Perhaps the most fundamental principle of legal interpretation is the presumption that terms should be given their “ordinary” (i.e., general, non-technical) meanings. This principle is a central tenet of modern textualism. Textualists believe a universal presumption of ordinary meaning follows from their theory’s core commitment: A law should be interpreted consistently with what its text communicates to the ordinary public. This Article begins from this textualist premise, empirically examining what legal texts communicate to the public. Five original empirical studies (N (...) = 4,365) reveal a surprising finding: Ordinary people consider genre carefully and regularly take terms in law to communicate technical legal meanings, not ordinary ones. -/- This discovery carries implications for legal interpretation’s theory and practice. Modern textualists—especially at the Supreme Court—justify their theory through “democratic,” fair notice, and rule-of-law appeals to ordinary people. But the empirical studies reveal that fidelity to ordinary people does not imply an unwavering commitment to ordinary meaning. Instead, it requires interpreters to also look to technical meanings. On a practical level, the results support a new presumption of legal meaning and ground a new challenge to textualism’s claim to promote fair notice. As a case study, we consider Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which held that both sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination are prohibited forms of sex discrimination. The Article’s empirics and theory offer a new justification of the Court’s landmark decision. (shrink)

How should judges decide which linguistic canons to apply in interpreting statutes? One important answer looks to the inside of the legislative process: Follow the rules that lawmakers contemplate. A different answer, based on the “ordinary meaning” doctrine, looks to the outside: Follow the rules that would guide an ordinary person’s understanding of the legal text. Empirical scholars have studied statutory interpretation from the inside—revealing what rules drafters follow—but never from the outside. We offer a novel framework for empirically testing (...) interpretive canons “from the outside,” recruiting 4,500 people from the United States, as well as a sample of U.S. law students, to evaluate hypothetical scenarios that correspond to each canon’s triggering conditions. -/- The empirical findings provide crucial evidence about which traditional canons “ordinary meaning” actually supports, and they carry several further implications. First, interpretive canons are not a closed set. We discovered new canons that are not yet reflected as legal canons, including one we term the “non-binary gender canon” and another the “quantifier domain restriction canon.” Second, the results support a new understanding of the ordinary meaning doctrine itself, as one focused on the ordinary interpretation of rules, as opposed to the traditional focus on “ordinary language” generally. Third, many of the canons reflect that ordinary people interpret rules with an intuitive anti-literalism. This anti-literalism finding challenges textualist assumptions about ordinary meaning, as well as offering a theme for researching other currently unrecognized canons. Most broadly, we hope the Essay initiates a new research program in empirical legal interpretation. If ordinary meaning is relevant to legal interpretation, interpreters should look to evidence of how ordinary people actually understand legal rules. We see our experiments as a first step in that new direction. (shrink)

Textualism is now the Court’s lingua franca. In response, some have proposed a “progressive textualism,” defined by the use of traditional textualist methods to reach politically progressive results. This Article explores a different kind of “progressive textualism.” Rather than starting with the desired policy outcome—politically progressive or conservative—we begin from one of modern textualism’s central values: A commitment to “democratic” interpretation. As Justice Barrett argues, this commitment views textualists as “agents of the people” who “approach language from the perspective of (...) an ordinary English speaker.” Textualists thereby claim to promote democracy by interpreting law consistently with what it communicates to the ordinary public. However, recent empirical studies reveal discrepancies between textualist interpretive commitments and how ordinary people understand legal texts. These discrepancies undermine claims that textualists’ methodology is committed to democratic interpretation. -/- A textualism centered on democratic interpretation would be methodologically more progressive if it centered facts rather than fictions about how ordinary people interpret language. It would recognize that people understand legal language in light of linguistic “(co)text” and “(con)text,” and sometimes nonliterally; they often understand ambiguous terms in law to have legal, not ordinary, meanings; and their understanding of law is informed by its apparent purpose and sometimes by interpretive rules that are conventionally justified on normative grounds. In contrast, current textualism is often methodologically regressive, crafting a fictional “ordinary person” more closely connected to ideological policy goals than facts about ordinary language comprehension. (shrink)

