The author, in this series of essays, depicts the law as an essentially literary, rhetorical, and ethical activity. The topics discussed include a talk to students entering law school, describing the intellectual activity of the law, an exploration of the structure of legal thought and expression, and a dialogue which explores the ethics of argument.

In this book, James Boyd White shows how texts by some of our most important thinkers and writers—including Plato, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Mandela, and Lincoln—answer these questions, not in the abstract, but in the way they wrestle ...

"This collection of essays continues the work of James Boyd White in the rhetorical and literary analysis of law as a system for the creation of meaning. White's interest is in the intellectual and ethical possibilities of law, which he sees not merely as a logical enterprise, nor as a mere matter of politics and power, but rather as involving the activity of the whole mind, including its imaginative and affective capacities." "The essays here are united (...) by two basic themes: the idea that law can usefully be regarded not only as a set of rules designed to produce results in the material world, as it usually is, but also as an imaginative and intellectual activity that has as its end the claim of meaning for human experience, both individual and collective; and, second, the idea that education, including in the law, works by the constant modification of expectation by experience." "From Expectation to Experience will interest lawyers, legal scholars, students of law, as well as those engaged in the fields of law and literature, ethics and literature, and rhetoric."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

The law is a not an abstract system or scheme of rules, as we often speak of it, but an inherently unstable structure of thought and expression. It is built upon a distinct set of dynamic and dialogic tensions, which include: tensions between ordinary language and legal language; between legal language and the specialized discourses of other fields; between language itself and the mute world that lies beneath it; between opposing lawyers; between conflicting but justifiable ways of giving meaning to (...) the rules and principles of law; between substantive and procedural lines of thought; between law and justice; between the past, the present, and the future. Each of these tensions is present whenever a lawyer or judge goes to work. None of them can be resolved by resort to a rule or other directive, but must be addressed anew by the lawyer and judge in each case as it arises, by the exercise of an art of language and mind that is defined by the nature of these tensions themselves. (shrink)

I want to begin with the simple and obvious point, supported by common experience, that it is extremely difficult to talk about religion at all, whether we are trying to do so within a discipline, such as law or psychology or anthropology, or in speaking in more informal ways with our friends. There are many reasons for this: it is in the nature of religious experience to be ineffable or mysterious, at least for some people or in some religions; different (...) religions imagine the world and its human inhabitants, and their histories, in ways that are enormously different and plainly unbridgeable; and there is no superlanguage into which all religions can all be translated, for purposes either of comparison or of mutual intelligibility. What is more, it seems to be nearly always the case that one religion's deepest truths and commitments, its fundamental narratives, appear simply irrational, even weird, to those who belong to another tradition; this means that in any attempt to study and talk about a religion other than one's own there is a necessary element of patronization, at least whenever we are studying beliefs we could not imagine ourselves sharing.Yet it is of enormous importance to attempt to learn to talk about religion well, if we possibly can, if only for the obvious political and practical reason that religious divisions, both within nations and among them, are often intractable and bitter, and mutual understanding very difficult to attain. And it is hard even to imagine an intellectually respectable way of doing this. Think of the anthropologist of religion for example: is he or she to assume that there is a cross-cultural phenomenon called `religion', and if so on what basis? `Religion' is our word, and why should we assume that the Samburu of Kenya or the Hindus of the Indian subcontinent have practices or beliefs that parallel what we know in the west? . Or consider the psychologist, say the psychotherapist working on analytic principles: is he or she to regard the religious beliefs and experiences of a patient as fantasies and wishes of a pathological kind, of which the patient should be cured? Or as healthy formations? If the latter, how can that position possibly be explained in the language of psychology?Or think of the historian of the Middle Ages, interested say in architecture or philosophy: how is she to come to understand the world of religious meaning in which the people whose work she is describing lived, and how can she represent it in anything other than reduced terms? Or, to shift to another field, how is the economist to think about the tensions between the premises of his economic thought and those of the religious life of his culture, in which he perhaps participates?My aim here will not be to presume to offer any final answer to the question of my title, How to talk about religion — I think there is none — but rather to explore it in a tentative and inconclusive way, with the hope of complicating our sense of the importance and interest both of the question itself and of our own performed responses to it. (shrink)

