Law in Contemporary Society

View   r3  >  r2  ...
JustinPurtleThirdPaper 3 - 17 Aug 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
Line: 1 to 1
 
META TOPICPARENT name="ThirdPaper"

Cannibalism and the Common Law

Line: 27 to 27
 

-- JustinPurtle - 16 May 2009 \ No newline at end of file

Added:
>
>
  • The essay begins asking a question directed at the conscious roots of social policy: why punish Dudley & Stephens? This is a sound inquiry, which you almost immediately abandon for an unprovable inquiry into the imperialist mindset in relation to the case. Your reliance on Katherine Biber's silly piece in the Sydney Law Journal doesn't help you to maintain equilibrium, to be sure, but your decision to rely upon her after you read carefully enough (you did read carefully enough, right?) to notice that she gets the result in R. v. Dudley & Stephens wrong implies a preference for the theoretically complicated over the true.

  • I don't doubt the presence of this among other unconscious aspects in the various social and individual behaviors that form parts of the story of the Mignonette's crew. But the gap between the reasons given for convicting Dudley and Stephens and the unconscious desire to punish them in order to make "cannibals" out of "natives" is too wide to be covered by the jump between paragraphs. One can go less far than Biber and do better, but it is impossible to fare farther, I think, without doing worse, and that's the problem of this draft. Why don't we go back to the conscious level and settle that, before we depart again for the realms where the history becomes noticeably more difficult?
 \ No newline at end of file

Revision 3r3 - 17 Aug 2009 - 19:28:07 - EbenMoglen
Revision 2r2 - 19 May 2009 - 03:29:38 - LaurenRosenberg
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
Syndicate this site RSSATOM