David Engel\u27s Article on global consciousness\u27 crystallizes a set of arguments he recently made in a number of publications, most notably in his coauthored book Tort, Custom, and Karma.2 To me, the main point of his argument is by no means limited to questions of law or globalism. Rather, he argues against the dominant mode of writing among scholars across a wide range of social science and related disciplines-a mode of writing that might best be termed wishful scholarship. In wishful scholarship, the starting point of the author is the world as she or he wishes to see it, or wishes to see it become
