Michael Sandel's famous Harvard course, "Justice," is being broadcast this year online.

Superman, socialist. As the link notes, he's an illegal immigrant, too.

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged “actual innocence” is constitutionally cognizable.

Great moments in American jurisprudence: Antonin Scalia says that convincing a court you're innocent doesn't mean the state can't still execute you.

Let's close some tabs.

* Stanley Fish says academic freedom is dangerous. I'm beginning to think Stanley Fish is dangerous.

* Forced arbitration is one of our most unrecogized societal injustices. And the courts are complicit.

After nearly three years of harassment, abuse and long hours for little or no pay, Dantz finally decided that she’d had enough. She filed suit against her employer—and the court kicked her to the curb. Even though Dantz refused to sign the binding arbitration agreement, the court said that merely by continuing to work for Applebees, she was bound by its terms. Debbie Dantz’ employer illegally abused her for almost three years, and Dantz was powerless to hold it accountable.

What a horrifying story. Via MeFi.

* Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where Saved By The Bell, Rather Than Law And Order, Became The Dominant Television Franchise For A Generation.

* The Singularity is a myth. Pharyngula explains.

* Catholicism is a myth. Cynical-C explains.

* America loves Obama and hates the GOP.

* It looks like the stimulus package (tee hee) passes today. That's because we're all socialists now.

When the trumpet sounded
everything was prepared on earth,
and Jehovah gave the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other corporations.
The United Fruit Company
reserved for itself the most juicy
piece, the central coast of my world,
the delicate waist of America...

From my Facebook news feed: incoming Attorney General Eric Holder's relationship with Chiquita. I usually outsource my commentary on Chiquita to Pablo Neruda and Gabriel García Márquez, but suffice it to say, generally speaking, this is perhaps my least favorite corporate conglomerate. It's really, really unfortunate that Holder was involved with them, though I must admit that his actions as their counsel in this particular instance don't strike me as especially reprehensible in context. Glen Greenwald for the defense:

I've seen some attempts to criticize Holder based upon clients he has represented while in private practice, most notably his defense of Chiquita Brands in a criminal case brought by the DOJ arising out of Chiquita's payments and other support to Colombian death squads. Attempts to criticize a lawyer for representing unsavory or even evil clients are inherently illegitimate and wrong -- period. Anybody who believes in core liberties should want even the most culpable parties to have zealous representation before the Government can impose punishments or other sanctions. Lawyers who defend even the worst parties are performing a vital service for our justice system. Holder is no more tainted by his defense of Chiquita than lawyers who defend accused terrorists at Guantanamo are tainted by that.

Readers of my comments may remember that perennial troll (and, unbelievably, my cousin) Mike T. proposed a wager back in June regarding the results of the presidential election.

I'll call it now, McCain will win by a much larger margin than Bush did in the 2000 election.

...I propose the bet be who will win, instead of odds that one candidate will defeat another. Also, I think the stakes should be something more interesting than a money amount. I suggest that the loser must read a book of the winner's choosing.

I have not forgotten about this.

The natural choice would seem to be Dreams from My Father, but I worry (a) it's too obvious (b) he's not in a place where he would get much out of it (c) I think he might have told me (unbelievably!) he's already read it.

At one point I was leaning towards Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, just because his nonsense assertions about ecology drive me completely up the wall. But again I wonder how much he would actually get out of reading it.

I sort of like the idea of picking A Theory of Justice, and not only because it's so long.

The absolute best thing, I think, would be something that would teach the concept of empathy to a person that doesn't have much. But I'm not sure what that book is.

Failing that, something really punishing.

Any ideas?

A judge on Tuesday ruled that a strict Florida law that blocks gay people from adopting children is unconstitutional, declaring there was no legal or scientific reason for sexual orientation alone to prohibit anyone from adopting. Yes, yes, yes. No moral reason, no practical reason, no good reason, no reason, period.

One down: Obama to close Guantánamo Bay.

Justice once again slightly favored by California residents: the Public Policy Institute's latest poll shows 52% of Californians currently oppose Proposition 8. Fingers crossed.

Colorado U.S. attorney Troy Eid, a Bush appointee, chose not to charge three meth addicts with high-powered rifles and a self-confessed plan with conspiracy to assassinate Barack Obama, against the suggestion of the FBI.

When police searched the hotel rooms and cars the men were using, they confiscated meth, needles, laptops, cell phones, a black mask, books indicating check fraud and forgery, bags of new clothes, tactical pants and bar coupons.

Based on the evidence, FBI special agent Robert Sawyer believed there was probable cause to charge the men with conspiracy to kill Senator Obama. However, US Attorney Troy Eid last week said there is insufficient evidence to indicate a true threat, plot or conspiracy against the senator.

The men were charged with various weapons and/or drug charges.

No true threat?

9Wants to Know has learned three men in Denver discussed assassinating U.S. Sen. Barack Obama during the Democratic National Convention in Denver by sneaking into one of his events and shooting him with a gun hidden inside of a camera.

