Jürgen Habermas on the public sphere, the state, and the private sphere
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher. He is perhaps most well known for the…
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Kara Swanson’s presentation on blood banks highlighted the move to commodify blood first, and then — at least partly in reaction to product liability concerns — to de-commodify it and move to a service-provider, gift-based system.
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Nullification and Obamacare: rejection of the rule of law - nullification is a dead const. theory -
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Facebook's core problem: customers vs. users
Facebook’s massive growth came because they gave users what they wanted: connect with your friends, see what their doing, conveniently share with them, and so on — and do it for free. But now they’re publicly traded, and satisfying users has become secondary to profit growth.
Facebook’s recent actions to generate profits makes sense from the Facebook (and Wall Street?) side. Some of these approaches even makes sense from an advertiser-on-Facebook’s perspective. But none if it is aligned with the interests of users. And failing to align business interests with user’s interests makes for a more complex, challenging, and vulnerable business model.
“September is the 225th anniversary of the United States Constitution. While it’s the foundation of our political system, many Americans really don’t understand it accurately. While many of those who try to help do contribute useful understandings, sometimes their approaches neglect the historical and textual complexity of the document — and are potentially misleading.
For example, while acknowledging and lamenting this lack of general understanding of this foundational document, Peter Roff, in Americans Must Improve Their Understanding of the Constitution, chooses to emphasize ‘God’ as if it were an unproblematic influence on the Constitution.
via “Do we need God to understand the Constitution?” at in propria persona.-
The right to liberty vs. the right to privacy: development of a term of art
I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to what exactly I’m working on. I typically describe it as the impact of new technologies on privacy in the nineteenth century. But I’m not sure that’s the best description, not least because the term “privacy” has some connotations and denotations that lead to misunderstandings and resentments.
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Warrantless wiretaps and the Fourth Amendment: why would a court allow a violation of the Constitution? // in propria persona
“The federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.” But how is this possible, if the Supreme Court has already ruled (in Katz v United States) that wiretaps without warrants violate the Fourth Amendment?
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Limits of interpretation: critiquing a lay reading of the 14th Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States remains arguably one of the most controversial, complex, and challenging pieces of Constitutional text. It is also the subject of my third article in a series on typical problems in lay readings of the Constitution.
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Critiquing a lay reading of the Constitution's "freedom of religion" clauses
In this second part of my series on typical problems in lay readings of the Constitution, I will focus on the question of the freedom of religion.
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Critiquing constitutional readings: introduction and underdetermination
There are many challenges when lay people “read” the U.S. Constitution. Most lay interpreters, regardless of political belief, ignore the centuries of Constitutional interpretation that gives additional meaning to everything in the document.