Our primary focus is on analysis of the concept of voluntariness, with a secondary focus on the implications of our analysis for the concept and the requirements of voluntary informed consent. We propose that two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions must be satisfied for an action to be voluntary: intentionality, and substantial freedom from controlling influences. We reject authenticity as a necessary condition of voluntary action, and we note that constraining situations may or may not undermine voluntariness, depending on the (...) circumstances and the psychological capacities of agents. We compare and evaluate several accounts of voluntariness and argue that our view, unlike other treatments in bioethics, is not a value-laden theory. We also discuss the empirical assessment of individuals? perceptions of the degrees of noncontrol and self-control. We propose use of a particular Decision Making Control Instrument. Empirical research using this instrument can provide data that will help establish appropriate policies and procedures for obtaining voluntary consent to research. (shrink)

Focusing on the new theories of human motivation that emerged during the transition from feudalism to the modern period, this is the first book of new essays on the relationship between politics and the passions from Machiavelli to Bentham. Contributors address the crisis of moral and philosophical discourse in the early modern period; the necessity of inventing a new way of describing the relation between reflection and action, and private and public selves; the disciplinary regulation of the body; and the (...) ideological constitution of identity. The collection as a whole asks whether a discourse of the passions might provide a critical perspective on the politics of subjectivity. Whatever their specific approach to the question of ideology, all the essays reconsider the legacy of the passions in modern political theory and the importance of the history of politics and the passions for modern political debates. Contributors, in addition to the editors, are Nancy Armstrong, Judith Butler, Riccardo Caporali, Howard Caygill, Patrick Coleman, Frances Ferguson, John Guillory, Timothy Hampton, John P. McCormick, and Leonard Tennenhouse. (shrink)

When Russia’s “Westernizers,” Nikolai Stankevič, Vissarion Belinskij, and Mikhail Bakunin first encountered Hegel’s ideas in the 1830s, they gravitated toward a conservative interpretation, centering on the proposition that the “rational is real.” This article studies the preconditions for that interpretation, demonstrating that it was grounded in the writings of the late Hegel and of the circle of adepts who popularized his ideas and writings immediately after his death. These adepts later came to be known as Center and Right Hegelians. They (...) influenced the early reception of Hegel in France as well as in Russia. Stankevič, the first of the Westernizers to subject Hegel to systematic study, learned about Hegel through these mediators. (shrink)

'Catholic identity' is a phrase with which we have become quite familiar in the last few years, not least with the development of the Enhancing Catholic School Identity collaborative research project between the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria Ltd and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Several tertiary institutions including Australian Catholic University and the University of Divinity offer a range of units and seminars that focus on enhancing Catholic institutional identity.

