Upcoming panel discussion (18 March 2026) @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social .., but it is interesting that maga is devoid of, or perhaps in opposition to, any hypothetically alluring fashion sense.

Herbert Marcuse observed that democracy with totalitarian organization obliterates the difference between true and false, information and indoctrination, right and wrong, with decisions made and conclusions arrived at before the discussion gets under way. -- Herbert Marcuse

The training of students must always be the chief object of the law school, but this work should be supplemented by solid contributions of their professors to the improvement of the law. -- James Barr Ames (1908)

Philip Glass!

Ah that's so good! (in a case with both Augustus and Learned Hand) scholar.google.com/scholar_case...

Wittgenstein recommends "Mrs. Geach" (E. Anscombe) for Research Fellowship (18 May 1945) (copy).

Jean-Paul Sartre at the Renault factory strike, Bellancourt, France (1968), urging a new alliance between workers and intellectuals.

The idea of adding the pursuit of happiness to the core natural law claims underlying various national political Declarations, particularly the American, likely originates with Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, one of the most influential legal/political theorists of the time.

In 1967, the extraordinary philosopher of language Michael Dummett and his wife, the author Ann Dummett, were arrested for picketing against racial discrimination, charged with public disorder, but acquitted upon an official admission that the police, not protesters, had obstructed passage.

"Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated."

Murdered by an untrained bunch of ICE thugs www.nytimes.com/live/2026/us...

Bernard Williams explained that what made Wittgenstein's writing so difficult wasn't an obscurity in his expression -- "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him" -- but rather deep ambiguities in reckoning how far his statements were harnessed to an argument.

The human subject transcends its true state of diffuseness or decentrement and finds a consolingly coherent image of itself reflected back in the 'mirror' of a dominant ideological discourse, and thus alienated is able to act in socially appropriate ways. -- Terry Eagleton on Louis Althusser

Ronald Dworkin started out as law clerk to Judge Learned Hand ("the law clerk to beat all law clerks," said Hand). But when RD disagreed with Hand's advocacy of judicial restraint, Hand blurted out, "Fuck you!", steam coming "out of his eyebrows," according to Dworkin.

Waiting to hear that the US stupidly signed on to the Treaty of Ghent

Called by J. Edgar Hoover "Red Monday (17 June 1957), SCOTUS issued Yates (overturning Communist Party convictions), Watkins (limiting congress's power to probe beliefs), Sweezy (invalidating investigation of lecturer's subversive acts), and Dulles (reversing disloyalty firing).

Weimar anti-fascist journals Das Wort (The Word) and Die Linkskurve (The Left Curve)

US citizen says he felt fear, shame and desperation a day after ICE officers broke down his door with guns drawn, handcuffed him and dragged him into the snow wearing half-dressed. He was later returned home without explanation or apology, he said.

A candidate for a professorship at Edinburgh University in 1744, David Hume lamented that accusations "of Heresy, Deism, Scepticism, Atheism &c have been raisd against me, which confound the ignorant," weighty academics deeming him "a very unfit Person for such an office."

Executive order henceforth requiring these be called Americans

Conceptions of Law, Ideology, and the Rule of Law -- why the rule of law project can be conducive in its moral evaluative commitments to an oppositional ideology in service of democratic agency and an ameliorative social function. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Hugely uplifting piece by Kushanava Choudhury @dissentmag.bsky.social - on what's possible, the Kerala model of bottom-up community decision-making about health, education, food management, basic economic security, "and dignity for all people." dissentmagazine.org/article/the-...

Clever commodity fetishizing from 1994

Nothing - neither wild beasts nor microbes - can be more terrible for humans than a cruel, intelligent, flesh-eating species which could understand and thwart human intelligence and whose aim would be precisely the destruction of humanity. That species is obviously our own. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

The issue will be whether failure to warn claims vs Monsanto/Bayer's Roundup weed-killer product (arising from its (carcinogenic) glyphosate component) are preempted by the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA).

