Thursday, November 20, 2025

Matthew Kramer's Book on H.L.A. Hart

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Once you get the Austin/Kelsen/Schmitt/Hart/Fuller/Finnis/Dworkin bug, it's pretty hard to get over it. Where do laws come from? Why sho...
Friday, November 14, 2025

A Distressing Realization for a Democratic Theorist

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It's not particularly fun to get old. But for those of us lucky enough to have a comfortable home, sweet, patient partner, awesome doggi...
Friday, October 3, 2025

Schmitt IV: An Important Book, An Additional Democratic Constraint, and My Error in Schmitt III

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My latest review over at the 3:16 AM Magazine “Hornbook of Democracy Book Reviews” is of Lars Vinx’s generous helping of translati...
1 comment:
Wednesday, September 17, 2025

A Shared "Solution" to a Problem Basic to Both Epistemology and Political Theory

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  A couple of hundred years into the Common Era, a skeptical philosopher named Sextus Empiricus wrote this: Those who claim for themselves t...
Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Gerrymandering is Possible Because Basing Political Representation Purely on the Geography of Subdivisions is a Bad Idea

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Gerrymandering is in the news. As I'm sure my readers realize, cutting up a territory in (allegedly) weird ways is arguably anti-democra...
1 comment:
Thursday, September 4, 2025

My (perhaps overly strident) review of Michael Lynch's "On Truth in Politics"

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  M ichael Patrick Lynch, a thoughtful scholar with an intense devotion to democracy and a clear desire to do all he can for both its preser...
8 comments:
Saturday, August 16, 2025

"Hey, if I found out somebody had been sneaking into my fitness club for years without paying, I'd want him arrested!"

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  The complaint encapsulated by the above title corresponds to the Republican Party's attitude toward "illegals" at present, a...
Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Arendt's Strange Take on Truths, Opinions and Facts

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  Hannah Arendt has certainly been having her day. That she led a fascinating--even romantic-- life, is clear from several recent movies and...