Hamdan v. Rumseld: The Legal Academy Goes to Practice

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is a rare Supreme Court rebuke to the President during armed conflict. The time is not yet right to tell all of the backstory of the case, but it is possible to offer some preliminary reflections on how the case was litigated, the decision, and its implications for the oft-noticed divide between legal theory and practice. In a widely cited article, Judge Harry Edwards lamented the growing disjunction between legal education and the legal profession, claiming that many law schools. .. have abandoned their proper place, by emphasizing abstract theory at the expense of practical scholarship and pedagogy. This observation is truer today than when Judge Edwards penned those words in 1992. Perhaps fueled by an intense desire to move up in published law school rankings, many of the nation\u27s leading law schools have ramped up course offerings and the number of faculty members devoted to legal theory while disparaging practitioners. Like any excluded group, practitioners have begun disparaging the theoreticians in return. We are witnessing one of the most significant developments in the history of American law: the majority of professors on many law faculties are now specializing in areas that are of no obvious relevance to their students\u27 activities upon graduation. This Comment uses Hamdan to illustrate why the disparagement of theory is partially wrong. By examining the litigation of the case, it demonstrates some of the benefits of theory to practice. At least three different theoretical tools were involved in Hamdan: (1) psychological research on framing effects and bias toward compromise; (2) theoretical inquiry into the timing of Supreme Court litigation and the passive virtues ; and (3) economic analysis of penalty default rules and political science research on the veto. The study of each in law school is widely - and incorrectly - believed irrelevant to practice

Consistent histories of systems and measurements in spacetime

Traditional interpretations of quantum theory in terms of wave function collapse are particularly unappealing when considering the universe as a whole, where there is no clean separation between classical observer and quantum system and where the description is inherently relativistic. As an alternative, the consistent histories approach provides an attractive "no collapse" interpretation of quantum physics. Consistent histories can also be linked to path-integral formulations that may be readily generalized to the relativistic case. A previous paper described how, in such a relativistic spacetime path formalism, the quantum history of the universe could be considered to be an eignestate of the measurements made within it. However, two important topics were not addressed in detail there: a model of measurement processes in the context of quantum histories in spacetime and a justification for why the probabilities for each possible cosmological eigenstate should follow Born's rule. The present paper addresses these topics by showing how Zurek's concepts of einselection and envariance can be applied in the context of relativistic spacetime and quantum histories. The result is a model of systems and subsystems within the universe and their interaction with each other and their environment.Comment: RevTeX 4; 37 pages; v2 is a revision in response to reviewer comments, connecting the discussion in the paper more closely to consistent history concepts; v3 has minor editorial corrections; accepted for publication in Foundations of Physics; v4 has a couple minor typographical correction

Cartesianisms and spinozisms : towards a theory of possible histories in philosophy

Translation by Pedro H. G. Muniz The history of philosophy is generally identified with an internalist and contextualist study of philosophical texts. Sometimes historiography is included; in that case, a first step is made to understand that several scenarios of the same text are possible, and why. The aim of this contribution is to open windows even more widely. It suggests including in the history of philosophy the history of its receptions and actualizations, in order to lay the foundations of a theory of possible histories. The figure of Descartes is a paradigmatic case to test this theory. By taking advantage of the methodological advances of the social sciences, intellectual history or even analytic philosophy, this history of revived philosophy thus reveals all its philosophical potential

From shareholder value to CEO power: The paradox of the 1990s

Why did CEOs remuneration exploded during the 90s and persisted to high levels, even after the bursting out of the Internet bubble? This article surveys the alternative explanations that have been given of this paradox mainly by various economic theories with some extension to political science, business administration, social psychology, moral philosophy, network analysis. Basically, it is argued that the diffusion of stock-options and financial market related incentives, that were supposed to discipline managers, have entitled them to convert their intrinsic power into remuneration and wealth, both at the micro and macro levels. This is the outcome of a de facto alliance of executives with financiers, who have thus exploited the long run erosion of wage earners'bargaining power. The article also discusses the possible reforms that could reduce the probability and the adverse consequences of CEOs and top-managers opportunism: reputation, business ethic, legal sanctions, public auditing of companies, or shift from a shareholder to a stakeholder conception.Managers'control and remuneration ; stock-options ; history of quoted corporations ; optimal contract theory ; economic and political power of managers ; Internet bubble

Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory: A Reply to Bueno and Zalta

We reply to various arguments by Otavio Bueno and Edward Zalta (‘Object Theory and Modal Meinongianism’) against Modal Meinongianism, including that it presupposes, but cannot maintain, a unique denotation for names of fictional characters, and that it is not generalizable to higher-order objects. We individuate the crucial difference between Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory in the former’s resorting to an apparatus of worlds, possible and impossible, for the representational purposes for which the latter resorts to a distinction between two kinds of predication, exemplification and encoding. We show that encoding has fewer forerunners in the history of philosophy than Bueno and Zalta want, and that there’s a reason why the notion has been found baffling by some

Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory: A Reply to Bueno and Zalta

We reply to various arguments by Otavio Bueno and Edward Zalta (‘Object Theory and Modal Meinongianism’) against Modal Meinongianism, including that it presupposes, but cannot maintain, a unique denotation for names of fictional characters, and that it is not generalizable to higher-order objects. We individuate the crucial difference between Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory in the former’s resorting to an apparatus of worlds, possible and impossible, for the representational purposes for which the latter resorts to a distinction between two kinds of predication, exemplification and encoding. We show that encoding has fewer forerunners in the history of philosophy than Bueno and Zalta want, and that there’s a reason why the notion has been found baffling by some

Open Access to Criminal Justice Scholarship: A Matter of Social Justice

The paper argues that criminal justice scholarship disseminated through the traditional journal subscription model is not consistent with social justice. Adoption of "open access" principles in publishing benefits both authors and readers through broader and more egalitarian dissemination of criminal justice literature. Moreover, when viewed in light of social justice theory, open access is a more just method of scholarly communication. After providing a brief outline of the history and basic aspects of open access, the paper uses the framework of the social justice theories of John Rawls and David Miller to argue why open access is more just than traditional subscription models of publishing and why criminal justice scholars and their associations must consider the importance of supporting open access initiatives and promoting the dissemination of scholarship as widely as possible if they are concerned about attaining justice for criminal justice scholarly literature

Child Abuse : Creating the Public in the Public Service Advertisement

This thesis seeks to examine the discursive construction of the public. Unlike studies before it, it explores a site that has yet to be analysed in depth- the public service advertisement. While the characteristics of this genre are understood in cultural common sense, what has been neglected is a consideration of how these advertisements can be understood to address an entity that is amorphous and unknowable. This study argues that such an address is only possible in this genre through the discourse of childhood. By employing an interdisciplinary approach that includes cultural and-media studies, political theory and sociology, the history of the \u27public\u27 and the history of \u27childhood\u27 are explored as a means to understanding how and why they are evoked through sites such as the public service advertisement. The implications of these strategies is what drives this dissertation and is what situates it as a contribution to the continued debates surrounding the media and notions of the public sphere

The evolution of biological theories: explaining the success of Mendelian genetics, Darwin’s Theory of natural selection and their synthesis

Darwin’s theory of natural selection was not widely accepted in the biological community until its synthesis with Mendelian genetics. I investigate the history of both sciences, with the aim discovering why Mendelian genetics and the synthesis were scientifically successful. One possible explanation for this is given by constructivism, the view that developments in science are decided not by rational reasons, but by contingent factors. A sophisticated version of this view is defended by Gregory Radick, who argues that Weldonian biometry, a rival theory of inheritance, could have supplanted Mendelism. For Radick, the success of Mendelism and the corresponding decline of biometry can be explained by historical circumstances, such as Weldon’s untimely death and his inability to recruit talented students. Another popular philosophical explanation of scientific developments is scientific realism, whose proponents argue that scientific success can be explained by the truth of scientific theories. More sophisticated versions of realism, such as Weisberg’s, take the routine scientific distortion of truth (idealization) into account. I argue from the history of genetics that neither constructivism nor realism, sophisticated or otherwise, can help us understand the success of Mendelian genetics. Instead, I argue that there were rational reasons in favor of Mendelian genetics, even if it was not a true theory of inheritance. I further conclude that the synthesis was successful because Mendelian genetics theoretically enriched Darwin’s theory of natural selection. This enrichment solved serious empirical and conceptual problems for Darwin’s theory, showing that we can also understand the success of the synthesis without appeal to broad realist or constructivist views