Law & Society Blog

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.

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 […]

Geoff Manne at Truth on the Market offers the following insightful comment, extending a discussion about the proportionality of Skilling’s sentence compared to sentences meted out in the so-called “war on drugs.”The problem in the drug war context is quite different, at least for me…. The question there, however, is how to do so optimally, given the staggering social costs of over-deterrence; the risk of self-aggrandizing, politically-motivated, error-prone prosecution; and the reality of pretty good, existing agency-cost controls.

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.

The ACLU has challenged the “Child Online Protection Act” (COPA), which would impose draconian criminal sanctions, with penalties of up to $50,000 per day and up to six months imprisonment, for online material acknowledged as valuable for adults but judged “harmful to minors.” Testifying on Monday, October 23, will be Rufus Griscom, founder and publisher of Nerve.com, Joan Walsh, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Salon.com and Dr. Lorrie Faith Cranor, an Associate Research Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Some people seem to believe in “textual revelation” as a truth criterion…. (How do I know what qualifies as bona fide revelation and what’s just a figment of my imagination?

One day, about a month into the trial, following a grueling cross-examination by the defense attorney of a witness from the CIA, which clearly harmed the government’s case, the federal prosecutors asked the judge for a closed hearing. In the closed hearing, with only the lawyers and the judge present, the lead prosecutor, from the U.S. Department of Justice, requested that the judge hold the defense attorney in criminal contempt for asking questions of the CIA witnesses that elicited prohibited classified information in open court.

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 […]