The Methodological Fallacy

Author(s):  
Edward A. Jr. Purcell

This chapter begins the book’s basic conclusions about the reasons for Justice Antonin Scalia’s enduring historical significance in terms of understanding American constitutionalism. The first reason, the chapter argues, is that his jurisprudence and judicial career demonstrate his belief in a pervasive “methodological fallacy,” the common belief that there is some formal interpretive methodology that is capable of tightly constraining or eliminating judicial discretion and generally providing “correct” interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. Scalia claimed that his jurisprudence did this, but his career demonstrated both that his jurisprudence was deeply flawed and that his own actions were largely guided not by “objective” originalist sources but by his own ideology and politics. The chapter argues that one major reason for Scalia’s enduring historical significance is that it suggests the true nature of American constitutionalism, the fact that the Constitution is incomplete and in many ways indeterminate and that there is no formal methodology capable of producing “correct” answers to most or all disputed constitutional questions.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-251
Author(s):  
Eric Hanada

AbstractThis study challenges the common belief that the ‘Trump tariffs’ are protectionist or a deliberate attack on China, the USA’s economic rival. By focusing specifically on Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and equating its use to Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, this study instead demonstrates how the U.S. administration is actively repurposing protectionist laws to function as unilateral enforcement tools. Thus, this study argues that the tariffs enacted on steel and aluminium in 2018 under the guise of national security are not meant to protect the domestic market or to hurt the Chinese, but rather to ‘protect’ the ability of U.S. businesses to make profits abroad. By contrasting the justification for the tariffs to factual application, China is not identified as a target but rather as a convenient fig leaf. The article goes into further detail to demonstrate how the U.S. (ab)uses these tariffs during negotiations with South Korea, Japan, and other nations and finds multiple examples of how others have been affected significantly more than China. Here, the article describes how U.S. officials have mastered the art of simultaneously creating leverage, exchanging it for concessions, and keeping it.


Author(s):  
Sylvia Berryman

This work challenges the common belief that Aristotle’s virtue ethics is founded on an appeal to human nature, an appeal that is thought to be intended to provide both substantive ethical advice and justification for the demands of ethics. It is argued that it is not Aristotle’s intent, but the view is resisted that Aristotle was blind to questions of the source or justification of his ethical views. Aristotle’s views are interpreted as a ‘middle way’ between the metaphysical grounding offered by Platonists and the scepticism or subjectivist alternatives articulated by others. The commitments implicit in the nature of action figure prominently in this account: Aristotle reinterprets Socrates’ famous paradox that no one does evil willingly, taking it to mean that a commitment to pursuing the good is implicit in the very nature of action. This approach is compared to constructivism in contemporary ethics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422110055
Author(s):  
Marçal Sintes-Olivella ◽  
Pere Franch ◽  
Elena Yeste-Piquer ◽  
Klaus Zilles

What is the opinion held by the European press on the U.S. election campaign and the candidates running for president? What are the predominant issues that attract the attention of European print media? Does Europe detest Donald Trump? The objective of the present study is to analyze the perception European commentators had of the 2020 race for the White House. The media, the audience, and European governments were captivated more than ever before by how the U.S. election campaign unfolded, fixing their gaze on the contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Through a combined quantitative and qualitative methodology, a combination of content analysis and the application of framing theory (hitherto scarcely applied to opinion pieces), our research centers on exploring the views, opinions, and analyses published in eight leading newspapers from four European countries (France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom) as expressed in their editorials and opinion articles. This study observes how the televised presidential debates were commented on, interpreted, and assessed by commentators from the eight newspapers we selected. The goal was to identify the common issues and frames that affected European public opinion on the U.S. presidential campaign and the aspirants to the White House.


Author(s):  
Giacomo Dalla Chiara ◽  
Klaas Fiete Krutein ◽  
Andisheh Ranjbari ◽  
Anne Goodchild

As e-commerce and urban deliveries spike, cities grapple with managing urban freight more actively. To manage urban deliveries effectively, city planners and policy makers need to better understand driver behaviors and the challenges they experience in making deliveries. In this study, we collected data on commercial vehicle (CV) driver behaviors by performing ridealongs with various logistics carriers. Ridealongs were performed in Seattle, Washington, covering a range of vehicles (cars, vans, and trucks), goods (parcels, mail, beverages, and printed materials), and customer types (residential, office, large and small retail). Observers collected qualitative observations and quantitative data on trip and dwell times, while also tracking vehicles with global positioning system devices. The results showed that, on average, urban CVs spent 80% of their daily operating time parked. The study also found that, unlike the common belief, drivers (especially those operating heavier vehicles) parked in authorized parking locations, with only less than 5% of stops occurring in the travel lane. Dwell times associated with authorized parking locations were significantly longer than those of other parking locations, and mail and heavy goods deliveries generally had longer dwell times. We also identified three main criteria CV drivers used for choosing a parking location: avoiding unsafe maneuvers, minimizing conflicts with other users of the road, and competition with other commercial drivers. The results provide estimates for trip times, dwell times, and parking choice types, as well as insights into why those decisions are made and the factors affecting driver choices.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136571272110022
Author(s):  
Jennifer Porter

