Bernard Williams' terrific 2000 lecture, incl his contemplation of "the well known and highly typical style of many texts in analytic philosophy which seeks precision by total mind control, through issuing continuous and rigid interpretive directions." acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:...

Interestingly, Kelsen likened national law & the dogma of an unrestricted state sovereignty to the Ptolemaic view & linked this to an imperialist political ideology; in contrast, he analogized international law to the Copernican frame of reference, tending to foster pacifism.

In case wondering what the crime of sedition actually is, or to what extent it's punishable

Robert Paul Wolff distinguished two approaches to philosophical writing: (1) precise anatomical dissection defending against innumerable possible counterexamples; (2) deep development of a central insight, capable of both introducing the material and genuinely advancing thought.

Vincent Willem van Gogh, The Prison Courtyard (1890)

Joint Forward by, in the order referenced, Robert Paul Wolff, Herbert Marcuse, and Barrington Moore, Jr.

An impulsive, capricious rant, delegated to an inexperienced sycophant, usually cannot be instantaneously transformed into correct legal practice. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/u...

Recommended analysis by Brian Z. Tamanaha on how the current bad faith administration exploits existing doctrines and a structural difference between the executive and courts to effectively undermine the rule of law. openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_scholars...

A commitment to equal freedom is not a compromise between freedom and equality. What 'equality' does in that formula is to pin down the form of our commitment to freedom; and what 'freedom' does is to indicate what it is that we are concerned to equalize. -- Jeremy Waldron

One of the things I often see in scholarship on public law, or at least in criminal procedure, is what you might call The Reference Problem. The author wants more of Right X, but needs to root the argument for more X in something beyond the author's preference. (Thread.)

Link to today's ruling by Mag Judge Fitzpatrick within, marshaling a series of likely improprieties by the Admin, including the likely impossibility that Halligan actually presented the final indictment to the grand jury - all of which "may justify" dismissal. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/u...

Great open access issue of the Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, inc Richard Stillman's disagreement with Dworkin on theoretical disagreement, John Oberdiek on the rule of law, Ernest Weinrib on internal morality specific to legal relationships. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

If one believes with Gramsci that an intellectual vocation is socially possible as well as desirable, then it's self-contradictory to rest analyses of historical experience on an exclusionary axiom that only a group's members can understand that group's experience. -- Edward Said

Amartya Sen credited, among others, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Ronald Dworkin, and Seyla Benhabib, for harnessing the notion of public reasoning in service of a view of democracy broadened from that of public balloting toward one of "government by discussion."

At least by HLA Hart's lights, Ronald Dworkin and Hans Kelsen held oddly similar views on the position of judges, for RD legal rights being those held against judges to the correct legal decision, for HK laws being commands made on judges and directing that they impose sanctions.

On the blog: In approving Trump's transphobic policy of listing sex assigned at birth on passports, SCOTUS said govt was "merely attesting to a historical fact," thus echoing the obtuseness of Plessy v Ferguson's statement that Black folks were only choosing to see segregation as white supremacy. 👇

📸 Gauri Gill -- Mira Nair et fils Zohran

Andrei Marmor's critique of anti-positivist logic: 1) some facts about legal validity are moral; 2) moral facts aren't fully grounded in beliefs; 3) so mistaken moral beliefs are possible; 4) so comprehensive errors about legal validity are possible, 2 & 3 are plausible, but not 4.

Ronald Dworkin's admittedly stripped-down construal of Paul Grice's view: Speaker's meaning is determined by what the speaker expects the hearer to understand the speaker as intending him to understand.

This changes everything

I think that analytic philosophy was a defence to fascism's claims. It punctured claims that the state was really enforcing the real will of its citizens, and therefore they must obey, and that they are obeying themselves. -- HLA Hart, commenting on his reply to Bodenheimer

One of the central problems of late-capitalist societies lies in their viewing public life from a legalistic-juridical perspective alone, while the vision of a community of needs and solidarity is ignored and rendered irrelevant. -- Seyla Benhabib

A gem that might have escaped notice

The eminent political theorist Norberto Bobbio penned the preface for these early 1990s memoirs, each by self-taught writers: Macagno, a Turin mechanic and Resistance fighter; Malgaroli, retired worker who'd been confined in the Mauthausen concentration camp; Ruju, Sardinian-born partisan.

Informative global labor history volume (2017), the IWW (Wobblies) promoted pro-worker ideals that found purchase internationally, eventually gaining members in at least twenty countries on six continents.

