scholarly journals Law as a Language, Law as an Art: Reflections on James Boyd White's Keep Law Alive

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Jefferson Powell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social World ◽  
Law And Literature ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Language Law ◽  
Traditional Understanding

Abstract Keep Law Alive, the latest book by law and literature scholar James Boyd White, is an important apologia for the traditional understanding and practice of law in the United States. Law, White argues, has served as a language in a sense closely parallel to what we mean by referring to English or Spanish as a language: law provides those fluent in it with the tools to describe the social world and to imagine its transformation, but without scripting what the speaker must say. White also envisions law as an art that evokes imagination, emotion and personal judgment, as well as the mind, and that is fundamentally oriented toward the realization of justice. Intellectual, social and political changes, however, threaten to displace law as a language and art with a view of law as an essentially empty rhetoric that cloaks the use of abstract and impersonal reasoning often borrowed from other disciplines. The survival of law depends on the willingness of those who speak it to continue its practice as an art that serves a humane vision of political life.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-20
Author(s):  
Billy Coleman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Music ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Early American ◽  
The Social ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
European Standards

This prologue surveys the key political challenges, debates, and ideologies that animated American political life following the creation of the United States. It also gestures to the emerging political purposes of music within this context. It distinguishes Federalists from Republicans, explains their conflicting visions, and overviews the logic Federalists used to justify their desire for social control and their insistence on social order and hierarchy as preconditions for freedom and liberty. The prologue similarly outlines the social context of early American music, especially its connections to religion, morality, science, and European standards of excellence. Finally, it highlights music’s perceived capacity to help define the terms of a new, uniquely American national identity.

MEASUREMENT AND MERITOCRACY: AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF IQ

2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 637-644
Author(s):  
THEODORE M. PORTER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Intelligence Quotient ◽  
Social Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mind

Is intelligence a fit topic for intellectual history? The creation and institutionalization of IQ (the initials have become self-sufficient, and no longer stand for “intelligence quotient”) have been a favorite topic in the history of psychology, and have even achieved some standing in social histories of class, race, and mobility, especially in the United States. The campaign to quantify intelligence tended to remove it from the domain of intellectual history, which after all has traditionally emphasized ideas and interpretations. Measurement, and not alone of the mind, was pursued as a way to rein in the intellect by making it more rigorous. What was pushed out the door, however, returned through the window in the form of debates about what intelligence means; in what sense and with what tools it can be measured; and how these measures relate to other ways of comprehending mind, thought, and reason. Quantification, a potent strategy for releasing science from the grip of history, is itself profoundly historical, as a half-century of modern scholarship has demonstrated. This historicizing of the antihistorical embodies what we may call counterreflexivity, and, as such, is partly about puncturing illusions, though it need not take a negative view of the social role of science. The perspective of history is all the more essential because the depoliticization of merit through science entails a consequential moral and political choice. Measurement, by rationalizing and stabilizing the idea of intelligence, enabled it more readily to enter everyday discourse and to be put to work in schools, businesses, and bureaucracies.

Republicans and Democrats Search for New Identities, 1870–1890

1969 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 466-476
Author(s):  
Albert V. House
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Henry Adams ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Cultural Lag ◽  
The Social

In October, 1963, Professor Vincent De Santis published a provocative revisionist essay on the realities of national politics in the United States during the Gilded Age. His perceptive comments and illustrations showed that the lion's share of the blame for the continuing misunderstanding of the politics of the period should be laid at the doors of Lord Bryce and Henry Adams. He demonstrated clearly that the distinguished, aristocratic Englishman and the Bostonian child of the eighteenth century were guilty of judging the passing parade of American political life by the standards of their own provincial and noncontemporary value systems. He went on to delineate the social, cultural and economic environment in which Gilded Age politicos functioned. These included the equating of democracy and capitalism, blind adherence to laissez-faire, cultural lag as to the theory of states' rights, the blight of two serious depressions, and a remarkably even balance of party and sectional power, especially after 1875.

