Ronald Dworkin argued states have a prima facie obligation to follow international law, not based on consent, but on their obligation to enhance their own political legitimacy, beyond what's possible just via state sovereignty.

Totalitarianism abolishes the right of asylum, embodied in the medieval principle that quid quid est in territorio est de territorio, but which dates back to ancient times and protects people forced to become outlaws through circumstances beyond their control. -- Hannah Arendt

One is tempted to measure the degree of totalitarian infection by the extent to which the concerned government uses its sovereign right of denationalization of refugees. -- Hannah Arendt

Love this. His modus operandi is bribery. His indictment is on bribery charges. Trump boasts about his bribe investment. Sullivan & Cromwell is trump's law firm. But no, the $10 billion promise "ultimately played no role" in abandoning the prosecution of him.

Hans Kelsen wrote that ideas of causation animistically originated in the norm of retribution, the Greek word for cause (aitia) originally meaning guilt, the cause being guilty of the effect.

A central task of democratic politics is to provide the institutions which will permit conflicts to take an 'agonistic' form, where the opponents are not enemies but adversaries among whom exists a conflictual consensus. -- Chantal Mouffe

The power of banishing was exercised only every fifth year: and, indeed, as the ostracism was designed against none but great personages who threatened the state with danger, it ought not to have been the transaction of every day. -- Montesquieu

Ronald Dworkin is, if he and Shakespeare will allow me to say so, the noblest dreamer of them all, with a wider and more expert philosophical base than his predecessors, and he concentrates formidable powers of argument on the defence of his theory. -- HLA Hart

Socrates on the case

In one respect the positivist program has a value that can hardly be questioned, in defining the boundaries of scientific validity and counteracting ideological misuse of science by doctrinaires who invoke its authority in support of their slogans. -- Leszek Kolakowski (1966)

John Stuart Mill opined that people accustomed to giving reasons for their opinions and critically examining their "fundamental tenets" would avoid an "owl-like dread of light and the drudge-like aversion to change" which characterizes unreasoning bigots.

He touched the shoddily applied, peeling blue paint in the reflecting pool. Therefore he caused it to peel. Open and shut case for the US DOJ.

Hard copies out

The Critical claim of indeterminacy is simply that the rule-system could also have generated a different set of stabilizing conventions leading to exactly the opposite results upon a shift in the direction of political winds. -- Robert W. Gordon share.google/m45MpFJiuvT2...

Today, democratic reaction to neo-liberalism centres on the demand that participation in collective decisions should be extended to matters and areas outside the political sphere. -- Norberto Bobbio (1988)

Synecdoche? metonymy? Simple irony?

At the trial of William Penn (ca. 1670), indicted for preaching to an "unlawful, seditious, and riotous assembly," the court ordered the jurors imprisoned for not having rendered the desired guilty verdict on the most serious charges.

The remarkable, yet presently largely overlooked, theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich on law and justice (1954)

Philosophers working for AI adopting functionalism is a no-brainer www.nytimes.com/2026/07/05/b...

In the waste economy in which we now live, not destruction but conservation spells ruin because the very durability of conserved objects is the greatest impediment to the turnover process characteristic of quicker and more efficient accumulation of wealth. -- Hannah Arendt

Joseph Raz: law must be capable of guiding the behavior of its subjects; John Rawls: social institutions must be just above all else.

Regarding Barrington Moore (1950), Soviet Politics -- The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change

Last eve's Brooklyn Bridge

The only collective reference in American case law (2014) to "intellectual masterpieces by Herbert Marcuse, Martin Luther King, Jr., Noam Chomsky, & Audre Lorde."

Interesting page from the FBI's cointelpro files (here 1970), its effort at undermining New Left figures by "forging" materials that would then discredit those individuals.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not Guilty'. -- Theodore Roosevelt

Kavanaugh skillfully threads the poisonous needle

Lon Fuller was adamant that, unappreciated by his critics, only legal rules via a sound legal system -- "something more than good intentions" -- can structure human interaction in a way that makes it possible for people to realize morality in their actual behavior.

Money plays no role in determining which positions politicians take, only arguments winning the day in the marketplace of ideas (that's why hardly any money is actually spent on political campaigns) 😒

I'm "probably" fine (66.66%), because I'm only allergic to one of these three pollens (grass)