Jeffrey Goldsworthy recently claimed that parliamentary sovereignty itself expresses or endorses legal positivism. This claim inverts the relationship between law and legal theory, according to whi...

In this book, legal scholars, philosophers, historians and political scientists from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States analyze the common law through three of its classic themes: rules, reasoning and constitutionalism. Their essays, specially commissioned for this volume, provide an opportunity for thinkers from different jurisdictions and disciplines to talk to each other and to their wider audience within and beyond the common law world. This book allows scholars and students to consider how these themes (...) and concepts relate to one another. It will initiate and sustain a more inclusive and well-informed theoretical discussion of the common law's method, process and structure. It will be valuable to lawyers, philosophers, political scientists and historians interested in constitutional law, comparative law, judicial process, legal theory, law and society, legal history, separation of powers, democratic theory, political philosophy, the courts and the relationship of the common law tradition to other legal systems of the world. (shrink)

This article develops some conceptual correlations between Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment and the common law tradition of legal judgment. The article argues that legal judgment, like aesthetic judgment, is best conceived in terms of intersubjective validity rather than objective truth. Understanding the parallel between aesthetic and legal judgment allows us to appreciate better the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, the individual and the community, in the formulation and communication of judgments, which combine a personal response and a reasoned determination (...) intended for a discrete audience. The article frames and pursues these themes in relation to four core concepts in Kant’s aesthetic theory: judgment, communication, community, and disinterestedness. Through sustained comparison and application of these concepts in aesthetic judgment and legal judgment, the article provides a conception of judging that more accurately captures the common law role and relationship of the individual judge and the institutional judiciary as integral parts of the broader legal and political community. (shrink)

By reconsidering the nature of professional work, renowned scholar Douglas E. Mitchell argues for reconceptualizing educational practices and institutional structures in ways that facilitate and protect educator professional responsibility. This book explores ways educators and their political supporters can seize the social and political power necessary to accept professional responsibility for the design of their work environment. Chapters explore how unionization, ethics, public values, political power, school reform, and trust play an important role in the essence of professional responsibility (...) in schools, arguing that we must use organization, management, and accountability mechanisms to encourage responsible civic participation and professional action in support of public education. This new text for graduate studies in teacher and leadership training frames a much needed analysis of where and how professional responsibility for public education is best incorporated into the work roles of teachers, administrators, and university scholars. (shrink)

African traditional religion is a highly non-dogmatic spiritual lifestyle that is practiced by millions of people around the world. Some African scholars argue that it is related to the religion practiced by the African Egyptians during the Dynastic Period. This study examines the nature of African traditional religion in an effort to determine the common attributes of the religion of the continent. In fact, the focal point of this study is the West African religious experience. To make this examination, the (...) study used an intertextual, soteriological analysis of African traditional religion by isolating key elements in the Yoruba, Dagara, and Ibo cultures. Specifically, this project determined that enough intertextual relations existed in oral and written literatures of the West African people to define a particular and common response to the environment. ;Principal elements isolated included sacrifice, salvation and culture, modes of revelation, divination, and African resilience in the face of invasions, colonization, and various outside religious assaults. The soteriological value of Yoruba, Dagara, and Ibo cultures, particularly as it relates to cosmology, symbolism, and ritual, was found to be the fundamental basis for the African traditional religious moral system. (shrink)

We assert that audit quality can be improved to the extent that social norms for honesty and responsibility are activated in the auditor. To test this assertion, we use an experimental audit market setting found in the literature and manipulate factors expected to activate honesty and responsibility norms in the auditor. We find that auditor misreporting is reduced when the investor is another participant in the experiment rather than computer simulated, and thus, the interests of third-party investors are salient to (...) the auditor. We also find that auditor misreporting is reduced when the auditor is required to sign-off on the audit report, but only when the investor is another participant in the experiment. Consistent with our underlying theory, we find that pre-experimental measures of sensitivity to honesty and responsibility norms help explain the effects of our manipulated variables. Finally, we find that these measures of social norm sensitivity are associated with the moral judgment that auditor misreporting is unethical. Our study helps explain previous anomalous findings in the literature and answers the call in Blay et al. (J Bus Ethics 2017. doi:10.1007/s10551-016-3286-4) for empirical researchers to use social norm theory to develop stronger tests of moral reasoning in the market for auditing services. (shrink)

A comprehensive look at the decline of the United States offers non-ideological remedies on how to overcome national self-doubt, reclaim optimism, and secure a prosperous future for American citizens.

This paper presents an alternative view for understanding abduction as ‘inference to the best explanation’, than can account from the simplest perception to the introduction of any new ideas. Subsequently the view offered is applied to medical practice and some consequences are extracted for it. The discussion is considered in the context of Peirce’s theories of men classification, fixation of belief and inquiry.

