Alani Golanski

No Kings NYC today

I am astonished again and again when I find out how little it has penetrated into people's consciousness that the right of resistance, namely civil disobedience, is a right higher than positive law and as old as civilization itself.
-- Herbert Marcuse

The defeat of fascism and national socialism has not arrested the trend toward totalitarianism. Freedom is on the retreat -- in the realm of thought as well as in that of society.
-- Herbert Marcuse 1954

Johnson & Johnson is facing the first lawsuits in Britain over allegations that its talc products cause cancer. KP Law said it filed the case on behalf of more than 3,000 people reut.rs/42HgenU

This is an excellent collection of essays many of which having been initially presented as papers at an international conference on Husserl's phenomenology of intersubjectivity in Norway 2016, re the role of intersubjective experience in constituting objective reality.

The Revolutionary Ensemble, 1970s, free jazz bordering on new classical.

Remedial action absent discriminatory intent [vs impact] is not a new idea in civil or voting rights law -- if it is happening, you gotta fix it.

-- Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

Kant's moral autonomy doctrine inspired the demand, notably via Johann Jacoby's 1841 pamphlet Vier Fragen ., that all of the people, "sufferers" as much as the privileged, should be legally entitled to full participation in the affairs of governance.

I suspect that the unrest has a still deeper source, namely, the sense that, before a terrifying background of ecological limits, living disparities, conflicts over resources, the rule of law cannot be had or maintained without radical democracy.
-- Jürgen Habermas (1992)

Intent or merely impact?

Judith Shklar (1964) observed a huge gap between jurisprudence and other forms of social theory, and opined that historians and political scientists interested in law found lawyer's approaches to be irrelevant.

Representative John Lewis expressed grave doubts about the commitments and suitability of John Roberts to serve as Chief Justice, during the 2005 confirmation hearing.

Eugene Gendlin became a sort of philosophical guru when he inverted the traditional philosophic procedure by which human or nature's rules & principles control our experiencing, holding instead that direct experience and felt meaning take center stage in the creation of concepts.

Judith Shklar wrote that citizens in a constitutional democracy have heightened responsibilities to avoid passive injustice: "It should not be enough for them to wait until the agencies of government act when a public wrong has been obviously committed."

Upon Amartya Sen's 1999 visit as a Nobel winner to his first childhood school in Dhaka, Bangladesh, prestigious but pedagogically stiffly conservative, the headmaster, having pulled AS's 1940 records to show off as exemplary, was disappointed to discover he'd ranked 33/37.

The Nobel Museum borrowed Amartya Sen's bicycle, upon which he'd ridden from 1945 to 1998 to collect data on local wages and prices, to transport a scale for weighing boys and girls in various villages to suss out gender-based deprivation, to run a night school, and so on.

Not a tyrant! While Machado is no leftist liberationist, the message in this specific context is her anti-authoritarianism, effectively creating a parallel between antidemocratic Maduro and antidemocratic Trump. Her focus and struggle is within Venezuela, not alignment with US liberal circles.

Lon Fuller: Conceptually, rulers could abide by the rule of law yet be oppressively brutal, but in reality law is an achievement that overwhelmingly pulls toward justice.

HLA Hart: Conceptually, rulers could rule justly, but in reality legal regimes stand ready to oppress.

Kant's writings on perpetual peace and his transcendental philosophy aroused the belief that the realization of reason through factual transformation was unnecessary, since individuals could become rational and free within the established order.
-- Herbert Marcuse (1937)

Maksymilian Del Mar's superb intellectual biography of Neil MacCormick (2025), political childhood, philosophy of law, contribution to European Constitution -- shortlisted for the Scotland Research Book of the Year.

There are defensive attitudes against painful perceptions. There is forgetting or misinterpreting of outer events to achieve wish fulfillment.
-- Otto Fenichel (1945)

Recommended, the book and/or the movie, the latter directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, based on the life of a scientific prodigy whose talents and experiences took him from Newark to Yale and back.

Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology Journalism cannot be neutral toward a threat to the conditions that make it possible.

David Roberts coined 'tribal epistemology' in 2017, information evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or a common understanding, but on whether it supports the tribe's values and goals, as espoused by the leader.

share.google/aHFfJNNHjHNu...

Extraordinary letter from Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin (21 Nov 1962)

Trump Is Leading the US Into Fascism Mainstreamcommentators acknowledge that the second Trump administration is authoritarian or right populist, but can’t bring themselves to use the term

Commentary from a season ago, before using US cities as a training ground for US military to combat "the enemy within," before trump's designation of a commitment labelled Antifa as "a domestic terrorist organization," before the indictment of Comey, and so on.

share.google/TLpFv8QhGJH6...

Hardly a single "fact" which Bayle's Dictionary culled with truly heroic labor is of real interest to us today; rather, what gives this work lasting value is its grasp of the pure concept of the factual as a profound problem.
-- Ernst Cassirer (1932)

The Insurrection Act of 1807 responded to a conspiracy hatched by Aaron Burr - who'd killed Hamilton - to invade the Mississippi Valley and Spanish Mexico, detach the western U.S, seize New Orleans, build himself an empire. It's just like what's going on in Chicago and Portland.

At least by HLA Hart's lights, Ronald Dworkin and Hans Kelsen held oddly similar views on the position of judges, for RD legal rights being those held against judges to the correct legal decision, for HK laws being commands made on judges and directing that they impose sanctions.

Joseph Raz: The rule of law is designed to minimize the danger created by the law itself.

Jeremy Waldron: The RoL is an idea designed to correct dangers of abuse that arise in general when political power is exercised, not dangers of abuse that arise from law in particular.

Paradoxically, gaining facility in the use of a concept can be a bit like learning to ride a bike, a knowing how rather than a knowing that, repeated exposure to the concept allows one to use it correctly even without necessarily becoming capable of conceptualizing the concept.