…here, wherein a National Review journalist informs us that ABC, CBS, NBC, Time, and Newsweek are bastions of “the Left.” What must the intellectual and imaginative horizons be like of someone who actually thinks these media outlets constitute “the Left”?

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…but not all sides are equal. One side is here (and here), courtesy of a recent graduate of Harvard who majored in philosophy (and who I was picking on here…but now I take it all back). The other side is here (scroll down to the Update), courtesy of an Assistant Professor of Political Science at

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It would be fair to say that I’m not a renowned admirer of Stanley Fish’s contributions to legal and literary theory, but now that he’s become an administrator, he’s been rather good on the subject of the growing right-wing campaign against universities–for example, here. Another salvo in the campaign came last night via Nightline’s giving

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UPDATED: see below “Philosophy Talk” (the creation of John Perry and Kenneth Taylor at Stanford) is set to debut starting January 6th, 2004, 12:00pm pdt on KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco. The program will appear weekly. From Professor Taylor: “We are also in negotiations at this very moment with public radio stations in Oregon

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Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tx) on “The Crime of Conscription.” Although American kids at Oxford find Donald Rumsfeld wholly credible, Congressman Paul apparently does not.

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Like all law professors, I get mailings every day, especially in the fall, from law schools around the country, touting their visiting speakers, their faculty, their alumni, their special programs, and so on. This practice is plainly a result of the U.S. News law school rankings, 25% of which are based on a “peer reputation”

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…from Karl Kraus’s favorite-journalist-he-never-met Thomas Friedman is remarked upon here (scroll down to Friday, Nov. 21), with all appropriate scorn and sarcasm.

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As I’ve remarked previously, right-thinking folks know that it’s just silly to talk about fascism in connection with the current developments in the United States, but for some reason a distinguished historian at the University of Michigan is doing just that. Jeez, it’s not like a former high-ranking, and still high-profile, military officer suggested that

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So “readership” (hit-o-ship?) seems to have stabilized over the last couple of weeks, with 800 to 1,000 visits per weekday, and 500 per weekend day, with 75% of visits coming from “old-timers” each day. Thanks to those as well who have e-mailed helpful feedback.

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UPDATE (4:19 PM) WITH SOME CORRECTIONS UPDATE 11/26 WITH ONE MORE CORRECTION Here’s some information on where faculty currently on tenure-track at the top 20 graduate programs in philosophy for 2003-04 did their graduate work.  (I often get asked for data like this.)  Bear in mind, of course, that these students were choosing graduate schools

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I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Robert Alexy, probably the leading figure in German legal philosophy, is teaching some of the objectivity debate in recent jurisprudence here.

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In 1974-75, the Blau-Margulies Reputational Survey asked 104 law school Deans to name “the top 5” law schools. The results (with number saying the school is top 5 in parentheses): 1. Harvard Law School (101) 2. Yale Law School (86) 3. University of Michigan Law School (73) 4. Columbia Law School (60) 5. University of

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“Where solitude ceases the market place begins; and where the market place begins the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of the poisonous flies begins too. “In the world even the best things amount to nothing without someone to make a show of them: great men the people call these showmen. “Little do

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Those seeking to enter “the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism,” please go here.

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Lecture by Susan Sontag here. “To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. “Literature was freedom. Especially in a

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UPDATE 11/21: With the recent Mass. Court decision on gay marriage generating much discussion, I thought it might be useful (or at least provocative) to move this earlier posting back to the top: ======================== You would think all those so publically exercised and agitated about homosexuality lately–whether homosexual marriage, or gays in the military, or

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…here.

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Data on health care in civilized countries and the United States, courtesy of Brian Weatherson. I realize, of course, that the civilized nations do not get the benefit of a large and thriving insurance industry.

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Useful information here on how the most scientifically advanced nation in the world is being led by corrupt and ignorant politicans. A sample: ~David Kay, Bush’s top nuclear WMD inspector, has no science degree at all and was until 2002 the vice president of SAIC, one of the contractors most favored by the Bush pentagon.

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Jimmy Lenman at Sheffield, who compiles the extremely useful bibliography of metaethics, also has some course material on line, which includes quite helpful introductory overviews of central metaethical concepts like “error theory,” “expressivism” and so on.

