Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.
Norman GerasTags: morality justice liberalism united-states law george-w-bush iraq socialism iraq-war leftism international-law ba-ath-party ba-athism ba-athist-iraq saddam-hussein stalinism nato anti-americanism opposition-to-the-iraq-war anti-war-movement pro-war-left
Genocide is the responsibility of the entire world.
Ann ClwydTags: morality law genocide iraq iraq-war international-law saddam-hussein al-anfal-campaign moral-responsibility kurdish-genocide responsibility-to-protect
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
Felix FrankfurterLife with a man is more businesslike after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you can't otherwise, unless he half-runs you through with a knife, or cracks your noddle with a poker. And if he bolts away from you--I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there's never any knowing what a man med do-- you'll have the sticks o' furniture, and won't be looked upon as a thief.
Thomas HardyGoldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.
Norman G. FinkelsteinTags: truth justice dissent law jews human-rights israel palestine palestinians israeli-palestinian-conflict gaza-war arab-israeli-conflict goldstone-commission israel-defense-forces richard-goldstone
Your religious beliefs are your business. They are not and should not be the basis for law. If you use them as justification to discriminate against others, don’t be upset when others decide you’re an asshole."
[Blog post of July 26, 2011]
Tags: belief religion law discrimination
At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty – not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others, but as the kind of absolute power of "use and abuse" over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman man's household – to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts.
David GraeberTags: philosophy economics law
Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights ..." thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we've just kept the old ones, but with the word "not" inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn't really have them in the first place.
David GraeberTags: philosophy law jefferson
... in practice the standard for what constitutes rape is set not at the level of women's experience of violation but just above the level of coercion acceptable to men.
Judith Lewis HermanTags: power inequality law rape crime feminist sexism dominance criminal male-thinking abuse-of-power rape-survivor raped patriarchy rape-culture sexual-assault sexual-violence coercion feminist-theory abused-women coercive-acts male-dominance male-domination rape-convictions violation
The law is so complex and voluminous
that no one, not even the most knowledgeable lawyer, can understand it
all. Moreover, lawyers and legal scholars have not gone out of their way
to make the law accessible to the ordinary person. Just the opposite: Legal
professionals, like the priests of some obscure religion, too often try to
keep the law mysterious and inaccessible.
Tags: politics society united-states law lawyers order beuracracy
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