(CLP) A Third Look at the Second Amendment

It is not easy to say anything new about the brief and polarizing Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but Thom Hartman has done so, based in part on the work of Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. It seems that the specific language of the amendment, in particular the word "state" (which replaced "country" in an earlier draft), was designed by the framers for the express purpose of preserving slavery, which demanded constant policing by armed militias raised by the Southern states. Here's the news article:  http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery.

Welcome to Spring Semester

It's not quite spring yet, but spring semester has sprung. This site will be a clearinghouse for course discussions in Contemporary Legal Philosophy (CLP) and World Religions (WR), and I will generally key posts to each course with those initials. As soon as you send me your course blog URLs, I will link them in the column to the left. This is a forum for thoughtful, respectful, wide-ranging conversation about the course content and anything even peripherally related to it. It is an opportunity to explore, together, everything that puzzles and fascinates us about these topics. I look forward to some really interesting conversations.

LCR: One Reason Logic is Hard

Chris Mooney writes about the relationship between reason and emotion:
     "Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds—fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
     "We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about."
Read the whole article at:   http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney?page=1

CD: Noncooperation in War

In an essay on the career of General David Petraeus in the current New Yorker magazine, Dexter Filkins describes a fascinating example of the way resistance movements sometimes arise even within military hierarchies. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/12/17/121217crat_atlarge_filkins. Describing the first year of American occupation of Iraq, Filkins paraphrases Fred Kaplan's forthcoming book The Insurgents: "... a small group of men, with Petraeus the most prominent, found one another and mounted an end-run around the military bureauracy, thereby saving Iraq, and probably the entire Middle East, from a war even more cataclysmic than the one we already had."

WR: Dueling Literalisms

In Friday's New York Times, the anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann discusses two distinct styles of Christian biblical interpretation, which we might characterize as textually reductive vs. imaginative or experiential. Neither has a tremendous amount of patience for historical scholarship, or even close, informed reading of scriptural texts, but both are interesting for what motivates them. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/14/opinion/what-didnt-happen-in-bethlehem.html?src=twr&_r=0

Fin de Semestre

Thank you all for many interesting conversations this semester. I will undertake the unpleasant and anti-educational task of assigning grades next week. When you receive them, if you think they are unfair or might be in error please send me a polite query by email  -- you will want to save your anger, vituperation, and righteous indignation for the corporate plutocracy -- and I will re-evaluate. If you are unsatisfied with my response, you then have the prerogative to file an appeal through the registrar's office.

I wish you all a pleasant and convivial winter break.

CLP: Ronald Dworkin on Affirmative Action

Those of you getting a running start on next semester's Contemporary Legal Philosophy might be interested in this article in the New York Review of Books (available in the library, and online for a small fee: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/20/case-against-color-blind-admissions/) by leading legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin: "The Case Against Colorblind Admissions." It is a very clear example of how legal reasoning works: the use of precedent, constitutional interpretation, etc.