Learned a new word...
Our policy toward terrorism is a farrago of conflicting ideals, policies, and approaches.
I also wrapped up Edward Levi's Introduction to Legal Reasoning. In a nutshell, I think he made two key points. One: that legal reasoning is a process of analogy, comparing existing problems to old ones and associating or disassociating classes of objects. Two: changes in established legal reasoning occur when society changes, when words take on new meanings, or when old analogies break down (as in, how views toward pre-marital sex have shifted in a way that we no longer would use the word "sin" to describe it).
I'm still working through the implications of the first point. This method of reasoning seems difficult to use when new things, like the Internet, come along that confound our ability to apply metaphors well. It seems like the law, under this scheme, would always be troubled by anything it can't process in an old way.
The second point seems pretty obvious, and merits no further comment.
Next on the list of things to read: the Old Testament, to try and see just how much of the law is underpinned by a 2,000 year old religious text. A reasonable basis?
I also wrapped up Edward Levi's Introduction to Legal Reasoning. In a nutshell, I think he made two key points. One: that legal reasoning is a process of analogy, comparing existing problems to old ones and associating or disassociating classes of objects. Two: changes in established legal reasoning occur when society changes, when words take on new meanings, or when old analogies break down (as in, how views toward pre-marital sex have shifted in a way that we no longer would use the word "sin" to describe it).
I'm still working through the implications of the first point. This method of reasoning seems difficult to use when new things, like the Internet, come along that confound our ability to apply metaphors well. It seems like the law, under this scheme, would always be troubled by anything it can't process in an old way.
The second point seems pretty obvious, and merits no further comment.
Next on the list of things to read: the Old Testament, to try and see just how much of the law is underpinned by a 2,000 year old religious text. A reasonable basis?
2 Comments:
farrago: a confused mixture, derived I gather from mixed feed for animals. way to define it inline, Tom.
Anyway, isn't the internet covered under Two, the cop-out response, thus relieving the burden from One? And, since my timeline is confused, is it reasonable to skip the Torah for the Code of Hammurabi, or did the ancestors of Israel leave Sumer before all that?
What production of human intelligence has ever been anything more than the progressive building of analogies until the amalgamation takes on a meaning of its own? 99.9% of technological progress is taking a radio and putting a clock in it.
What idea has ever come down out of the blue?
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