I want to begin with the simple and obvious point, supported by common experience, that it is extremely difficult to talk about religion at all, whether we are trying to do so within a discipline, such as law or psychology or anthropology, or in speaking in more informal ways with our friends. There are many reasons for this: it is in the nature of religious experience to be ineffable or mysterious, at least for some people or in some religions; different (...) religions imagine the world and its human inhabitants, and their histories, in ways that are enormously different and plainly unbridgeable; and there is no superlanguage into which all religions can all be translated, for purposes either of comparison or of mutual intelligibility. What is more, it seems to be nearly always the case that one religion's deepest truths and commitments, its fundamental narratives, appear simply irrational, even weird, to those who belong to another tradition; this means that in any attempt to study and talk about a religion other than one's own there is a necessary element of patronization, at least whenever we are studying beliefs we could not imagine ourselves sharing.Yet it is of enormous importance to attempt to learn to talk about religion well, if we possibly can, if only for the obvious political and practical reason that religious divisions, both within nations and among them, are often intractable and bitter, and mutual understanding very difficult to attain. And it is hard even to imagine an intellectually respectable way of doing this. Think of the anthropologist of religion for example: is he or she to assume that there is a cross-cultural phenomenon called `religion', and if so on what basis? `Religion' is our word, and why should we assume that the Samburu of Kenya or the Hindus of the Indian subcontinent have practices or beliefs that parallel what we know in the west? . Or consider the psychologist, say the psychotherapist working on analytic principles: is he or she to regard the religious beliefs and experiences of a patient as fantasies and wishes of a pathological kind, of which the patient should be cured? Or as healthy formations? If the latter, how can that position possibly be explained in the language of psychology?Or think of the historian of the Middle Ages, interested say in architecture or philosophy: how is she to come to understand the world of religious meaning in which the people whose work she is describing lived, and how can she represent it in anything other than reduced terms? Or, to shift to another field, how is the economist to think about the tensions between the premises of his economic thought and those of the religious life of his culture, in which he perhaps participates?My aim here will not be to presume to offer any final answer to the question of my title, How to talk about religion — I think there is none — but rather to explore it in a tentative and inconclusive way, with the hope of complicating our sense of the importance and interest both of the question itself and of our own performed responses to it. (shrink)

What do we know when we know the law? Not a set of rules or theories, but a set of practices that are at bottom practices of reading--reading the texts of the law, reading the world--and writing (including of course speaking), especially writing in news ways in the inherited language of the law. Legal knowledge is a writer's knowledge. It always has as one of its deepest themes the question of justice. These themes are explored through an examination of the (...) Model Penal Code, which respect to which I ask what it would be like to learn this material with an eye to using it as a language of thought and argument. It is full of tensions and fissures about the most important matters, including its conceptions of justice and the purposes of criminal law, its central ideas of blameworthiness as a function of intention or state of mind, and its conception of proportionality. These can be seen as defects to be cured, or as reflections of irremediable tensions deep in our thought about these matters which it is a virtue not a vice of the Code to render explicit. To shift from legislative to judge-made law, I next examine Holmes's famous opinions in Shenck and Abrams, which I read in the light offered by the Model Penal Code, using that text to help define the criminal law issues presented in the two cases. This in turn helps define Holmes's achievement in these cases as a transformation of the criminal law, which leads to his constitutional doctrine. Finally, I analyze Brandeis's opinion in Whitney as an intellectual and rhetorical achievement of a different, and more extraordinary, kind. In all of these, the idea is to demonstrate how it is that legal knowledge is a writer's knowledge: for the drafter of statutes, for the composer of judicial opinions applying statutory and constitutional law alike, and for the lawyer thinking through and arguing a case. (shrink)

In a dynamic term of the United States Supreme Court in 2021-2022 a series of critical cases raise manifold changes and impacts on individual and communal health through 10 key areas ranging from abortions to vaccinations.

Ma is a curriculum. The Japanese concept of ma refers to the interval between two markers. In a dialectic exploration, the spaces between--private/public, teacher/student, old/new, self/other, among others are probed in ways that contribute to the significant research in teaching and learning that has been undertaken in the last decades.

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of (...) small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life. Key Words: altruism; cooperation; cross-cultural research; experimental economics; game theory; ultimatum game; public goods game; self-interest. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 508-527, July 2022.

This is an interpretation of the experiential/religious meaning of Japanese Shrine Shinto as taught us primarily by the priests at Tsubaki Grand Shrine, Suzuka, Mie Prefecture. As a heuristic device, we suggest lines of comparison between the thought and practice of the Tsubaki priests and two Western thinkers: the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the French philosopher Georges Bataille. This in turn allows the construction of three interpretive categories that we believe illuminate both the Shintō worldview and Shintō ritual practice.

We would like to thank the commentators for their generous comments, valuable insights and helpful suggestions. We begin this response by discussing the selfishness axiom and the importance of the preferences, beliefs, and constraints framework as a way of modeling some of the proximate influences on human behavior. Next, we broaden the discussion to ultimate-level (that is evolutionary) explanations, where we review and clarify gene-culture coevolutionary theory, and then tackle the possibility that evolutionary approaches that exclude culture might be sufficient (...) to explain the data. Finally, we consider various methodological and epistemological concerns expressed by our commentators. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 658-676, September 2021.

Among the morass of critical issues impacting the results of the midterm elections in 2022 were core public health issues related to health care access, justice, and reforms. Collectively, voters’ communal health and safety concerns dominated outcomes in key races which may shape national, state, and local legal approaches to protecting the public’s health in the modern era.