El artículo empieza con un recorrido por las ideas republicanas del 1848 francés en torno a la fraternidad como idea fundamental para combatir el individualismo e instaurar un nuevo orden social. No obstante, el ideal de fraternidad es rápidamente ignorado por el pensamiento político contemporáneo, contrariamente a o que ocurre con los dos otros dos términos de la divisa revolucionaria: la libertad y la igualdad. La autora se plantea si conviene recuperar el concepto de fraternidad y en qué sentido. ¿Es (...) una virtud en el sentido aristotélico? Pese a que hay filósofos contrarios a esa idea, se defiende la tesis de que es difícil que sin fraternidad pueda hacerse justicia y que, en consecuencia, la fraternidad no puede ser vista sino como una virtud o una obligación moral imprescindible como base de la cooperación social. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The 2005 Meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian StudiesFrances S. Adeney, SecretaryThe annual meeting of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies was held in Philadelphia on November 18, 2005. The theme of the program was visual and aural expressions in Christianity and Buddhism and their relationship to religious practice.The focus of the first session was visual images of sacred art. Victoria Scarlett presented the paper "The Iconography of Compassion: (...) Visualizing Guanyin and the Virgin Mary." She noted that meditation exercises that explore visual imagery can mediate the experience of the holy in both Buddhism and Christianity. By comparing and contrasting the images of Guanyin and the Virgin Mary through both commentary and slides, she pointed toward the qualities of compassion, healing, empathy, generosity, and selfless love presented in both Buddhism and Christianity. Scarlett stressed the role of visualization in generating compassion and taking responsibility for cultivating and living the devotional life. Engaging the religious imagination in those visual ways, she said, can help us generate compassion in our world today.Alice Keefe presented the second paper, "The Visual Dimension of Religion in Comparative Perspective." She challenged the assumption that visual experience is a derived or secondary aspect of religious life. As Tibetan Buddhism clearly shows, through its depiction of Buddhas, lamas, bodisattvas, and deities, the divine is form as well as formless. In Christian Orthodox traditions, the icon is viewed as material and glory, the transcendent visible to the human eye. Visual images in both Buddhist and Christian traditions indicate the possibility of transformation as one imagines one's own body as a body of light.Keefe challenged us to bring the centrality of the visual in Buddhism and some portions of Christianity into our academic discussion. Western thinkers present the body in opposition to the spiritual, sometimes understanding images as idolatrous. We assume that the generative locus of meaning is in the subjective consciousness and seek out ideas, ignoring the body. However, communicating an idea is not the [End Page 181] object of visual attention to an icon—rather, it involves the constitution of a self in relation to others. Through practices that activate the visual dimension of religions, we come to know ourselves as part of a pantheon of beings.Rita Gross responded to both papers, focusing on the biases of Western religion in the study of Buddhism. The prohibition of idolatry in Western religion has been identified with the sense of sight, rather than hearing or the use of words. Furthermore, idolatry is always a category defined by outsiders, Gross asserted. People who use the sense of sight to reach beyond themselves to the sacred know what they are doing. The papers and visual images presented gave the attendees insight into how that might happen in Buddhism and Christianity.Michael Monhart and Jisho Shizuka opened the second session with their presentation of "Chanting as Practice: Japanese Shingon Buddhist Sutra Chant." After a brief history of the Shingon sect, the presenters focused on a central aspect of Shingon chanting practice: a realization of one's inherent Buddha-nature in this life. Through activating the mysteries of the ritual activities of the body, voice, and mind, chanting develops the specific connection between Buddha-nature and human nature. An explanation of the chanting itself—its modes, patterns, and energies—led to the conclusion that sound and word become reality through their use by the practitioner of ritual, a conclusion that was demonstrated by the chanting of three sutras.Bill McJohn and Joseph Anderson next presented their work, "The Aural Dimension of Religion: Chanting Psalms in Gregorian Chant." McJohn focused on the history of chanting the Psalter, beginning in the monasteries of the fourth century. Singing the Psalms was motivated by a desire to pray constantly, and as the monastic communities developed, a practice of working through the 150 psalms developed. A shorter version, which eventually became the rosary, also developed. Anderson noted that the recitation of the Psalms is the analog to Buddhist chanting of the sutras. One is actually speaking as the Christ in recitation of the Psalms. Both also find a balance between time and timelessness as they are re-created in different ways... (shrink)

Exceptionnel, l'itinéraire politique de Marcelle Devaud, l'est assurément. Sénatrice dès 1946 puis députée (de 1958 à 1962), maire de Colombes (1959-1965), membre de Conseil Economique et Social (1962-1979), représentante de la France à la commission de la femme aux Nations-Unies (1975-1983), elle cumule tous ces mandats avec de nombreuses responsabilités dans les associations féminines, dont plusieurs fondées par elle-même. Quand on sait qu'elle est par ailleurs mère de 6 enfants, on ..

Exact contemporain de la reine Victoria, Herbert Spencer est assurément un des derniers constructeurs de système. De 1862 à 1893, il n'a eu d'autre but que de mener à bien un vaste projet de philosophie synthétique conçu en 1858 et qui, après avoir posé les principes premiers, devait examiner tour à tour ceux de la biologie, de la psychologie, de la sociologie puis de la morale. Une fois la part faite à un inconnaissable emprunté à Kant, ou à quelques (...) principes universels, comme le passage de l'homogène à l'hétérogène, les lois de la moindre résistance ou de la persistance de la force, cette philosophie se résume pour l'essentiel à appliquer à toutes les branches du savoir la théorie de l'évolution, censée expliquer aussi bien le monde inorganique que le monde organique. À ce propos, on ne perdra pas de vue que l'évolutionnisme de Spencer a précédé celui de Darwin; qu'il s'agit, si l'on préfère, d'une doctrine plus idéologique que scientifique, en ce sens que son auteur s'est contenté d'étendre aux êtres vivants ce qui avait été élaboré initialement pour rendre compte du devenir social. (shrink)

