A Holistic Approach to Jesus the Nazarene in Matthew 2:23

In Matthew 2:23 Jesus is said to have fulfilled what the prophets spoke when he and his family moved to Nazareth, that he shall be called a Nazarene. Due to the uniqueness of this term and the town of Nazareth being found nowhere in the Old Testament, multiple views have been proposed. These views include Jesus of the despised town of Nazareth, Jesus as a Nazirite, and Jesus as the branch from Isaiah 11:1. Each of these views propose their own interpretation of this Old Testament citation. However, these views often do not acknowledge the possibility of multiple meanings intended by Matthew, thus ignoring the depth and purpose behind Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as the one who fulfills the Old Testament Scriptures

The Authoritarian Impulse in Constitutional Law

Should there be greater participation by legislators and citizens in constitutional debate, theory, and decision-making? An increasing number of legal theorists from otherwise divergent perspectives have recently argued against what Paul Brest calls the principle of judicial exclusivity in our constitutional processes. These theorists contend that because issues of public morality in our culture either are, or tend to become, constitutional issues, all political actors, and most notably legislators and citizens, should consider the constitutional implications of the moral issues of the day. Because constitutional questions are essentially moral questions about how active and responsible citizens should constitute themselves, we should all engage in constitutional debate. We should stop relying on the courts to shoulder the burden of resolving the constitutional consequences of our political decisions. According to this argument, our methods of resolving moral issues in this country are deeply flawed. The flaw is that we have delegated to the courts, rather than kept for ourselves, the moral responsibility for our decisions. By protecting, cherishing, and relying upon judicial review, we have essentially alienated our moral public lives to the courts. I agree with Brest that our methods of resolving issues of public morality in this culture are deeply flawed, but I view with skepticism both the diagnosis--insufficient community participation in constitutional processes--and the cure--increased community participation in constitutional processes--suggested by the participation theorists. The call for increased participation in constitutional thought rests on the assumptions that constitutional questions are moral questions, and that constitutional debate is the forum in which we engage in moral decision-making. From these assumptions it follows that all citizens, not just courts, should take up issues of constitutionalism. If we take very seriously the text of the opinions in a significant number of recent constitutional cases, however, it is clear that as a descriptive matter, the assumption that constitutional questions are moral questions is flatly false. According to the Justices themselves, constitutional issues are by definition legal issues, as opposed to moral issues. Countless neutral principles constitutional theorists as well insist upon making a distinction between constitutional issues and moral issues. Thus, according to a well-respected strand of constitutional theory, as well as an increasing number of recent cases, constitutional questions are definitionally amoral, as are the answers they propose

Desperately Seeking a Moralist

In a recent issue of “Unbound”, Janet Halley reviews my book “Caring for Justice”, criticizing it for exhibiting a broad range of the problems she sees in all forms of identitarian legal writing, and therefore worthy of detailed critique. Halley begins her review by listing the representative missteps she finds in both my book and in identitarian politics generally, including, although certainly not limited to, an identification of the site of the subordinated group\u27s injuries-for women, reproduction and sexuality with the site of its ethical lives and insights; a tendency to differentiate and present the interests of subordinate and dominant groups, such as women and men, as inevitably opposed, such that women\u27s injuries work to men\u27s advantage and vice versa; an inclination to substitute the language of harm, injury, and ethics for the language of subordination, exploitation, and the like; and both an unhealthy aversion to politics and an insistence that changing the hearts and minds of the dominant will somehow magically reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Whether or not the list accurately captures my views on these questions, or those of identitarian scholars for whom I did not purport to speak, it is misleading in a more fundamental sense: by the end of her review, it is clear that Halley finds much more troubling sins in “Caring for Justice”, sins that are assuredly much more particular to feminism, to my feminism, and maybe just to this book, than to identitarian politics across the board. Thus, in the bulk of the review, Halley suggests that “Caring for Justice” exhibits tendencies toward both totalitarian[ism] and a slave morality, asserts an ethical view that is infantile, conveys a sense of sexual injury that is panick[ed] (this latter is not just a sin; in Halley\u27s moral ordering, it has all the markings of original sin), shows frightful signs of female- ... supremac[y], is politically paranoid, and, in toto, amounts to something she calls derisively mother feminism. The punishing epithets and psychoanalytic diagnoses flow promiscuously. Whatever else one might say about these charges, I cannot imagine why anyone would regard them as shared characteristics of identitarian scholarship. In this response, graciously invited by the editors of “The Harvard Journal of Law & Gender”, I will address some of these charges, and I will respond in some detail to the thrust of Halley\u27s complaints about the politics of injury. However, what I want to focus on first, albeit briefly, is just one of Halley\u27s characterizations of my work that, on first blush, I found to be extraordinarily peculiar and on one argument of sorts that is built on top of this characterization. I believe that this argument is at the heart of much of Halley\u27s Freudian and Nietzschean lambasting of my work

