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Is everything old new again? Learning from the history of technology
Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, and Christopher S. Yoo recently published an article, Are Those Who Ignore History Doomed to Repeat it?, on Tim Wu’s book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.
March 2012 / 3 min.
Liberty or inflexibility: reading Antonin Scalia
Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court justice and originalist extraordinaire, wrote “Common-Law Courts in a Civil Law System” as a part of A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. In it explains his approach to legal reasoning and especially to Constitutional interpretation, and especially rejects both legislative history and the so-called “living Constitution” of liberal justices like Stephen Breyer.
October 2011 / 2 min.
Colonial Law in Early America
In The Common Law in Colonial America: The Chesapeake and New England, 1607-1660, William Edward Nelson writes about three main colonial legal traditions: Virginia, New England, and Maryland. These three centers drew to various degrees from English common law, but deviated from it in a number of important respects and for reasons related to their establishments and purposes.
October 2011 / 3 min.
Dorinda Outram on the Enlightenment
In her book The Enlightenment, Dorinda Outram gives a broad introduction to the history and historiography of the Enlightenment.
October 2010 / 8 min.
Looking forward to reading the new Adrian Johns book
So illustrious a source as the Fred von Lohmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation recommends the new book by Adrian Johns.
June 2010 / 1 min.
Applying Robert Merton’s “The Normative Structure of Science” to the law
Robert Merton, in “The Normative Structure of Science” (from The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations), posits four sets of “institutional imperatives” that together “comprise the ethos of modern science”: universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism. How well do these four sets of imperatives describe the “ethos of modern law”?
December 2009 / 4 min.
Copyright’s Paradox: a book by Neil Netanel
Neail Netanel writes on The Volokh Conspiracy: The paradox referenced in my book’s title is that copyright serves both as an “engine of free expression” and silencer of free expression. Copyright law provides a vital economic incentive for the creation and distribution of much of the literature, commentary, music, art, and film that makes up […]
May 2008 / 1 min.
Should we study Kelsen?
Quite honestly, I had never heard of Kelsen before. Perhaps this is unsurprising, considering the almost complete lack of theory in the law school curriculum. I also never encountered him in my studies of history, philosophy or literary theory, but then again, I’m hardly a specialist in such matters. So I found the following discourse […]
October 2007 / 3 min.
“Webs of Significance,” Clifford Geertz
An individual is bound up in a series of symbolic or mythic representations – “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures) – which serve to generate and maintain meaning. Together, these symbols and myths provide the structure for our world-views. They constitute a cohesive […]
June 2007 / 2 min.