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With this approach, Katz offers a book that is all but unique in the legal/philosophical literature, and one that should appeal to lawyers, law students, and nonlawyers alike. Bringing to bear a large quiverful of hypotheticals, thought experiments, and extreme cases (some real, some contrived, some purely fantastical), Katz puts common legal principles through their paces and shows us that our intuitions, while reliable in a general way, may not be as sound as they appear at first blush.
Katz's own area of expertise is criminal law, but he may have done the book a mild disservice in its subtitle: as he is himself well aware, the "conundrums" with which he deals -- What is the difference between an act and an omission? What does it mean to do something "intentionally"? What does it mean to say that something is the legal "cause" of something else? -- bear on many areas of the law, including (for example) contracts, torts, and wills.
They are also of general philosophical interest, of course, and Katz is himself a competent philosopher more or less in the "analytic" camp; indeed, his footnotes are as likely to cite Searle or Austin as to refer to a case. His discussions of e.g. tacit knowledge (a la Michael Polanyi) and judgment under uncertainty (a la the famous work of Kahneman and Tversky) are most gratifying and in each case will point the interested reader to a fascinating body of literature with which, probably, lawyers ought to be familiar. (For example, he does a nice job of tying the psychology of risk and uncertainty to the psychology of jury verdicts.)
And he is one of few writers who make (what I regard as) sound use of thought-experiments, which in the wrong hands (say, Rawls's) are merely tools for confusing oneself and others. Another writer with the right hands is Judith Jarvis Thomson -- and sure enough, Katz cites her well-known "Trolley Problem," for which see _Rights, Restitution and Risk_ and the additional discussion of the problem in _The Realm of Rights_. (By the way, Katz does not explicitly set out his own fundamental outlook but his overall approach to moral problems seems to be based on a sort of critical intuitionism not unlike Thomson's.)
The resulting volume is a thoroughly enjoyable and stimulating read. Law students in particular may want to read it as early as possible, as Katz's use of hypos is much like what we encounter in law school and will probably do more to galvanize the reader into "legal reasoning" than any ten other books on the topic. But it's suitable for a general readership.
It is also a fine corrective to the view that the law can be rendered clear and unambiguous by reliance on a handful of simple principles (e.g. by reducing all law to "property rights"). Katz is at pains to show -- I think successfully -- that no such program can hope to eliminate all vagueness or explicitly capture everything of intuitive relevance, and in at least one case ("proximate cause") he presents an entirely new argument showing why this is so.
Katz is also the author of _Ill-Gotten Gains_ and moreover has a nice essay in Dennis Patterson's _A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory_, another volume which is highly recommended (especially to law students). Katz's readers might also be interested in Patterson's _Law and Truth_, which in a way is complementary and "orthogonal" to the present work: Patterson is concerned with what it means for a proposition of law to be true, and Katz has a good deal to say that is relevant to this question.
For example, suppose A is planning a desert trek, and B and C independently decide to kill A. B poisons the water in A's canteen. C, not knowing what B has done, drills a tiny hole in the canteen. A goes off to the desert and dies of thirst. Who killed A? After all, if C had not drilled the hole, A would have been poisoned to death.
Katz explores these and other issues with a very readable and witty style. One of the famous cases he discusses is Regina v. Dudley and Stephens, a famous (or infamous) case to all law students. Dudley, Stephens, and two others set off in a boat. Disaster struck, and they barely managed to get to a lifeboat; however, they had little food and no water. Days passed, and as they wondered if they could survive long enough to be rescued, Dudley suggested to Stephens that they kill the cabin boy, who was the weakest of the four, and eat him. The third person (Brooks) protested, but did take part in the eating when Dudley and Stephens did the killing. A couple of days later, they were rescued. Dudley and Stephens were prosecuted for murder and convicted. Should they have been? Did the desperation of their circumstances make it "necessary" for them to kill the cabin boy to survive?
These are very difficult questions and are largely unanswered, even in modern law, but Katz makes them worth thinking about, and he's very entertaining. Lawyers and non-lawyers should enjoy this book.
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One of my favorite messages in this book reads, "Even when no one else seems to recognize how truly remarkable we are, we always have ourselves, the one inexhaustible resource for positive reinforcement, the one person who will always proudly wave our personal flag."
This is a wonderful message to use as an affirmation, because as one says these words, out loud, with closed eyes, 3 times per day, for 21 days (enough time to form new habits), you see, feel and hear more of your connection to the human race.
And it is in this new place, one is able to transcend the self and focus upon the needs of others around us, while we fulfill our own needs.
It is also the best way to follow the path that you are here to travel.
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In this sense, in this book Strauss related us the answers to that's questions. He teaches us three different, but complementary, views of the city: the political, the philosophic and the historical perspective of the city.
He gives us numerous clues that it's must take us to value the risks of the single natural human association. He pushes us to think, in the last part of the book, about the risks of overcoming the natural limits of the city. So,he invites us to share his discussion as regards the world state.
As it's common in their books, it is an excellent index from the problems to those faces the political philosophy. I recommend it to you.
edsallent@eresmas.com
Some of them were nothing more (or less) than philosophers, like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; some others, like Thucydides and Xenophon, were hard-die warriors as well. In a sense, they could not be more realistic. For justice was also understood by them as the outcome of political prudence or the practical wisdom to handle situations in order to serving right and reasonably yielding to compulsion altogether. And how was it that the classics accomplished so unexpected a synthesis of the idea of Justice as a heavenly reward for the wise management of the clash between Right and Compulsion in the pursuit of common happiness? Leo Strauss masterfully tells us in The City and Man
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Of course, there is a price to pay for such bold and foolhardy adventurism, and Leo pays it by way of isolation, deprivation, and dealing with the elements. Before the smoke clears, his girlfriend/wife has exhausted her patience and tolerance for the difficult living conditions and the incredible isolation, and flees in desperation back to something better approximating normal human contact and civilization. Thus Leo and son are left to find their own truths and their own future in the splendid isolation of the Alaskan tundra in sight of Mount McKinley. This is a remarkable tale, told in brash but sometimes soaring prose by a gifted young writer, and I soon recognized that often my frustration was with the fact that he kept succeeding at things I thought were dangerously foolish to attempt.
Finally I realized somewhere along the way that my concern was exactly the reason I am sitting in this armchair reading the book instead of following in his footsteps. I am too settled and "civilized' to try to do what he does with fervor and enthusiasm, and it is this remarkable quality of his, his zany and almost mystical faith in himself that makes the book so interesting and so easy to read. One caution; he is not an easy guy to empathize with, and he sometimes has an annoying arrogance, self-absorption and a tendency toward self-righteousness that is hard to bear, but you will enjoy his tale and all the strange and off-beat characters he bumps into, interacts with, and includes in this superbly well-written voyage of self-realization and discovery. The book is curently 'out of print', but I trust you can find it through a good search as a used commodity. By the way, if publishers can find an excuse to put books like "Running to the Mountain" about a New Jersey suburbanite's silly attempts to become a "mountain man" in rural New York state into paperback, they should also be able do so for this real adventure story. Obviously,I would love to see it come out in paperback, and be much more widely read! Enjoy!
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These case studies reflect my life. This is what I do and how we do it. The book is refreshingly honest with direct care workers point of views. A must read for anyone considering the field of ABA or even mildly interested.
The people are all different, but the point is always the same. it's always for the kids.