The common law test of voluntariness has come to be associated with important policy rationales including the privilege against self-incrimination. However, when the test originated more than a century ago, it was a test concerned specifically with the truthfulness of confession evidence; which evidence was at that time adduced in the form of indirect oral testimony, that is, as hearsay. Given that, a century later, confession evidence is now mostly adduced in the form of an audiovisual recording that can be observed directly by the trial judge, rather than as indirect oral testimony, there may be capacity for a different emphasis regarding the question of admissibility. This article considers the law currently operating in Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia to see whether or not, in the form of an audiovisual recording, the exercise of judicial discretion as to the question of the admissibility of confession evidence might be supported if the common law test of voluntariness was not a strict test of exclusion.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matin Pedram

Abstract Competition is building block of any successful economy, while a cartelized economy is against the common good of society. Nowadays, developing artificial intelligence (AI) and its plausibility to foster cartels persuade governments to revitalize their interference in the market and implement new regulations to tackle AI implications. In this sense, as pooling of technologies might enable cartels to impose high prices and violate consumers’ rights, it should be restricted. By contrast, in the libertarian approach, cartels’ impacts are defined by government interference in the market. Accordingly, it is irrational to rely on a monopolized power called government to equilibrate a cartelized market. This article discusses that AI is a part of the market process that should be respected, and a restrictive or protective approach such as the U.S. government Executive Order 13859 is not in line with libertarian thought and can be a ladder to escalate the cartelistic behaviors.


Utilitas ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-220
Author(s):  
KARL EKENDAHL ◽  
JENS JOHANSSON

In a recent article, Joyce L. Jenkins challenges the common belief that desire satisfactionists are committed to the view that a person's welfare can be affected by posthumous events. Jenkins argues that desire satisfactionists can and should say that posthumous events only play an epistemic role: though such events cannot harm me, they can reveal that I have already been harmed by something else. In this response, however, we show that Jenkins's approach collapses into the view she aims to avoid.


2021 ◽  
pp. 026858092199852
Author(s):  
Aneta Piekut ◽  
Gill Valentine

In this article, the authors move away from approaching generations as static categories and explore how ordinary people, as opposed to scholars, distinguish generations and justify their different responses to cultural diversity in terms of ethnicity, race and religion/belief. The analysis draws on 90 in-depth interviews with 30 residents in the Polish capital, Warsaw (2012–2013). Through approaching generation as an analytical category, the authors identify various differentiating narratives which the study participants employed to draw boundaries between generations, reinforcing the common belief that the youngest Poles are most accepting of diversity. Although generations are seen as the axis of difference, conditioning generation-specific responses to diversity, the accounts emerging from the interviews reveal their relational nature, as well as similarities and points of connection between their experiences.


Author(s):  
Satoshi Nakano ◽  
Takao Fujisawa ◽  
Bin Chang ◽  
Yutaka Ito ◽  
Hideki Akeda ◽  
...  

After the introduction of the seven-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, the global spread of multidrug resistant serotype 19A-ST320 strains became a public health concern. In Japan, the main genotype of serotype 19A was ST3111, and the identification rate of ST320 was low. Although the isolates were sporadically detected in both adults and children, their origin remains unknown. Thus, by combining pneumococcal isolates collected in three nationwide pneumococcal surveillance studies conducted in Japan between 2008 and 2020, we analyzed 56 serotype 19A-ST320 isolates along with 931 global isolates, using whole-genome sequencing to uncover the transmission route of the globally distributed clone in Japan. The clone was frequently detected in Okinawa Prefecture, where the U.S. returned to Japan in 1972. Phylogenetic analysis demonstrated that the isolates from Japan were genetically related to those from the U.S.; therefore, the common ancestor may have originated in the U.S. In addition, Bayesian analysis suggested that the time to the most recent common ancestor of the isolates form Japan and the U.S. was approximately the 1990s to 2000, suggesting the possibility that the common ancestor could have already spread in the U.S. before the Taiwan 19F-14 isolate was first identified in a Taiwanese hospital in 1997. The phylogeographical analysis supported the transmission of the clone from the U.S. to Japan, but the analysis could be influenced by sampling bias. These results suggested the possibility that the serotype 19A-ST320 clone had already spread in the U.S. before being imported into Japan.


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