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Democracy rests on habits no constitution records: the loser conceding, the winner not calling the opponent illegitimate, courts treated as everyone's courts. New comparative evidence from nine democracies suggests the link between political hatred and the collapse of those habits is real but far less mechanical than the alarm suggests.
Robert Alexy, among the most influential legal philosophers of the past half-century, died on Saturday 5 September at the age of 80, four days short of his 81st birthday. He leaves a method behind him — proportionality. What he really leaves is a question. Is everything a state does law?
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Brazil's Supreme Federal Court issued a note of condolence on Alexy's death — an unusual gesture towards a German academic. The interesting part of the story lies elsewhere: Brazilian lawyers have spent years debating something they call 'balancing, Brazilian style', and they do not mean it as praise.
The blogger who announced Alexy's death stands at the opposite pole from him in legal philosophy. Brian Leiter's new collection from Oxford argues that what explains a judge's decisions is not reasons but psychology, ideology and social circumstance. A review in NDPR points to a tension.
To read Cicero merely as a 'great orator' is to miss the intellectual fight he was actually in. Long treated as the man who carried Greek philosophy into Latin, he is now read as a thinker of independent weight. His question is still open: does a republic survive on good institutions, or on good citizens?
Edward Coke died on 3 September 1634; Oliver Cromwell on 3 September 1658. One wrote that the king stands under the law; the other executed the king and failed to build a lasting order in his place. Two deaths on the same date hold the founding question of modern political philosophy from both ends.
The Stanford philosopher's new book from Harvard University Press prises apart rationality and reasonableness. For Lawlor, the reasonable person is not merely the one who infers correctly but the one who can see what matters. The New Yorker named it among the year's best.
The Yale philosopher of law argues that the real question artificial intelligence raises for law is not efficiency but power. Even when rule-based systems give the right answer, 'legal reasoning' becomes an appeal to authority once the reasoning can no longer be followed by a human.
Scott J. Shapiro
On 23 August 1927 two Italian anarchists went to the electric chair despite protest across the world. On the same date in 1921, Kenneth Arrow was born, who would demonstrate the mathematical limits of collective decision.