Brooklyn

Hannah Arendt reflected that Wittgenstein's "What we cannot speak of we must be silent about" wasn't a simple positivist claim, since sense experience itself can't be expressed in words that measure up to what's given to the senses.

Franz Newmann, a Weimar Republic jurist and Frankfurt School thinker writing in the 1920s, saw sovereignty, on the one hand, and the rule of law on the other, as the defining characteristics of the modern nation-state, yet in perpetual, irreconcilable struggle with one another.

Liner notes on Lenny Bruce's Feb 1961 Carnegie Hall set during blizzard: "His ideal was to walk out there like Charlie Parker, take that mike in his hand like a horn and blow everything that came into his head with nothing censored, nothing mediated, until he was pure mind.."

It is not true that the courts are merely serving as an instrument of tyranny and repression. At the same time these institutions are not functioning in an acceptable fashion. -- Noam Chomsky et al. (1968)

While the phenomenon of disruption in the courts appears to owe most to a theory of revolution, I want to contend that it may also, at least sometimes, be regarded as a legitimate extension of an acceptable theory of civil disobedience. -- Graham Hughes (1973)

Rawls seems to get in a bit of a pickle when he suggests "we think of the original position as similar to the point of view from which noumenal selves see the world," because he also takes parties in the original position to be rational maximizers.

In his practical philosophy Kant distinguishes between the doctrine of right (Rechtslehre), which concerns the proper organization of society and sidelines motives, and the doctrine of virtue, for which motives are central.

Pool Parlor by Jacob Lawrence (1942)

The principle that unadmitted aliens have no constitutionally protected rights defies rationality. -- Thurgood Marshall

Informative background on chronological developments within Venezuela 1958 - 2013, through the Hugo Chavez era, by @CFR.org, if interested. www.cfr.org/timeline/ven...

Globalisation didn’t begin in the 1990s, or even in the past millennia. The tale of globalisation is written across human history. So why do we keep getting the story so wrong? This Essay was one of our most read by you in 2025. Revisit it here:

Anselm Kiefer

Happy 85! yesterday

Le Corbusier (1939)

According to Aristotle, only an active life can assure happiness; but the activity needn't involve "relations to others" if it consists in "thoughts and trains of reflections" that are independent and complete in themselves.

The Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo evolved from being a dedicated Spinozist to Husserlian phenomenologist to orthodox Marxist, but in each incarnation sought to understand the historical human condition and its implications both personal and political.

Hannah Arendt opined that, absent enforced constitutional guarantees, there is only the unlikely possibility of "the good will of the government" standing in the way of official repression and violence.

Plato must be stripped of tenure immediately

In José Saramago's 2004 novel, 83% of the capital's population simply casts blank ballots in the national election, thereby withdrawing the consent of the governed, triggering massive state repression.

Forthcoming - why the rule of law can foster an oppositional ideology that promotes real democratic agency and ameliorative changes in people's living conditions that enhance their capabilities of participating in governance and coordinating to constrain power. www.academia.edu/resource/wor...

Although Habermas chafed at positivism, he "appreciated Kelsen's philosophical motivation for developing a theory of legal positivism," and allied with "the democratic law professor and legal pacifist" against their common nemesis Carl Schmitt.

The Monroe Doctrine 1823 traded off no European interference in the "Americas" for no amerikan interference in Europe, so this imperialist appropriation isn't it

David Dyzenhaus-edited (2019) publication of Hermann Heller's major Weimar-period work Sovereignty (1927), responsive to albeit far less well-known than Hans Kelsen's 1920 Problem of Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt's 1922 Political Theology.

In their 1971 debate, Chomsky advanced his thesis that science and beneficial social theory must presuppose a fixed human nature, Foucault a view that scientific achievement doesn't concern itself with human nature, whereas power constructs and manipulates ideas of human essence.