THE POWER OF FILM

David Thomson, Moments That Made the Movies (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013) ("And see, it's part of the soul of schtick, and of so many of our movies, that pretending is sweeter than living. After a hundred years of film, maybe, we have a population, very hip yet pretty inexperienced, that has seen so many wild, outrageous things on screens that it sort of knows how to do them. It knows how to fake it, and to act. But beneath that there is a tempest of behaviors that perhaps we never get to. You wonder if Harry and sally get married. will they produce children or a hit TV sitcom?" Id. at 253.).

RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Jonathan Israel, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("The French Revolution, we may conclude was really three revolutions--a democratic republican revolution, a moderate Enlightenment constitutional monarchism involving Montesquieu and the British model as its criteria of legitimacy, and an authoritarian populism prefiguring modern fascism. These distinct impulses proved entirely incompatible politically and culturally, as well as ideologically, and remained locked in often ferocious conflict throughout. . . ." "In shaping the basic values o the Revolution and the Revolution's legacy, the first, the democratic republican revolution, was from 1788 onward always the most important, the 'real revolution,' despite its successive defeats. Obviously, the causes of the French Revolution are very numerous and include many economic, financial, and cultural as well as social and political factors. But all of these can fairly be said to be essentially secondary compared with the one major, overriding cause driving the democratic republican impulse--the Radical Enlightenment. This is the factor that needs to be placed at center stage." Id. at 695. "Equally integral to the clash that wrecked the Revolution was a powerful socioeconomic factor . . . In a letter [Marc-Antoine Jullien (1744-1821, 'Jullien de la Drome'] . . . warned his son against too obviously parading his zeal for equality. The 'great vice of our social system,' something probably irresolvable, is 'the monstrous inequality of fortunes.' The rich understand the resentment this causes but will not tolerate a genuinely democratic republic knowing sooner or later this will deprive them of some of their wealth. 'That is the rock on which the modern philosophy founders. It has indeed established equality of rights, but it wants to uphold that prodigious inequality of fortunes, putting the poor at the mercy of the rich, and making the rich arbiters of the poor man's rights, by withholding the right to subsistence'." Id. at 285-286.).

"TO PHILOSOPHIZE IS TO PREPARE TO DIE."

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014) ("Plato shared, with radical modification, in the Ethos of the Extraordinary, and it led him to create philosophy as we know it. The kind of exertion that is required if one is to achieve a life worth living is philosophy as he understood it. It is our exertion in reason that makes us matter--makes us, to the extent that we can be, godlike. And if such exertions don't win the acclaim of the masses, so much the worse for the masses. The kind of extraordinary that matters is likely to go undetected by them--so, in a certain sense, though not in all sense, they really don't matter. This is a harsh statement, but, as already noted, harshness didn't much faze the Greeks, and Plato is no exception here." Id. at 9. "And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less, than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world." Id. at 40. "What is an intellectual but someone who has so disciplined his or her mind that he or she can take extreme pleasure in the free play of ideas?" Id. at 207. Also, see Anthony Gottlieb, "Let's Have A Dialogue," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/20/2014.).

DEREK WALCOTT

Derek Walcott, The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013, selected by Glyn Maxwell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) ("[Y]ou too could succumb to a helpless shrug that says, 'God! the sad magic that is the hope of black people . . .'." Id. at 433. Also see Teju Cole, "Poet of the Caribbean," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/23/2014.).

NON-VIOLENCE, THE MORE ACTIVE FORCE

Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India (New York: Knopf, 2014) ("For Gandhi, those who wrote history were preoccupied with wars and bloodshed. Thus, if two brothers quarrelled, their neighbors and the newspapers, and hence history, would take notice of it; but if they peacefully settled their dispute, it would remain unrecorded. Extrapolating, Gandhi said, in a striking passage, that 'hundreds of nations live in peace. History does not, and cannot, take note of this fact. History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul.' Contrary to what was popularly believed, non-violence had been a far more active force in human affairs than violence. The 'greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars of the world, it still lives on'." Id. at 368.).