Over last half of the twentieth century, a silent revolution in post-material values made significant advances around the world. The formation of post-material values also resulted in expanded participation in post-material experiences such as joining voluntary groups, pursuing creativity and independence in the world of work, and engaging in political actions—experiences that go beyond a strict focus on accumulating economic wealth and material possessions. Because social class position matters for being a post-materialist, a class divide exists between middle-class post-materialists and (...) working-class materialists who occupy the lower end of the social class spectrum. This article will show that such a divide occurs, first for participation in post-material experiences and second for the attainment of life satisfaction. Using data from the World Values Survey, evidence will be provided in this article showing that members of the working class participate less in post-material experiences than others and, as a consequence, enjoy lower life satisfaction than others, especially post-materialists. In light of working-class-supported right-wing populism’s recent emergence in the USA and Europe, this social class divide takes on a special significance in explaining shifting trends in politics and public policy. (shrink)

Complex organisms thwart the simple rectilinear causality paradigm of “necessary and sufficient,” with its experimental strategy of “knock down and overexpress.” This Essay organizes the eccentricities of biology into four categories that call for new mathematical approaches; recaps for the biologist the philosopher's recent refinements to the causation concept and the mathematician's computational tools that handle some but not all of the biological eccentricities; and describes overlooked insights that make causal properties of physical hierarchies such as emergence and downward causation (...) straightforward. Reviewing and extrapolating from similar situations in physics, it is suggested that new mathematical tools for causation analysis incorporating feedback, signal cancellation, nonlinear dependencies, physical hierarchies, and fixed constraints rather than instigative changes will reveal unconventional biological behaviors. These include “eigenisms,” organisms that are limited to quantized states; trajectories that steer a system such as an evolving species toward optimal states; and medical control via distributed “sheets” rather than single control points. (shrink)

This paper presents an alternative view for understanding abduction as "inference to the best explanation", than can account from the simplest perception to the introduction of any new ideas. Subsequently the view offered is applied to medical practice and some consequences are extracted for it. The discussion is considered in the context of Peirce's theories of men classification, fixation of belief and inquiry.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Eternal Present: Slow Knowledge and the Renewal of TimeDouglas E. ChristieA woman is seated in a chair at the center of a large, light-filled atrium. Across from her sits an adolescent girl, Asian or Asian-American, maybe thirteen years old. They are both perfectly still. They look intently at each other. That is all. Minute after minute passes. Neither of them moves. I look more closely. Utter stillness. Not (...) quite repose, for there is a sense of intentionality to their engagement with each other, but deep stillness and calm. I look around the room and see a hundred or so persons also taking in the scene. Everyone is silent, though there are occasional sounds—shoes shuffling on the floor, a cough, a sigh. It takes me a few minutes to understand what is going on, what I am seeing. I feel my own anxiety to place myself somehow in this scene, to find the appropriate categories for grasping what is unfolding before me. I ask a person nearby; he tells me: it’s Marina Abramovic. She is performing “The Artist Is Present,” part of a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.1 “Oh,” I say, “thanks.” It’s performance art. Got it. But knowing this only helps a little. What are they doing? What is going on here? What is my part, if any, in what is happening? My mind, as usual, is racing ahead trying to figure it out. Which in this moment I cannot do. So, I pause (inwardly), take a step back and try to reorient myself. I take a breath, then another. I look again at the two figures.Their stillness is uncanny. This is part of what is making me anxious, I think. They are absorbed completely in the simple act of gazing at each other. I smile, thinking at first of the “stare-downs” I used to have with my brother when we were kids. Who would flinch (and fall into uncontrollable laughter) first? It was a game of chicken. With the eyes. Usually it was of short duration, and someone had to lose. This is different. The quality of attention, in particular, feels utterly different. These two are not trying to knock each other off their chairs. No one is trying to “win” at anything. They are, it seems, simply giving themselves to the work of beholding and being beheld. Extraordinary. I am not sitting in the chair. But I feel a jolt run through my body as I begin to feel the depth and power of this moment. The sense of nakedness, of naked abandon, of vulnerability. What else? Tenderness. Yes, I sense a certain tenderness passing between these two figures. And not just between them. Also touching those of us gathered in the room watching them. How is that possible? We are all [End Page 13] strangers to one another after all. And yet within this space, for these few moments there is a remarkable and palpable sense of intimacy.I am not sure at how long I stand there. But after a while, I feel the need to move, to get some relief from the intensity of this exchange. I leave the room where the artist and her companion are sitting and walk into a nearby gallery. (Later I learn that anyone visiting the museum can occupy the chair opposite the artist and that over the course of the exhibit many, many people do just that.) I am not ready to look at anything else, not yet. I have to gather myself a little first.Eventually, I do begin to take in some of the other art in the museum. But my mind keeps returning to that room and to those two seated figures. During the next couple of hours, I return to the atrium several more times. Each time I do, I am struck by how still these two figures are, how alive. Also how still and alive I feel entering into that space. Those of us beholding the scene are respectful and quiet but also animated, exchanging brief whispers, glances, smiles. We are captivated, enthralled.Suddenly... (shrink)

Vaught's " * -transform method" is applied to derive a global definability theorem of M. Makkai from a classical theorem of Lusin.

We improve a general theorem of J. A. Makowsky which characterizes, for a wide class of languages, those sentences θ such that both $\operatorname{Mod}(\theta)$ and $\operatorname{Mod}(\neg\theta)$ are closed under unions of chains.

We discuss the problem of defining the collection of first-order elementary classes in terms of the natural topological space of countable models.