At Balkanization there is a post about an exchange between Judges Scalia and Alito on what the Constitution has to say about video games. The arguments speak for themselves. It’s usually conventional wisdom that the Constitution’s text matters most, and the framer’s original intent matters least, in cases involving modern technologies, like wiretaps or the [...]
This maybe of interest to some of you. Daphna Hacker, Religious Tribunals in Democratic States: Lessons from the Israeli Rabbinical Courts Abstract: This paper offers a three-variable explanatory model of religious tribunals’ praxis in democratic states. The model emerged from two empirical studies conducted by the author examining the Israeli legal field governing the family [...]
This past year, Brian Tamanaha published a book that has caused a bit of a stir in the legal theory world. In his book, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging, Tamanaha discusses the state of Formalist and Realist schools of jurisprudence in nineteenth century America. The book has been discussed quite [...]
The latest from Robert Bork, (hat tip) Former Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is opposing Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s nomination to the high court because she admires Aharon Barak – the former chief justice of Israel’s supreme court whom conservatives regard as an activist liberal judge. In a conference call sponsored by Americans United for [...]
During Shabbat I was thinking a bit more about the questions of glow sticks on Shabbat (see here) and I found some similarity to the question of whether one is permitted to use a microwave oven on Shabbat. How is a posek suppose to approach the question of using a microwave oven on Shabbat? Poskim [...]
Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky has a post at Morethodoxy, The Mesorah and Her Alleged Heretics. It is unmistakable that our received tradition instructs us to continuously reflect upon our long-standing practices. For the fact that a given practice is long-standing can point either to the conclusion that it is worthy and good, or to the conclusion [...]
ADDeRabbi posted some comments on Melvin Urofsky’s book Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. As a follow-up, here is a fascinating video of a lecture by Richard Polenberg, the author of The World of Benjamin Cardozo: Personal Values and the Judicial Process, titled “Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo: Judaism and the Crisis of the 1930s.” (hat [...]
In the early 1990′s the Columbia University School of Law and the Shalom Hartman Institute published a very good journal called S’vara. Unfortunately, only four issues were ever published. These four issue are available in PDF format here. Below is a description of the journal. S’Vara: A Journal of Philosophy, Law, and Judaism is a [...]
Legal Theory Bookworm: The Legal Theory Bookworm recommends A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesnt Mean What It Meant Before by Cass R. Sunstein. Here is a description: (the emphases are mine, MM) The future of the U.S. Supreme Court hangs in the balance like never before. Will conservatives or liberals succeed [...]
In what has become one of the most historic speeches of American history, “I Have a Dream”, Martin Luther King, Jr. said the following, I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men [...]
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