Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Rules, Tricks And Emancipation, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

Rules and tricks are generally seen as different things. Rules produce order and control; tricks produce chaos. Rules help us predict how things will work out. Tricks are deceptive and transgressive, built to surprise us and confound our expectations in ways that can be entertaining or devastating. But rules can be tricky. General prohibitions and prescriptions generate surprising results in particular contexts. In some situations, a rule produces results that seem far from what the rule makers expected and antagonistic to the interests the rule is understood to promote. This contradictory aspect of rules is usually framed as a downside …

Reading Blackstone In The Twenty-First Century And The Twenty-First Century Through Blackstone, Jessie Allen

Book Chapters

If the Supreme Court mythologizes Blackstone, it is equally true that Blackstone himself was engaged in something of a mythmaking project. Far from a neutral reporter, Blackstone has some stories to tell, in particular the story of the hero law. The problems associated with using the Commentaries as a transparent window on eighteenth-century American legal norms, however, do not make Blackstone’s text irrelevant today. The chapter concludes with my brief reading of the Commentaries as a critical mirror of some twenty-first-century legal and social structures. That analysis draws on a long-term project, in which I am making my way through …

Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Book Chapters

Our book Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press 2009) highlights and explains the major themes and methodologies of a group of scholars who challenge the traditional claim that tax law is neutral and unbiased. The contributors to this volume include pioneers in the field of critical tax theory, as well as key thinkers who have sustained and expanded the investigation into why the tax laws are the way they are and what impact tax laws have on historically disempowered groups. This volume will provide an accessible introduction to this new and growing body of scholarship. It will be …

Hatred, William I. Miller

Book Chapters

Hatred, the noun, and to hate, the verb, do not completely coincide in their semantic ranges. Hatred carries with it more intensity and greater seriousness than many of our most common uses of the verb. Hatred is unlikely to apply aptly to one’s feelings about broccoli, though it would be perfectly normal to register one’s aversion to it by saying ‘I hate broccoli’. In daily speech, hate can be used to indicate a fairly strong but not very serious aversion to a film, novel, or food, all the way to desiring, with varying seriousness, the extermination of an entire people. …

Deceit In War And Trade, William I. Miller

Book Chapters

This chapter offers “a genealogy on deceit in war and trade”. It starts with deceit in Ovid and the Old Testament and works its way all the way up to the present day, considering the deceptions of such famous tricksters as Odysseus, David, the Vikings, Machiavelli, William the Conqueror, even Montaigne. It then considers the practices of some famous deceivers in contemporary business culture, such as Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Koslowski, and Kenneth Lay.

Conversion Of One’S Systems Of Beliefs; Godparents, Ethical Responsibilities Of., Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

Contributions by Howard J. Bromberg to Ethics, Revised Edition

Why Am I My Brother's Keeper?, Donald H. Regan

Book Chapters

I want to cast doubt on a proposition which many people would regard as the first axiom of moral theory. Joseph Raz has stated the proposition thus: 'Morality is ... concerned with the advancement of the well-being of individuals.' Actually, Raz includes a qualifier-the full quote says that morality 'is thought to be concerned with' advancing the well-being of individuals. But the whole tenor of his ensuing discussion suggests that Raz generally shares this view of what morality is about.

As I say, I want to cast doubt on this axiom, but I shall not take issue with any particular …

Perceiving Imperceptible Harms (With Other Thoughts On Transitivity, Cumulative Effects, And Consequentialism), Donald H. Regan

Book Chapters

Many writers believe there can be cases which satisfy the following description: starting from an initial state of affairs, it is possible to make a series of changes, none of which alters the value of the state of affairs in any way, but such that the final state of affairs that results from the series of changes is worse than the initial state of affairs. I shall call the claim that there can be such cases the "ex nihilo" claim, since in a sense it asserts that the bad effects of the complete series of changes arise ex nihilo. Proponents …

Writing And Reading In Philosophy, Law, And Poetry, James Boyd White

Book Chapters

In this paper I will treat a very general question, the nature of writing and what can be achieved by it, pursuing it in the three distinct contexts provided by philosophy, law, and poetry.

My starting-point will be Plato's Phaedrus, where, in a wellknown passage, Socrates attacks writing itself: he says that true philosophy requires the living engagement of mind with mind of a kind that writing cannot attain. Yet this is obviously a paradox, for Socrates' position is articulated and recorded by Plato in writing. How then can we make sense of what Plato is saying and doing? What …