>, it is a
> voluntary agreement and not a unilateral imposition.
>
Your point about "overstating" is well taken, even with Doug's amendments.
But your point about all of this being "voluntary" is interesting. What you mean is that as "interpreted by our legal institutions", these are "voluntary" contracts, etc, in the same way that all labor contracts are voluntary. It is one of the great bourgeois freedoms, the freedom of contract.
But let me say, in a rather old-fashion Marxist way, that this "voluntariness" is one of the ideological mystification of the law. We shouldn't accept it as such. In fact it is one of the primary examples of ideology. I think I can actually get Doug, Miles and Carrol to agree with me on this, though maybe they will argue with me on the use of the word "mystification."
I realize that "left-wing" lawyers are caught in a double role, if not a double bind in these matters. To clearly explain the law as it is, as Andie, thus working against a tendency toward institutional obfuscation and exclusivity, and on the other hand to question the actually ideology behind the workings of the legal institution and how they make the "particularistic" ideas of the capitalist system into "universalistic" notions of justice, freedom, and equality.
An attempt to analyze legal institutions and their ideological mystifications is not fundamentally different from attempts to analyze educational institutions and their ideological mystifications, which is the point of my huffy and puffy ruminations.
Jerry Monaco
> So it is overstating matters to say that this is
> chilling censorship. In this case, the ex-agents where
> able to provide a bibliography and links for all the
> missing information provided by others or themselves
> in other contexts. I'd describe it as more of a
> bureaucratic pain in the tuchus than censorship.
>
>