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon (...) Lee, and Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate how cultural meanings associated with the left ventricular assist device inform acceptance and experience of this innovative technology when it is used as a destination therapy. We conducted open-ended, semistructured interviews with family caregivers and patients who had undergone LVAD-DT procedures at six U.S. hospitals. A grounded theory approach was used for the analysis. Thirty-nine patients and 42 caregivers participated. Participants described a sense of obligation to undergo the procedure because of its (...) promise for salvation. However, once the device was implanted, patients described being placed into a liminal state of being neither sick nor healthy, with no culturally scripted role. Consideration of end-of-life decisions was complicated by the uncertainties about how patients with LVADs die. Pre-implantation communications among patient, family, and clinicians should take into account the impact of the technology on meaning, identity, and patient experience. (shrink)

Morality, Mortality as a whole deals with certain aspects of ethical theory and with moral problems that arise primarily in contexts involving life‐and‐death decisions. The importance of the theoretical issues is not limited to their relevance to these decisions; however, they are, rather, issues at the heart of basic moral and political theory. This first volume comprises three parts. Part I, Death: From Bad to Worse, has with four chapters, and an appendix, discussing death and why it is bad for (...) the person who dies. Part II, Saving Lives: General Issues, has six chapters, and explores a cluster of moral problems that arise in saving lives. The general question raised is whether we should always, in aiding life, act so as to save the greater number of lives or to produce the greatest amount of good. Part III, Scarce Resources: Theoretical Issues, Specific Recommendations, and Organ Transplants, has five chapters, and deals with the problem of the acquisition and distribution of organs for transplantation. It allows us to apply the theoretical discussion of saving lives and relevant/irrelevant utilities presented in the previous parts. However, the discussion can be understood independently of the first two parts, and the conceptual issues and procedures on which it focuses are relevant to dealing with any scarce resource, including money and time, which are needed to use other plentiful resources. Although the book contains much theoretical and methodological argument, it is firmly grounded in practical ethical issues, and is illustrated throughout by examples. (shrink)

Placing Bruno—both advanced philosopher and magician burned at the stake—in the Hermetic tradition, Yates's acclaimed study gives an overview not only of Renaissance humanism but of its interplay—and conflict—with magic and occult practices. "Among those who have explored the intellectual world of the sixteenth century no one in England can rival Miss Yates. Wherever she looks, she illuminates. Now she has looked on Bruno. This brilliant book takes time to digest, but it is an intellectual adventure to read it. Historians (...) of ideas, of religion, and of science will study it. Some of them, after reading it, will have to think again.... For Miss Yates has put Bruno, for the first time, in his tradition, and has shown what that tradition was."—Hugh Trevor-Roper, _New Statesman_ "A decisive contribution to the understanding of Giordano Bruno, this book will probably remove a great number of misrepresentations that still plague the tormented figure of the Nolan prophet."—Giorgio de Santillana, _American Historical Review_ "Yates's book is an important addition to our knowledge of Giordano Bruno. But it is even more important, I think, as a step toward understanding the unity of the sixteenth century."—J. Bronowski, _New York Review of Books_. (shrink)

