The “free speech” debate is both exhausting and frustrating. You sometimes get sucked into it and then, hours later, you are wondering how this happened and where the exit doors are. Somehow, no headway has been made in the discussion and both sides seem to have become further entrenched behind their point of view. One […]
Read more "Re-scripting the ‘Free Speech’ debate"“I was disappointed to hear about the Montreal Jazz Festival booking multiple nights of a show called SLĀV, in which a majority white group of singers, lead by a white Québécois director, sing African-American slave songs, sometimes dressed as field slaves and cotton pickers” ~ Moses Sumney. “All I know about music is that not […]
Read more "SLĀV – ‘It hurts to play this music’"“And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail, but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so, I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who […]
Read more "Rights: A Lubricant for Neo-liberalism?"“Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’” ~ Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect ~~~ I recently attended a three-day conference in Montreal. It brought together a range of local, national and international practitioners, academics and activists and everyone in-between. The conference followed the progression […]
Read more "Margin of maneuverability and atmospheres of hope"“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not […]
Read more "Street-Level Bureaucrats, Discretionary Justice and Improvised Law"“Curiosity is the lust of the mind” ~ Thomas Hobbes “I have always been full of lust – as I am now – but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path” ~ Susan Sontag “I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity […]
Read more "Curiosity is the lust of the mind"“the argument of the Hollow Hope isn’t radical. What is radical is the belief that litigation can produce significant social reform, that rights triumph over politics. This is a historically odd idea. Until the mid-twentieth century, proponents of significant social reform mostly understood that change would only come through the building and nurturing of social […]
Read more "Legal Education and Social Movements: Does it Compute?"