Testimony of Jack West Before the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations

Testimony_ASQC_081094.pdf: 115 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Integrity and Universality: A Comment on Dworkin\u27s \u3ci\u3eFreedom\u27s Law\u3c/i\u3e

Ronald Dworkin has done more than any other constitutional lawyer, past or present, to impress upon us the importance of integrity to constitutional law, and hence to our shared public life. Far from being merely a private virtue, Dworkin has shown that integrity imposes constraints upon and provides guidance to the work of judges in constitutional cases: Every constitutional case that comes before a court must be decided by recourse to the same moral principles that have dictated results in relevant similar cases in the past. Any group or individual challenging the constitutionality of legislation which adversely affects his or her interests is entitled -- morally and legally -- to a reasoned decision illustrating why moral principles held constitutionally dispositive in earlier cases regarding similarly situated groups should not be equally dispositive for him or her. When done well, the result of this method is what Dworkin has called an integrity of principle, which, in turn, is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for the moral justification of the constraints of constitutional law in a democratic state. Stated differently, if constitutional law is to be a part of a morally justified form of democratic self-governance, then the moral principles at its core must be applied even-handedly, and they must be applied even-handedly no matter how difficult, inexpedient, inefficient, or simply politically unpopular it may be, from time to time, to do so. Finally, commitment to such a view defines membership in the party of principle, intended as a contrast to the membership of the party of history, who defends and locates rights not by reference to general principles even-handedly applied, but rather, by reference to whether the argued right respects distinctions honed and honored by tradition. In these comments, I want first to suggest a non-relativist argument for the necessity of integrity to constitutionalism, intended, frankly, to resolve the above noted tension, and to do so by identifying the grounds for integrity and principle in neither the interpreted constitution nor in liberalism, but in a substantive value that is deeper and broader than both, and hence both informs and constrains both. The constraint of integrity, I will argue, arises not from the sail of constitutional precedent itself, which goes wherever the wind blows it, nor from liberalism per se, but from a source external to both, which accordingly constrains the direction which constitutional authority might take. The argument that I will suggest is by no means inconsistent with Dworkin\u27s arguments and indeed is strongly suggested in much of his earlier writing, particularly Law\u27s Empire. In the second part of my comments, I will suggest some limitations on this conception of integrity. Finally, I will offer a friendly amendment to Dworkin\u27s account of integrity

Justice Roberts’ America

Less than a week after the Roberts Court issued its decision in National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius, Jeffrey Toobin, writing in The New Yorker, compared the first part of Chief Justice John Roberts\u27s opinion, in which he found that the Commerce Clause did not authorize Congress to enact the individual mandate section of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires all individuals to buy health insurance, with an Ayn Rand screed, noting that the pivotal sections of the argument were long on libertarian rhetoric but short on citations of authority. Roberts held (although held might be stating it too strongly) that the Commerce Clause does not authorize Congress to regulate the inactivity of individuals—the act of not buying health insurance—even if that inactivity impacts interstate commerce. Rather, the Clause only authorizes congressional regulation where there is some activity of a commercial nature there to be regulated. Injecting a dose of libertarian and individualist thinking more typically associated with the Lochner-era\u27s substantive due process jurisprudence into Commerce Clause reasoning, Roberts argued that the inactivity of not buying insurance is tantamount to doing nothing, and doing nothing cannot be characterized as commercial activity even if it has a commercial impact

How open is open enough?: Melding proprietary and open source platform strategies

Computer platforms provide an integrated architecture of hardware and software standards as a basis for developing complementary assets. The most successful platforms were owned by proprietary sponsors that controlled platform evolution and appropriated associated rewards. Responding to the Internet and open source systems, three traditional vendors of proprietary platforms experimented with hybrid strategies which attempted to combine the advantages of open source software while retaining control and differentiation. Such hybrid standards strategies reflect the competing imperatives for adoption and appropriability, and suggest the conditions under which such strategies may be preferable to either the purely open or purely proprietary alternatives