is something that has all but disappeared wherever economics is now used in the law as the naturalist basis for explanation and interpretation.

Don’t miss Daniel Gilbert’s interesting Op-Ed over at the New York Times: He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn’t. Gilbert writes about recent experiments that show that (a) we tend to regard our own actions as consequences (of the actions of others) and the actions of others as causes, and (b) that we tend […]

After having (once again) missed a window of departure at Newark airport, because resulting in yet another two hour delay, I am glad to see that someone is thinking about alternative approaches to aircraft security.