>Which paper are you speaking of?
Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, and Justice, 17 Legal Studies 1997. It's sort of the ethical countrerpart to my ideology paper.
>
>It may mean that when powerful factions of lawyers, both in and out of
>government, use sophisticated argumentation strategies to undermine
>due process itself because it advances their political and economic
>interests and that this is done from within the very terms of liberal
>discourse itself and that discourse is incapable of proving them wrong
>precisely because there is no pie-in-the-sky basis for adjudicating a
>determination of wrongdoing,
Ah, that's exactly the topic of RRE. We are not stuck with the dilemma you pose, either an arbitrary choice between incommensuable value sysyems or an appeal to an impossible neutral Archimedean point. However, your cri di coeur seems not to be a request for a philosophical justification, but for another impossibility, a language taht is inappropribale by the bad guys. It's no more a criticism of liberalism that its rhetoric can be misused by Ashcroft than it is of socialism that its rhetoric can be misused by, say Vyshinsky. Moreeover, the mere fact that Ashcroft--who hates liberalism, btw--is able to deploy the language for illiberal ends means nothing; in otherr circumstances, he'd be a Vyshinky, and be calling for what both he and Vyshinky agree upon, Shoot the mad dogs!
How are non-lawyers supposed to use the same
>institutional means to get the camel out of the tent by which he got
>in?
We lawyers are in the same situation.
jks
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