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“There is an instinct for rank that more than anything else, is itself the sign of a high rank; there is a pleasure in nuances of respect that indicates a noble origin and noble habits. The subtlety, quality, and stature of a soul is put dangerously to the test when something of the first rank

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Attorney General John Ashcroft visits an elementary school. After speaking for 15 minutes he says, “I will now answer any questions you have.” Bobby stands up and says: “I have four questions, sir:

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“For three decades now, much of the Anglo-American legal philosophy curriculum has been organized around something called ‘the Hart/Dworkin debate,’ a debate whose starting point is Ronald Dworkin’s 1967 critique of the seminal work of Anglophone jurisprudence in the twentieth-century, H.L.A. Hart’s 1961 book The Concept of Law. Hart’s final word on that debate is

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Of the various blogs by law students I’ve seen, this one (by a Michigan student) is easily the most amusing.

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…apparently want to destroy one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment too, namely, freedom of religion and the separation of public power and religious faith (for their mutual safety). Rabbi Yehuda Levin, head of “Jews for Morality” (and the Jews against morality are….?), angered by the correct removal from office of former Alabama Chief

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Here’s an excellent example of what philosophically serious scholarship on Continental philosophy looks like: David Woodruff Smith on phenomenology at SEP.

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Myth: The “overman” or “superman” (the Ubermensch [note: umlauts are unavailable on MovableType]) is one of Nietzsche’s most important ideas, an organizing theme of his work. Reality: After Zarathustra, the “overman” drops out of the published corpus, except for two brief references: once in the Genealogy, where he describes Napoleon as a synthesis of “Unmensch

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According to this story from The Guardian in London, “Home Secretary David Blunkett has refused to grant diplomatic immunity to armed American special agents and snipers travelling to Britain as part of President Bush’s entourage this week. In the case of the accidental shooting of a protester, the Americans in Bush’s protection squad will face

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…in this editorial from Newsday chastising the Bush Administration’s contempt for it.

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The Curmudgeonly Clerks writes here about legal realism: “It’s not that legal realism has no merit, it’s that its merits are always overstated. Consider, for example, Professor Powe’s assessment (as related by his likeminded colleague Brian Leiter): ‘Lucas A. (Scot) Powe, Jr. has a pithy way of expressing the idea. He likes to say: “Anyone

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En Banc on one of the Volokh Conspirators: “Is it just me, or does David Bernstein just alternate between posting about how great his book is and how everyone hates the Jews? I know I’m no paragon of intellectual breadth, but geez.”

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“When stepped on, a worm doubles up. That is clever. In that way he lessens the probability of being stepped on again. In the language of morality: humility.” —Twilight of the Idols, “Maxims and Arrows,” sec. 31.

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Science Watch, a publication of Thomson ISI (Institute for Scientific Information), has produced new “top ten” lists of faculties based on impact as measured by citations. More precisely, “All the rankings are based on ‘relative citation impact’—that is, each university’s average-citations-per-paper score for the five-year period compared, on a percentage basis, against the world impact

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A colleague sent me the latest data (2003) from the Law Firms Yellow Book, which profiles more than 800 law firms around the nation, from all major cities, and from all states except South Dakota. Here is where the firm managing partners went to law school: 1. Harvard University (80) 2. University of Virginia (53)

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My admonishing of Larry Solum for misrepresenting the views of his professional colleagues is already having a constructive effect, as evidenced here. Of course, in this latter case, the person whose talk is being recorded is a veteran blogger, so likely to actually read the blog in question, catch any errors, and respond. In the

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here. As all right-thinking folks know, governments never lie. And when they do, they can count on clever Americans in Oxford to cover their tracks. UPDATE: A reader asks: “Do you really think they made up the 20-year thing for the draft boards?” This took be my surprise. I wrote back: “The 20-year terms of

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Karl Kraus’s favorite-journalist-he-never-met gets a suitable (and amusing) thrashing here. A taste: “The New York Times’ Tom Friedman has a thing about wheels. They recur in his columns with chilling frequency. The tendency is so overt that he often reads like a classic case study in sexual fetishism–particularly given the fact that he sometimes mentions

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“It just absolutely boggles the mind,” said Dr. James Langer, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who is vice president of the National Academy of Sciences. “I wouldn’t want my doctor thinking that intelligent design was an equally plausible hypothesis to evolution any more than I would want my airplane pilot

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UPDATE: I’m moving this post (from 9/17/03) to the top, given the latest brouhaha about the judicial confirmation process. The Democrats have approved 168 of Bush’s 172 nominees; that’s to their lasting shame. An honest, i.e. legal realist, appreciation of what appellate courts actually do, suggests that they ought to be using the filibuster a

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The lawless Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court (and the Alabama Taliban) has been ousted for his gross misconduct in the Ten Commandments case. I’m pleased to welcome Alabama back to the family of jurisdictions that recognize the rule of law.

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