WHITE VIOLENCE VERSUS THE RULE OF LAW

Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law (Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society) (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2010, 2011) ("This book demonstrates that the tension between the discourse of a rule of law and the practice of something different snapped around trials of violent Britons, exposing the fact that the scales of colonial justice were imbalanced by the weight of race and the operatives of imperialism. By taking a classic colonial claim--of bringing law and order to pre-colonial chaos any mayhem--and turning it on its head, this study zeroes in on a rather unusual source of lawlessness and disorder: the Briton himself. The unsettling picture that emerges from our investigation of white violence and its handling in the colonial courts should not be brushed off as a list of exceptions, an epiphenomenal sideshow to the main stage of Pax Britannica. The exemplary cases selected for examination in this book represent a small fraction of those chronicled in the historical record." Id. at 4. In a poetic phrase that would be repeated for years to come they affirmed: 'There can be no equality of protection where justice is not equally and on equal terms accessible to all." Id. at 75, citing Letter No. 44 from the Court of Directors to the Government of India, NAL, Home (Public), Letters form Court Directors (1834), No, 98.).

NO MORAL STRUGGLE, JUST TRADE AND BUSINESS IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

Robert D. Kaplan, Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (New York: Random House, 2014) ("Just as German soil constituted the military front line of the Cold War, the waters of the South China Sea may constitute the military front line of the coming decades." " There is nothing romantic about this new front. Whereas World War II was a moral struggle against fascism, the Cold War a moral struggle against communism, the post-Cold War a moral struggle against genocide in the Balkans, Africa, and the Levant, as well as a moral struggle against terrorism and in support of democracy, the South China Sea shows us a twenty-first century world void of moral struggles, with all of their attendant fascination for humanists and intellectuals. Beyond the communist tyranny of North Korea, a Cold War relic, the whole of East Asia simply offers little for humanists. For there is no philosophical enemy to confront. The fact is that East Asia is all about trade and business. Even China, its suffering dissents notwithstanding, simply does not measure up as an object of moral fury." Id. at 15.).

ON THE FAILED PAKISTAN-UNITED STATES RELATIONSHIP

Husain Haqqani, Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013) ("Bureaucrats often think only in terms of their immediate needs and requirements, and tactical issues always trump strategic vision." Id. at 96. Reminds me of the problems with law schools today. "Zia's message was targeted at those Americans who did not bother with details about other countries' history or with their long-term strategic thinking." Id. at 251.).

THE MARIAS MASSACRE, JANUARY 23, 1870

Andrew R. Graybill, The Red and The White: A Family Saga of the American West (New York & London: Liveright, 2013).

BE A MAN!

Ruchama King Feuerman, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist: A Novel (New York: New York Review Books, 2013) ("The rabbis exhorted: In a place where is no man, become one." Id. at 243.).

THE RIM COUNTY WAR

Daniel Justin Herman, Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West (The Lamar Series in Western History) (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2010) ("The Rim County War . . . emerged from economic conflict and weak legal institutions. The feud in Pleasant Valley, however, was no struggle between preindustrial values and entrepreneurial capitalism. It was a uniquely Western 'tragedy of the commons' catalyzed by opportunistic men who flocked to Arizona's Rim County only to find themselves competing for grazing lands. Settlers might lay claim to land or water through preemption and homesteading laws.To succeed as cattlemen, however, they needed access to free range. The problem with free range was its promise. Even settlers with preemption and homestead claims found themselves crowded by newcomers with large herds as well as newcomers with no more than a few cows and a branding iron. All hoped to became independent--or even prosperous--in the cattle trade, Free range thus became an economic and social wrestling mat.What is important about the Rim County War, then, is that it could have happened--and did happen--in other parts of the West where free range existed." Id. at 283."Americana today associate honor with self-sacrifice. Honor means remaining loyal to one's word, one's friends, one's principles, even if one must suffer to do that. The vocations we associate with honor are those involving peril: soldiering enforcing the law, fighting fires." Id. at xiv. For the most part, not much honor in being a lawyer, let alone a law professor.).

