two more...

1. We spent some time on statutory interrpetation in class, although we downplayed it for the final. If only our final was still ahead of us, I might use this "hypothetical:" does a the use of the word "force" in the September 2001 authorization of Use of Mulitary Force, authorizing "all necessary force," include wiretapping?


2. This semester we talked about the politics of courts now and again. Here is a post from our co-author, Princeton Emeriti Walter Murphy, on law and politics

Subject:
Re: FW: Walter Murphy on LAW AND POLITICS
From:
"Walter F. Murphy"
Date:Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:32:53 -0700
To:xxxxxxx@yahoo.com
CC:Gillman Howard

Have been away and the debates have moved to other issues, but I would like to respond to Sean Wilson's comment re "politics" as overlapping/including religion, science, etc: The answer is a simple "of course." Aristotle saw politics as the "master science," concerned with helping citizens live noble lives. The most obvious overlap (competition?) is with religion. We can do a fairly good job of separating church and state but we can never separate law and politics, precisely why so many political theorists and public officials have tried to create a civil religion or make the head of state the head of church, as is still the case in the UK, Morocco, and, de facto, Iran.

As for science, many of our colleagues, Bob Gilpin most especially, have made science the focus of their scholarship. Issues such as cloning, stem cell research, ecology, public health and atomic energy are political, not merely "scientific issues," as is exploration of other planets.

We could say essentially the same thing about the other so-called fields that SW mentions.

We may think of ourselves as belonging to a water-tight discipline, but the distinctions among fields of the social sciences are largely imaginary and overlaps with the humanities (including theology, certainly moral theology) and the physical sciences is enormous. Indeed, I believe the distinctions among the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences are, at best, artificial, a concession to our limited life times and intellectual capacities. The complexities of the world require specialization; but we'll never understand what we, as scholars, are doing if we adopt the mind set of the worker who said he was carving a stone rather than that of the man who said he was building a cathedral. Granted that most of us, certainly I, have to be content with an occasional well carved stone, but that stone is part of a much larger effort to understand and, we may hope, improve human life and its environments.

As for a distinction between law and politics, I repeat that law is a subset of politics in the Aristotelian (or Eastonian) sense. We, as professional scholars, should stop using a shallow, journalistic definition of politics. Even a decision by a lawmaker, judge, other official, or private citizen, to defer to other(s) represents, consciously or not, a judgment about the best way to organize and operate a society, to maximize our chances of living a good life. Why such a decision necessarily involves only "desire" and not reasoned judgment escapes me. That each of us may confuse the public good with private gain is obvious; that's why we have a duty to explain and criticize and perhaps take other action that our system opens up to us.

Peace,

WFM

cheers,