It's the clank they
make, that wears on
one.
Gone for a few days.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
"Pangs of death and pangs of birth"
Over an entrance to the quadrangle
of the Yale School of Law, one can
make out an inscription carved al-
most a century ago. The law is a
living growth, not a changeless
code. Still the most illuminating
guest lectures in the school's fa-
mous Storrs series under this ae-
gis, were given in the 1920s by a
Columbia Law School grad, working
in New York, Benjamin N. Cardozo,
a descendant of Portuguese Sephar-
dic Jews, and a self-effacing bach-
elor, all his life. Those lectures,
on the Judicial Process, were met
with such respect that when the
Republican Herbert Hoover nominated
Cardozo to the Supreme Court of the
United States, they were cited in
his support even more strenuously
than his brilliant career on the
New York State Court of Appeals.
But he had second thoughts on his
Storrs Lectures; so he gave a sec-
ond series, which are bedrock tes-
taments in the life of the mind.
I have become reconciled to uncertainty,
because I have grown to see it as inev-
itable. I have grown to see that the pro-
cess [of jurisprudence] in its highest
reaches is not discovery, but creation;
and that the doubts and misgivings, the
hopes and fears, are part of the travail
of mind, the pangs of death and the pangs
of birth, in which principles that have
served their day expire, and new princip-
les are born.
Justice Anthony Kennedy's candid
confession of trepidation, in yes-
terday's oral arguments at the Sup-
reme Court, in rendering a decision
he would perceive as at odds with
"millennia," called to mind the pangs
Cardozo not only felt, but explained
to him, and to all people within the
purview of our hybrid legal system.
Benjamin Cardozo is gentle, but he
is unfailingly not vague. Here, in
fraternal advice to Justice Kennedy,
he is saying there are times when
incremental redistributions of em-
pathy can no longer defend the af-
front of decrepit, incongruous rule.
The duty to act is not paradoxical,
it is preservative.
I turned to his voice last evening,
and rested not on bedrock, but on
polishings of its grain.
We may say that in the everyday trans-
actions of life the average man is gov-
erned, not by statute, but by common
law, or at most by statute built upon
a substratum of common law, modifying,
in details only, the common law founda-
tion. Failure to appreciate this truth
has bred a distrust of a creative activ-
ity which would otherwise have been seen
to be appropriate and normal. A rule
which in its origin was the creation of
the courts themselves, and was supposed
in the making to express the mores of
the day, may be abrogated by courts when
the mores have so changed that perpetua-
tion of the rule would do violence to the
social conscience .. If abrogation is per-
missible in cases of extremity, still more
plainly permissible at all times is con-
tinuing adaptation to varying conditions.
This is not usurpation. It is not even
innovation. It is the reservation for our-
selves of the same power of creation that
built up the common law through its exer-
cise by the judges of the past.
Who could make a secret of the
call to justice in one's time?
Benjamin N. Cardozo
The Growth of the Law
Yale University Press, 1924©
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Arrival of displaced persons
New York
1946
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Choatie in a room with Shaw
I'm gettin' married
in the morning
Ding, dong, the bells
Pull out the stopper,
we'll have a whopper
But get me
to the church on time
I got to get there
in the morning
Spruced up and lookin'
Girls come and kiss me
say that you'll miss me
But get me
George Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion
1913
Alan Jay Lerner '35
lyricist
My Fair Lady
1956
Crane Brinton
The Anatomy of
Revolution
Vintage Books
Edmund S. Morgan
The Stamp Act Crisis
University of North
Carolina Press
Thomas S. Kuhn
The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions
University of Chicago Press
James Obergefell
plaintiff
Obergefell v. Hodges
Supreme Court of the United States
28 April 2015
Monday, April 27, 2015
427 Only Avenue
Unlike, say, Bertrand Russell,
who turned to philosophy with
hope of finding certainty where
previously he had felt only doubt,
Wittgenstein was drawn to it by
a compulsive tendency to be struck
by .. questions. Philosophy, one
might say, came to him, not he to
philosophy. Its dilemmas were
experienced by him as unwelcome
intrusions, enigmas, which forced
themselves upon him and held him
captive, unable to get on with
everyday life until he could dis-
pel them with a satisfactory
solution.
Ray Monk
op. cit.
Alex Godart
Edward Wilding
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Happy Birthday, Handsome
1889-1951
A man will be imprisoned in a room
with a door that's unlocked and o-
pens inwards, as long as it does
not occur to him to pull rather
than to push.
One might say, genius
is talent exercised
with courage.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
rowing in the year at
his fjord in Skjolden,
1913, his refuge from
Cambridge and Vienna,
before his enlistment.
Remarks in his note-
books, 1940 and 1941.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Culture and Value
Peter Winch
translation
University of Chicago Press
op. cit.
Plane sensibility
I think of Ozu
and of Valéry
Lorenzo, such
elegant and
penetrating
masters of the
plane in visu-
al craftsman-
ship, as I re-
turn to this
still from a
student movie,
a coming of age
project within
a coming of age
project. I know
little of the
narrative but I
know this is an
eloquent eye,
in this probing
application of
several senses to
a fluid partition,
as they simply are.
Mees Peijnenburg
director
Netherlands Film Academy
Stephan Polman
cinematography
Ko Zandvliet
2013
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