Italy: anti-system opposition within the system

1966 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvano Tosi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Political System ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
The Social ◽  
Electoral Representation

There is no need, perhaps, to repeat that as in other European countries, and especially France, but not in Great Britain and the United States, the most characteristic feature of Italy’s contemporary political life is the fact that within its liberal-democratic political system the main opposition is carried on by a party or parties which deny in principle the structure and purposes of the liberal-democratic state, and the values of electoral representation and its institutions. The interchange between government and opposition in countries like Great Britain and the United States is centred around the agreement between the parties to play fair and to acknowledge the rules of the parliamentary process as the permanent basis of the country’s political life. But the communist parties, and in the countries where they still exist the fascist or neo-fascist parties, reject these principles and proclaim that when they come to power they will replace them by forms of ‘direct’ or ‘all people’s’ democracies. This ideological argument about the respective merits of the purely political or parliamentary and the social-economic centralized forms of democracy is at the core of the doctrinal discussion between the communists and the neo-fascist parties, and the other Italian parties.

Specters of Belonging

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrián Félix
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mexican Migrants ◽  
Mexican State ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Mexican Migrant ◽  
Transnational Citizenship

In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican migrants? In addressing this question, this book resembles what any good migration corrido (ballad) does—narrate the thickening of transnational citizenship from beginning, middle, to end. Specifically, Specters of Belonging traces Mexican migrant transnationalism across the migrant political life cycle, beginning with the “political baptism” (i.e., naturalization in the United States) and ending with repatriation to México after death. In doing so, the book illustrates how Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody transnational citizenship in constant dialectical contestation with the state and institutions of citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border. Drawing on political ethnographies of citizenship classrooms, the first chapter examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States and grapple with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and its script of singular political loyalty. The middle chapter deploys transnational ethnography to analyze how Mexican migrants enact transnational citizenship within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state, focusing on a group of returned migrant politicians and transnational activists. Last, the final chapter turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México.

The Empire of Disgust

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Drinking Water ◽  
Sexual Orientation ◽  
Change Point ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Swimming Pools ◽  
Economic Class ◽  
Group Resistance

All known societies exclude and stigmatize one or more minority groups. Frequently these exclusions are underwritten with a rhetoric of disgust: people of a certain group, it is alleged, are filthy, hyper-animal, or not fit to share such facilities as drinking water, food, and public swimming pools with the ‘clean’ and ‘fully human’ majority. But exclusions vary in their scope and also in the specific disgust-ideologies underlying them. In this volume, interdisciplinary scholars from the United States and India present a detailed comparative study of the varieties of prejudice and stigma that pervade contemporary social and political life: prejudice along the axes of caste, race, gender, age, sexual orientation, transgender, disability, religion, and economic class. In examining these forms of stigma and their intersections, the authors present theoretically pluralistic and empirically sensitive accounts that both explain group-based stigma and suggest ways forward. These forward-looking remedies, including group resistance to subordination as well as institutional and legal change, point the way towards a public culture that is informed by our diverse histories of discrimination and therefore equipped to eliminate stigma in all of its multifaceted forms.

scholarly journals An Attack on the Separation of Powers? Strategic Climate Litigation in the Eyes of U.S. Judges

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8335
Author(s):  
Jasmina Nedevska
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
Climate Politics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Domestic Courts ◽  
Research Plan

Climate change litigation has emerged as a powerful tool as societies steer towards sustainable development. Although the litigation mainly takes place in domestic courts, the implications can be seen as global as specific climate rulings influence courts across national borders. However, while the phenomenon of judicialization is well-known in the social sciences, relatively few have studied issues of legitimacy that arise as climate politics move into courts. A comparatively large part of climate cases have appeared in the United States. This article presents a research plan for a study of judges’ opinions and dissents in the United States, regarding the justiciability of strategic climate cases. The purpose is to empirically study how judges navigate a perceived normative conflict—between the litigation and an overarching ideal of separation of powers—in a system marked by checks and balances.

What is Happening in the United States? How Social Classes Influence the Political Life of the Country and its Health and Quality of Life

2021 ◽  
pp. 002073142199484
Author(s):  
Vicente Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
United States ◽  
Access To Health Care ◽  
Universal Access ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Race And Gender

This article analyses the political changes that have been occurring in the United States (including the elections for the presidency of the country) and their consequences for the health and quality of life of the population. A major thesis of this article is that there is a need to analyse, besides race and gender, other categories of power - such as social class - in order to understand what happens in the country. While the class structure of the United States is similar to that of major Western European countries, the political context is very different. The U.S. political context has resulted in the very limited power of its working class, which explains the scarcity of labor, political and social rights in the country, such as universal access to health care.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document