Technology engulfs our lives. Since the birth of the steam engine in the 1830s, we haven’t looked back. However, the excitement that marked the unprecedented profits brought on by the Industrial Revolution slowly transformed into unease about the future of manual labor. Today technology critics, economists, and policy makers alike are concerned with the […]
According to Ancestry.com, I am composed thus: Benin/Togo, 40% My grandmother went to Ghana and a woman touched her face and traced a path across her forehead and down her nose and back three hundred years. You’re from Mauritania, she said. I googled “people of Mauritania,” looking for my face, my mother’s face, some […]
You know what’s spookier than demons and goblins and witches? America’s lack of belief—in people of color, minorities, immigrants, and women. I came across an article assessing events related to the confirmation of Kavanaugh on the judicial court, “The Kavanaugh hearings have become a ‘witch hunt,’ where belief is all that matters.” In the article […]
After the absolute nightmare that was the last two weeks, I think everyone feels the need to escape for a while. But too often these excursions are solitary ones. Laying down illuminated by the glow of a laptop binge watching Netflix, scrolling through the vastness of the internet, losing yourself in tweets and posts and […]
“Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge, you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”—Sherlock Holmes Caching (pronounced “cash-ing”) in Computer Science is a method of speeding up performance by providing a temporary […]
Holmes’s particular view on the misplaced role of morality in law was not accepted as canon by all. Rather, weighing in on the concept of morality in law was mid-20th c. founder of the positivist movement HLA Hart. A notoriously dense writer, Hart’s book The Concept of Law is, for even the most dedicated of […]
Today, the law is largely based on theories of human behavior, but this was not always the case. Before the nineteenth-century, laws were based much more upon the morally-informed concept of Natural Law. Then along came the Realists. Rather than a framework focused on essential, fundamental liberties and justice, prominent conceptualizations of law came, by […]
A better, perhaps more accurate title for this post just might read: “How do we interpret, institutionalize, theorize, conceptualize, etc. etc. etc. the law?” I doubt that any, save for steel-nerved, theory nerds, would click on that article. And for good reason: when we– those of us fixated on the words of nation founders, legislators, […]
Morality has the distinct honor of being a concept found and refound in discussions on legal theory. Let’s break — morality and legal theory are, to be sure, two dense, varied, and widely-studied topics. 500, or even 1000 words, covering the two dominant philosophies governing how law is made just barely puts a dent in […]
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of seeing Gail Collins, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, speak in-person when she came to visit QC. The speaking event was hosted by The Knight News, and a number of students and faculty were in attendance. I was impressed by the number of people who showed up; […]
