Notebook Transcription 60
November 22, 2007

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The middle-class tax revolt became a permanent fixture of American politics during the Reagan era. For many Republicans noninterference with the marketplace became an article of faith.
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"People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." FDR in 1944
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Alexander Hamilton First treasury secretary and great believer in the potentials and profits of a strong central government...fluid capital markets, nationalized debt etc. public works (roads etc.) financed by the gov.
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Andalus...might be here or there, or anywhere...a meeting place of strangers in the project of building human culture...It is not only that there was Jewish-Muslim coexistence, but that the fates of the two people were similar...Al-Andalus for me is the realization of the dream of the poem. >Mahamoud Darwish
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Judges exercise "public power"
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Dead, empty language, designed to fill as much space as possible while saying as little as possible.
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"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals. We now know it is bad economics..." FDR
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Ronald Dworkin "Law's Empire"
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Ronald Dworkin on law as integrity: "Law as integrity accepts law and legal rights whole heartedly...It supposes that law's constraints benefit society not just by providing predictability or procedural fairness, or in some other instrumental way, but by serving a kind of equality among citizens that makes their community more genuine and improves its moral justification for exercising the political power it does...It argues that rights and responsibilities flow from past decisions and so count as legal, not just when they are explicit in these decisions but also when they follow from the principles and political morality the explicit decisions presuppose by way of justification."
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Dworkin is primarily concerned with "moral legitimacy" as a primary element of the law, and of a political community as an association of principle.
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For Dworkin rights trump liberty. i.e. equality trumps liberty
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The 3 generations of Human Rights
1) negative civil and political rights -- Hobbes, Locke, Mill. Prohibit interference with the right-holder's freedom.
2) Positive Rights -- economic and social cultural rights -- e.g. Right to education, work etc.
3) Collective rights (Article 28 Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- "everyone is entitled to social order in which rights set down can be realized." e.g. Solidarity rights -- right to benefit from resources, and technical information, right to healthy environment peace disaster relief etc...
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Deonotological systems of ethics: rightness or wrongness is independent of its consequences
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Corrective justice: (Aristotle) makes redress of a wrong
Distributive justice: gives each person their due -- generally legislative
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Under the Roman legal code Corpus Juris Civilis (Justinian 482-565) justice is defined as "the constant and perpetual wish to give everyone what they deserve"
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Themis: lady justice
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Jeremy Bentham: positivism and utilitarianism
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Concepts of efficacy (both measured in readiness to pay)
1) Pareto Optimality: describes a situation that cannot be altered without making at least one person worse off than he was prior to the change
2) Kaldor-Hicks Test: a change is Kaldor-Hicks efficient when the increase in value to those who gain exceeds the loses to those who lose.
3) Posner uses "diminishing marginal utility": a dollar given to a beggar would have a major effect on his wealth. To a millionaire one dollar would make no difference.
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I offer you that kernel of myself, that I have saved, somehow -- that central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities. >Borges
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In the bureaucratic state authority lives not in persons but in rules.
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"Reification" for Marx was the process by which social relations assume the form of relations between things. For example, in a Capitalist society their is the reification as a result of the alienation of workers from the product of their work.
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a desperate error of intellectual abstraction
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If you want to know the law and nothing else you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict. >Oliver Wendell Holmes
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The ideal condition of philosophical anarchy where the state does not attempt to regulate by legislation but depends upon the beneficence of natural law and the virtue of the sovereign
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The Poles say Grunwald, the Germans Tannenberg
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Wee must be knitt together in this worke as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brother Affeccion, wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, wee must uphold a familiar Commerce together in all weakness, gentleness, patience and liberality, wee must delight in eache other... for we must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. >John Winthrop on the deck of Arbella to the Puritans 1630
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if by chance I scribe U.S. Politics, Wisdom, Meditation, theories of art, It's because I read a newspaper loved teachers skimmed books or visited a museum >Allen Ginsburg
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