Category Archives: Society

Intellectualism and the Emperor’s New Clothes

June 5, 2008 – 8:51 pm

I’ve been reading the interesting string of posts on the question of intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. It all started off at PrawfsBlog, where Rick Hills explained why he was an anti-intellectual. At Slate, Eric Posner and Richard Ford mounted a defence of intellectualism, while still maintaining a dislike of deliberate obscurantism.
Hills’ example of intellectual obscurantism was Judith Butler’s [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Academia, Education, Law, Philosophy | Comments (31)

The scary side of karma

May 29, 2008 – 10:23 pm

Adrian the cabbie has an interesting post on karma. When someone does you wrong, you often wish that either that the consequences of their actions will come back to bite them on the bottom, or that something equivalent happens to them as a result of their bad actions. It’s a tantalising concept, and a tempting [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in General, Personal | Comments (16)

The Left Hand of Darkness

May 26, 2008 – 9:03 am

The other day I was reading Ursula Le Guin’s novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. I hadn’t read it for 10 or so years; I had forgotten what an excellent book it was.
Shortly, the book involves a male human diplomat and explorer arriving in a world, Gethen, where the sentient inhabitants are humanoid androgynes. For [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Books, Children, Law, Sex | Comments (11)

Job interview boo-boos

May 24, 2008 – 8:54 pm

I must confess that when I was at law school, I didn’t do well in interviews. I had no trouble getting them. But I used to freeze like a rabbit in the headlights once in the interview. I guess the problem is that I  don’t like talking about myself. And, as I have described, I [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in General | Comments (3)

The value of saying sorry

May 19, 2008 – 7:58 pm

Saying sorry is not something that happens very often in legal disputes. When I was a young teenager, my sister was hit by a car in front of me, and had to spend a few months in hospital. Fortunately, she made a full and total recovery. I remember that one of my primary grievances at [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Law | Comments (16)

Oxford weirdnesses

May 2, 2008 – 11:46 pm

I’ve seen some pretty strange stuff in my life. No doubt, too, there are perfectly normal things that I think strange because, ahem, I’m pretty strange.
Anyhoo, that’s by-the-by.
The hot-penny-chucking ritual I witnessed yesterday was right up there on teh weirds list. A mate of mine suggested the RSPCA would be on your case if you [...]

By skepticlawyer | Comments (0)

Cause and effect

April 27, 2008 – 10:35 pm

I haven’t been too impressed with ethanol fuels for a while. My concern back then was “that if governments make emotional knee-jerk reactions, the cure may be as bad as the disease it is designed to alleviate.”
In that context, the current food crisis is a salutory reminder of the nature of cause and effect.  Food riots [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Economics, Environment, Politics | Comments (0)

The Spirit and the Law - consumer protection and mediums

April 24, 2008 – 10:19 pm

A certain section of the British spiritualist community is protesting again the repeal of the Fraudulent Mediums Act 1951 (UK). The Independent reported the other day that the recently formed Spiritualist Workers Association (SWA) believes that the repeal of the legislation is discriminatory towards spiritualism. The Spiritualists’ National Union (SNU) which is a long-established body, backed [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Fark!, Law | Comments (3)

Not so much gibberish as derivative and boring

April 18, 2008 – 8:37 pm

I was rather amused to see that the Judge hearing the J.K. Rowling copyright infringement case has described Rowling’s plotlines as “gibberish”.
To explain briefly, as outlined in this article from The Times, Rowling is asking the Manhattan Federal Court to block publication of The Harry Potter Lexicon, a guide to places and names in the [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Books, Law, Literature | Comments (2)

God’s law and the law of the State

April 18, 2008 – 10:50 am

What happens when you have a particular group in society who are not minded to follow the law of the State, but prefer to follow God’s law as they interpret it?
Recently this question has come up in relation to Sharia law, particularly after the Archbishop of Canterbury said that some aspects of sharia law would [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Children, Feminism, Law, Marriage, Politics, Religion | Comments (1)