The paper gives an overview of recent doctrines of legal interpretation that can be subsumed under the common name “institutional turn” in theories of legal interpretation. Among the reviewed theoretical positions are the ones from Jeremy Wаldron, Victoria Nourse, Cass Sunstein, Adrian Vermeule, Scott Shapiro. It is concluded that the institutional turn in legal interpretation offers some significant insights into legal interpretation and interesting perspectives on the appropriate interpretative methodologies. The turn, however, does this by eschewing parts of (...) traditional accounts of legal interpretation that are arguably worth preserving in any theory of legal interpretation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religion after September 11th World CongressMontreal, Quebec, September 11–15, 2006Frances S. AdeneyThis global conference, organized by Professor Arvind Sharma and a team of international scholars, began on the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in 2001. Conference themes stressed the commonalities among religions seeking peace, the unity all religions share in our common humanity, the necessity for (...) religions to formulate cogent views of human rights, and the importance of nonviolent socially engaged religion.Those themes were carried through the congress in individual paper presentations, panel discussions, and plenary sessions. The participants represented many nations and religions with Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars, religious leaders and lay persons participating at every level of the conference.A central feature of many of the presentations was the connection between the political realm and religion. How religions could formulate their sources for human rights and press for human rights implementation, what forms of just war theory could be developed for the current age of terrorist warfare, and how religious groups could be protected from indiscriminate or dishonest proselytizing were among the topics addressed.The Religion after September 11th World Congress brought together people of different religions, political persuasions, and cultures around issues crucial to us all. [End Page 141]Frances S. AdeneyLouisville Presbyterian Theological SeminaryCopyright © 2007 The University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

Is there an objective notion of disability and superability that can be employed in discussion of genetic alteration? In this article I suggest that there are such objective notions. Nevertheless, I point to factors which may distinguish between the morality of genetic therapy for disability and genetic enhancement policies. These factors include the importance of helping the worst off first, the reasonableness of risks relative to goals, and the importance of certain types of autonomy. Gibt es objektive Begriffe von Körperbehinderung (...) und körperlicher Überlegenheit, die in der Diskussion über genetische Veränderungen verwendet werden können? Der Beitrag behauptet, daß es solche objektiven Begriffe gibt. Trotzdem arbeitet die Autorin Gesichtspunkte heraus, die auf Unterschiede in der moralischen Beurteilung von gentherapeutischen Maßnahmen gegen Körperbehinderungen einerseits und von Verfahren zu genetischen Verbesserungen andererseits hinweisen. Zu diesen Gesichtspunkten gehören der Gedanke, daß den am schlimmsten Betroffenen zuerst geholfen werden muß, der Gedanke, daß zwischen den gesteckten Zielen und den Risiken, die zu ihrer Erreichung eingegangen werden, eine vernünftige Relation bestehen muß, und die Überlegung, daß bestimmten Arten von Autonomie eine sehr hohe Bedeutung zukommt. (shrink)

In this article, I examine several distinctions that may be relevant to the morality (and conceptual characterization) of terrorism: (1) the state/nonstate agent distinction, (2) the combatant/noncombatant distinction, (3) the intention/foresight distinction, (4) the means/side-effect distinction, (5) the interrelated necessary/nonnecessary means and produce/sustain distinctions, (6) the mechanical/nonmechanical use distinction, (7) the military/political distinction, (8) the harm/terror distinction, and (9) the harm-for-terror/terror-for-goal distinction. I conclude that some of these factors (though not those most commonly cited) account for the prima facie wrongness (...) of terrorism and that the nondistinctive properties of terrorism (which it shares with some nonterrorist acts) are what make it most seriously wrong. I also provide a conceptual examination of terrorism as we commonly think of it and its relation to torture. In the course of discussing the distinctions and also in concluding the article, I consider why terrorism may sometimes be morally permissible. (shrink)

Here lies the real problem of moral knowledge that occupies Aristotle in his ethics. For we find action governed by knowledge in an exemplary form where the Greeks speak of techne. This is the skill, the knowledge of the craftsman who knows how to make some specific thing. The question is whether moral knowledge is knowledge of this kind. This would mean that it was knowledge of how to make oneself. Does man learn to make himself what he ought to (...) be, in the same way that the craftsman learns to make things according to his plan and will. (shrink)

This article presents an approach we have developed for the assessment of public research institutions in the natural sciences and engineering. The method consists in the exploitation of available S&T databases and indicators, including bibliometrics (databases of scientific as well as technical literature), patents, and internal data. Results are therefore derived through multiple databases. The objective is to profile a specific national R&D community in order to assess the positioning of a public institution or program within the community to which (...) it belongs. It involves obtaining the profile of the evolution of an R&D area, the R&D performers, the financing and support institutions, the users of R&D results, and the interactions between all these actors. A case-study of Canadian research in polymers is presented. (shrink)