"THE WHOLE FIELD OF MAN AS A SOCIAL BEING"

The cover to The University of Chicago Law School Record (The Interdisciplinary Issue) (Spring 2014), which I referenced in yesterday's post, has a quote from William Rainey Harper. It is as follows: "A University School of Law is far more than a training institute for admission to the bar. It implies a scientific knowledge of the law and of legal and juristic methods. But these are the crystallization of ages of human progress. They cannot be understood in their entirety without a clear comprehension of the historic forces of which they are the product, and of the social environment with which they are in living contact. A scientific study of law involved the related sciences of history, economics, philosophy--the whole field of man as a social being."

THE IMPORTANCE OF LEGAL HISTORY

Richard Helmholtz: "Law is a learned profession. It should be about more than just making money. A lot of learning comes from understanding the past of what you're doing. You see yourself as part of something that's been going on since the twelfth century, and even before that in Roman times. If you have a new idea, it has to fit within this system that has developed over the ages."  From Meredith Heagney, "Worth a Volume of Logic: The Study of Legal History at the Law School," The University of Chicago Law School Record (The Interdisciplinary Issue) (Spring 2014), at 40, 45. 

NEVER TRUST THE GOVERNMENT PERIOD

Watching the watchmen - NY Daily News

http://m.nydailynews.com/opinion/watching-watchmen-article-1.1746134?msource=MAG10#bmb=1

THE DARK AGES FOR LEGAL EDUCATION ARE JUST BEGINNING

A Bold Bid to Combat a Crisis in Legal Education

New York Times-Apr 4, 2014

Brooklyn Law School is hardly alone in facing a crisis in legal education. Five law schools have closed in the last two years, more than at any other time in American history. ... Credit Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times.

THE TECHNOCRATIC ILLUSION

William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2013) ("The conventional approach to economic development, to making poor countries rich, is based on a technocratic illusion: the belief that poverty is a purely technical problem amenable to such technical solutions as fertilizers, antibiotics, or nutritional supplements. We see this in the [World] Bank's actions...; we will see the same belief prevalent amongst other who combat global poverty, such as the Gates Foundation; the United Nations, and US and UK aid agencies." "The technocratic approach ignores what this book will establish as the real cause of poverty--the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights..." "By this technocratic illusion, the technical experts unintentionally confer new power and legitimacy on the state as the entity that will implement the technical solutions The economists who advance the technocratic approach have a terrible naiveté about power--that as restraints on power are loosened or even removed, that same power will remain benevolent of its own accord..." "What used to be the divine right of kings has in our time become the development right of dictators, The implicit visioning development today is that of well-intentioned autocrats advised by technical experts what this book will call authoritarian development The word technocracy (a synonym for authoritarian development) itself is an early twentieth-century coinage that me ands 'rule by experts..." "The technocratic illusion is that poverty results for a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights. . .  This book argues that the cause of poverty is the absence of political and economic rights, the absence of a free political and economic system that would find the technical solutions to the poor's problems, The dictator whom the experts expect will accomplish the technical fixes to technical problems is not the solution, he is the problem." Id. at 6-7. In reading this book I kept thinking about the efforts to provide quality education to underprivileged children in the US, and how this problem also suffers from a technocratic illusion: No Child Left Behind, the Common Core, charter schools, the move from an education-model to a business-model, etc. I also though about the slow death of legal education with it so-called "Best Practices," "Practice Ready," and "Experiential Learning." It all works well for administrator, but it is intellectually deadening for both teachers and students. We are training a generation of Babbitts: materialistic anti-intellectual conformists. Woe be the students! Shame on us as educators!!).

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DON QUIXOTE

Nina Munk, The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (New York: Doubleday, 2013) (For a few moment, we sat in silence. Then he said: 'I believe in the contingency of life.' There are no certainties. Nothing can be predicted. When I say I have conviction, it's the conviction that this is the best we can do. I'm not betting the planet on anything. This isn't one grand roll of the dice. The world is complicated, hard, and messy.'" Id. at 231. From the bookjacket: "The Idealist is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of  a brilliant, driven man meet the realities of human life.").