Since its inception in 2010, the Network for Public Health Law has aligned with federal, state, tribal, and local public health practitioners to assess how law can promote and protect the public’s health. In 2013, Network authors illustrated major trends in public health laws and policies emanating from an internal assessment of thousands of requests for technical assistance nationally. More recently, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has invited the Network and other partners to consider new ideas and strategies toward building (...) a “culture of health.” Per Figure 1, RWJF’s conception of a culture of health emphasizes key action areas essential to the promotion of health across all sectors and diverse populations. (shrink)

As the United States emerges from the worst public health threat it has ever experienced, the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider constitutional principles from bygone eras. Judicial proposals to roll back rights under a federalism infrastructure grounded in states’ interests threaten the nation’s legal fabric at a precarious time. This column explores judicial shifts in 3 key public health contexts — reproductive rights, vaccinations, and national security — and their repercussions.

In another tumultuous term of the United States Supreme Court in 2022-2023 a series of critical cases implicate instant and forthcoming changes in multiple fronts that collectively shift the national public health law and policy environment.

Historically, entities with a vested interest in a product that critics have suggested is harmful have consistently used research to back their claims that the product is safe. Prominent examples are: tobacco, lead, bisphenol A, and atrazine. Research literature indicates that about 80–90% of studies with industry affiliation found no harm from the product, while only about 10–20% of studies without industry affiliation found no harm. In parallel to other historical debates, recent studies examining a possible relationship between mercury exposure (...) and autism spectrum disorder show a similar dichotomy. Studies sponsored and supported by industry or entities with an apparent conflict of interest have most often shown no evidence of harm or no “consistent” evidence of harm, while studies without such affiliations report positive evidence of a Hg/autism association. The potentially causal relationship between Hg exposure and ASD differs from other toxic products since there is a broad coalition of entities for whom a conflict of interest arises. These include influential governmental public health entities, the pharmaceutical industry, and even the coal burning industry. This review includes a systematic literature search of original studies on the potential relationship between Hg and ASD from 1999 to August 2015, finding that of the studies with public health and/or industry affiliation, 86% reported no relationship between Hg and ASD. However, among studies without public health and/or industry affiliation, only 21% find no relationship between Hg and ASD. The discrepancy in these results suggests a bias indicative of a conflict of interest. (shrink)

The thymus is a unique primary lymphoid organ that supports the production of self‐tolerant T‐cells essential for adaptive immunity. Intrathymic microenvironments are microanatomically compartmentalised, forming defined cortical, and medullary regions each differentially supporting critical aspects of thymus‐dependent T‐cell maturation. Importantly, the specific functional properties of thymic cortical and medullary compartments are defined by highly specialised thymic epithelial cells (TEC). For example, in the medulla heterogenous medullary TEC (mTEC) contribute to the enforcement of central tolerance by supporting deletion of autoreactive T‐cell (...) clones, thereby counterbalancing the potential for random T‐cell receptor generation to contribute to autoimmune disease. Recent advances have further shed light on the pathways and mechanisms that control heterogeneous mTEC development and how differential mTEC functionality contributes to control self‐tolerant T‐cell development. Here we discuss recent findings in relation to mTEC development and highlight examples of how mTEC diversity contribute to thymus medulla function. (shrink)

On a June afternoon in 1960 Karl Hess 3rd, an assistant to the president of Ohio's vast Champion Paper and Fibre Company, was driving toward Cincinnati, lost in the manipulative thoughts common to rising young executives. Suddenly the sound of a police siren intruded and he pulled over, perplexed but not alarmed, for in his world the police menaced not.

The Book Provides A Genealogy Of `Dialectical Materialism` By Tracing The Development Of Marxist Ideas From Their Origins In German Philosophical Thought To The Ideology Of The Socio-Democratic Groups In Russia In The 1890S, From Which Lenin And The Revolutionary Generation Emerged. It Reconstructs Marx`S Original Conceptions And Examines The Modifications That Were Made To Them By Himself And By His Russian Followers, Which Eventually Gave Rise To The Doctrine Of `Dialectical Materialism`, Expounded By Plekhanov. Condition Good.

A questionnaire study was performed among Swedish organic livestock farmers to determine their view of animal welfare and other ethical issues in animal production. The questionnaire was sent to 56.5% of the target group and the response rate was 75.6%. A principal components analysis (exploratory factor analysis) was performed to get a more manageable data set. A matrix of intercorrelations between all pairs of factors was computed. The factors were then entered into a series of multiple regression models to explain (...) five dependent variables. Respondents were well educated and had long experience of farming. 81% were full-time farmers. They generally had a very positive attitude towards organic animal husbandry. They considered allowing animals their natural behavior a central aim, which is in accordance with organic philosophy. Farmers tended to be less approving of concepts like animal rights, dignity, and intrinsic value. When analyzing correlations between the factors, two groups of farmers emerged that were only partially correlated, representing different attitudes and behavioral dispositions. These may be interpreted as two subpopulations of organic livestock farmers in Sweden: those who saw organic farming as a lifestyle (``pioneer attitude'''') and entrepreneurs, who considered making money and new challenges more important. Their view of animal welfare differed. While the pioneers considered natural behavior a key issue, this was less important to the entrepreneurs, who also had a more approving attitude towards invasive operations such as castration and were more critical of the organic standards. (shrink)