...

Johnson, Shawn Adolf and Tharin Gartrell all thought that Obama had a suite in the third floor of the Hyatt hotel, where they were staying. In fact, Obama was staying in another Denver hotel.

The men were doing methamphetamine inside the hotel with two women on Aug. 23 discussing the plot to kill Obama, according to federal records.

Adolf said, "It would not matter if he killed Senator Obama because police would simply add a murder charge to his pending charges," according to the records.

There were seven outstanding warrants for Adolf's arrest.

The underage woman told law enforcement that Adolf also talked about using "a high-powered rifle 22-250 from a high vantage point" to shoot Obama during his acceptance speech at INVESCO Field at Mile High.

The California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved gay marriage ban Thursday in a ruling that would make the nation's largest state the second one to allow gay and lesbian weddings. Great news; only forty-eight to go.

Some random links I've been hanging onto this weekend:

* Congratulations to Girl-Wonder.org, finally getting their memorial for Stephanie Brown (Robin IV) in the Batcave. Finally, there's no more sexism in comics. At last.

* Here's Shift, a quick but enjoyable platform game that relies on rotating the playing field for its gimmick.

* Deal to end writer's strike near?

* There were five accidental taser deaths in January. It's a good thing these things are non-lethal...

* And finally, via MeFi, here's an interesting article wrestling with the tough questions at the margins of of attorney-client privilege. The MeFi comments have a lot of other good links on the same subject. I recognize intellectually the reasons why one ought to be a absolutist in favor of procedural protections like attorney-client privilege, but I have to admit that in practice I feel willing to sacrifice ironclad rules in favor of results that seem plainly more just. The important point for me is that the Law is only a proxy for justice, an approximation of it; the Law and justice are not the same thing.

The question, always, is where the move away from strict legal proceduralism stops—and the impossibility of drawing any sort of line short of pure absolutism inevitably pushes me, dialectically, back towards absolutism again...

Meanwhile, almost as if to welcome me on my way home for Christmas, the great state of New Jersey has voted to join the rest of the civilized world and abolished the death penalty.

“You give no compensation to none of those guys who were wrongfully incarcerated and proved their innocence?” he said in an interview. “How can you say we believe in justice?”

"A Long Road Back After Exoneration, and Justice Is Slow to Make Amends," in the New York Times. Thanks for the link to Frinibarf, the first and greatest of the long-missed Three Guys.

The postmodernist epistemological challenge to "the Enlightenment"—its attack on master narratives and its critique of truth—also loses its liberatory aura when transposed outside the elite intellectual strata of Europe and North America. Consider, for example, the mandate of the Truth Commission formed at the end of the civil war in El Salvador, or the similar institutions that have been established in the post-dictatorial and post-authoritarian regimes of Latin America and South Africa. In the context of state terror and mystification, clinging to the primacy of the concept of truth can be a powerful and necessary form of resistance. Establishing and making public the truth of the recent past—attributing responsibility to state officials for specific acts and in some cases exacting retribution—appears here as the ineluctable precondition for any democratic future. The master narratives of the Enlightenment do not seem particularly repressive here, and the concept of truth is not fluid or unstable—on the contrary! The truth is that this general ordered the torture and assassination of that union leader, and this colonel led the massacre of that vilalge. Making public such truths is an exemplary Enlightenment project of modernist politics, and the critique of it in these contexts could serve only to aid the mystifactory and repressive powers of the regime under attack.

In our present imperial word, the liberatory potential of the postmodernist and postcolonial discourses that we have described only resonates with the situation of an elite population that enjoys certain rights, a certain level of wealth, and a certain position in the global hierarchy.

This passage from Hardt and Negri's Empire really leapt out at me as perhaps the difference between 1999 and 2007: the Bush administration has again taught elite intellectuals the incomparable power of truth, of knowing and of being able to name. The "postmodernist epistemological challenge to the Enlightenment" we saw reach its apex in the 1990s is possible only in a moment in which politics is viewed as essentially inconsequential—now that we know that (surprise) history isn't actually over and (surprise) it's still possible for the forces of global capital to make human life much, much worse, those old master narratives don't seem quite so destructive or misleading anymore. There's something there worth rehabilitating.

This isn't to say that we must return to some epistemology of rationalist certainty, or that we already have—quite the opposite, any movement forward will need to synthesize positivism and relativism while moving past both—but merely that a politics of utter truthlessness has no ground on which to stake a claim, much less revolutionize anything. And this ground will never ultimately be anything but ethical-moral—the concept of justice, as in every resolution in every high school debate I ever did, remains our central value, the only rhetorical space worth claiming.

I think this notion of the irreducible supremacy of justice, and the inescapable claims it makes on us, is what Derrida is getting at from the other direction when he talks about fidelity to the spirit of Marx in chapter 3 of Specters of Marx, a book I really need to read again soon:

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth...