Marable weighs in

[Justin Schwartz]

Ian, you're getting all wierd, and I don't know quite what's got into you. 
Yeah, I know that the govt and others do bad things in the name of liberal 
values. So what values haven't bad people perverted. We're all socialists 
here, and are unimpressed if someone starts saying, haven't you idiot heard 
about Stalin? Yeah, laeyersa re a conservative bunch ina  conservative 
profession, your point? What do you expect, we grease the wheels of 
commerce, that's what we are paid to do. Surely you are disappointed that we 
have not started the revolution. Yes of course there is no neutral a priori 
pie-in-the-sky basis for law,a s you knwo I have published on this, so 
what's your point? Does that mean due process and the rule of law is a bad 
idea?


>From: "Ian Murray" <seamus2001 at home.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: "Lbo-Talk at Lists. Panix. Com" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Subject: Re: Marable weighs in
>Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 08:41:55 -0800
>
>

Ian Said: >And the attack on it -liberalism- was made from within the very
>discourse of liberalism itself. What's up with that?! Or, paraphrasing
>Bill Clinton, is there "nothing wrong with liberalism that can't be
>fixed with what is right about liberalism"?

Nothing is worse
>than when lawyers go into cynical and Machiavellian mode when they
>argue with one another and their fellow citizens [yes, rape, murder,
>child abuse are worse, but you know what I'm getting at]. So when is
>the ABA going to mobilize the thousands and thousands and thousands
>and thousands of lawyers in Wash DC in a Ghandian and MLK mode of
>collective action and shut down Congress, the White
>House and the Supremes the way citizens have been mobilizing against
>the Bretton Woods institutions?

Doomsday, or thereabouts.


>
> > As for your puerile idea that lawe is just a bunch of philosophical
> > abstractions backed up with guns, what are you trying to say?
>
>======
>The assertion stands. You know exactly what it means. Just because you
>disagree does not justify the use of derogatory language. Or are you
>falling prey to the adversarial fetish?
>

Look who's talking,a nd I don';t know what you mean.


>

Are lawyers the ones who have a
>monopoly on determining when political revolution is justified?

No.

The
>legal theorist's & lawyer's quest for nice, neat, monistic
>explications of normative-ethical certitude for the sake of
>adjudicating competing claims  is Cartesian folly in a
>pluralistic society.

?? That's the core of liberalism as as an ideal. Meanwhile, political theory 
is a harmlress pasttime.

Just what is the ultimate tool of enforcement
>when the incommensurability over the manner of justifying commands
>fails? If law and philosophy were enough, there'd be no weapons.

Tell me something I don't know. Do you recall the position I took on whether 
aguments ever persuade anyone, really?

I'm not dismissing law, I am
>criticizing the notion that utlimately it is founded upon a
>content-neutral structure of rationality which is capable of solving
>all social-philosophical conflicts and when citizens get fed up with
>the laws and engage in action to the point where the State feels
>itself threatened, the state will claim the law legitimates it's use
>of violence against it's own citizens.

So who said otherwise, anyone around here?


>What's the one true theory of law?

Mine, I'll tell when it's worked out.

jks

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