My new essay on the New Right and its relationship to historical fascism has been published at the Ideas Letter @lbenardo.bsky.social www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-ge...

When lawyers are asked to define what they do, they string together long sentences in which they unfailingly use the adjective "legal" to qualify everything they say, without troubling to define it further, without even realizing that they are caught up in a tautology! -- Bruno Latour

Thomas Hobbes didn't tolerate a profession or position in an institution, which would have exercised authority over his intellect, so instead chose the life of a multi-task servant within aristocratic households, with freedom to read, write, travel.

It might seem optimistic perspectives that hope for far-reaching transformations of human life are more epistemically chancy than pessimistic ones. But, Charles Taylor wrote, pessimism tragically errs when it aborts positive change from the beginning by refusal to believe in it.

In the aftermath of the 1970 Kent State shooting, "his conservative family and neighbors pressured him to say nothing critical about the guardsmen who had shot him and 12 others." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/u...

Jules Coleman: It's a conceptual truth about law that officials must coordinate their behavior w/ one another.. Ronald Dworkin: Some American judges hope to reverse decades of constitutional law, while others firmly oppose. Judges are more divided than united by their ambitions.

When the Voice said goodbye to Lindsay's progressivism 1973

HLA Hart lauded and followed von Jhering & Holmes in identifying as "the fundamental intellectual error about the nature of legal concepts" the idea that these are fixed prior to their application in concrete cases such that legal reasoning merely unfolds what's "already there."

Before appearing in book format in the original English (1993), Michael Dummett's 1987 discerning lectures were published as Ursprünge der analytischen Philosophie (1988), Alle origine della filosofia analitica (1990), and Les origines de la philosophie analytique (1991).

Fierce Brooklyn dusk

Such, I say, appears to be (David Hume's) meaning. For, as in all his writings, he is rather acute and ingenious than coherent and profound,.. evincing an utter inability to grasp his subject as a whole. -- ouch, John Austin (1832)

The idea that the duty of the state is only to its citizens stems from a faulty conception of a state's purpose, which includes representing its citizens to the world, such that the claim for refuge of those fleeing persecution should be universally recognized. -- Michael Dummett

Found @MercerBooksNYC, Human Acts (1963) by Eric D'Arcy (1924–2005), Australian philosopher and ninth Archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Hobart.

This article is one of the more wonderful things I have ever read on Plato www.bostonreview.net/articles/pla...

If we need to grasp intersubjective experience to appreciate the constitution of objective reality, as Husserl saw it, and if this grasping depends on Einfühlen, Verstehen, Fremdverstehen (all entailing a capability to stand in others' shoes), how secure is our objective reality?

Given the implicit formula by which one describes the other's politics as ideological, Clifford Geertz (1973) reminded that "the term 'ideology' has itself become thoroughly ideologized."

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple. -- Jean-Paul Sartre My library is an archive of longings. -- Susan Sontag

"I have had two days and have got through seven out of 80 pages plus incidental forward references." Letter 1923 from Frank Ramsey to his mother about the Tractatus

THIS MOTHERFUCKER HELD A GREAT GATSBY PARTY WHILE 43 MILLION PEOPLE GO HUNGRY AND HEALTHCARE COSTS KEEP RISING.

Compare Hegel (critiquing Kant's tautology that appropriating a deposit, universalized, would mean the end of deposits, presupposing immorality) with Oakeshott (on the "confusion" of conflating moral rules with directions for achieving substantive ends such as "the good").

Hegel's two-part essay (1802-1803) in his and Schelling's Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, includes accessible critiques of Kant and formalist thought.

Michael Oakeshott's "adverbial" theories were insightful -- law doesn't prescribe killing just killing murderously, or civil harming just doing so negligently ..; and re morality, this "can never tell us what to say or do, only how we should say or do what we wish to say or do."

Hannah Arendt said at NYC's Riverside Church (1966), there are no general standards to determine our judgments unfailingly, no general rules under which to subsume the particular cases with any degree of certainty.

An interesting, prolonged debate in intellectual history, generalizable beyond economics: Milton Friedman (good theories predict well, that's how one chooses b/w them) vs Ronald Coase (good theories give insight into "the factors at work" even if they predict badly).

Some think of tradition as a static set of values that end up tilting the scales in favor of their cultural preferences. The late Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) rightly defined tradition as "an argument extended through time, socially embodying continuities of conflict.."