Academic

Ruminations V: False Inferences in Shoes

Posted on February 05, 2009
Nietzsche once notedThe art of drawing inferences. The greatest progress men have made lies in their learning how to draw correct inferences. That is by no means something natural, as Schopenhauer assumes when he says: 'Of inference, all are capable; of judgment, only a few...

Ruminations IV

Posted on February 04, 2009
A sign of the power of mass democracy, and its maturity, is the privileging of gesture as a basis of policy. The greater the number of direct participants in the deployment of participatory political power, the simpler the expression of policy and the greater the need to hide its reality in complex documents, regulations, policies and processes that remain opaque to the electorate and that insulate elected officials from responsibility...

Ruminations III

Posted on February 03, 2009
The Divine is said to be able to see everything be everywhere, understand everything, judge, punish, forgive and direct. The Divine, now incarnated through man, has become an aggregation of recording devices. The spark of the divine is now measured in access to this recorded memory, and its control and use the mark of the strength of the connection to Truth...

Ruminations II

Posted on February 02, 2009
Vienna is a city of many profound insights. One of the greatest is expressed in its architecture. As the Empire for which it served as a capital expanded abroad and rotted within in the 19th century, the architectural expression of that outward form of the state reached an apogee of grandeur that continues to draw tourists from all over the world...

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Ruminations I

Posted on February 01, 2009
All conduct is now moral, in the sense that it is measured and judged. The new moral conduct is the outward expression of an inner fear--of exposure, of being recorded, observed, of the fear of the consequences of being caught failing to confess, to report to expose oneself...

State Owned Enterprises and Sovereign Investment in Foreign Economic Entities

Posted on January 28, 2009
Much attention has recently been devoted to the rise of sovereign wealth funds. These entities present great difficulties in the application of current legal frameworks because they straddle the traditional divide between public and private law, between states as market regulators and market participants...

Smart Power and Soft War: Egypt Versus Syria and Qatar in Gaza

Posted on January 27, 2009
I have written of the great change in American approaches to the management of the its role in the world on the ascendancy of the administration of President Obama. I have suggested how the many aspects of liberal internationalism touched on in that speech suggest great possibilities for advancing an American agenda...

Embracing Networked Managerialism in the Service of a Global (American) Power

Posted on January 26, 2009
The American periodical Foreign Affairs recently congratulated itself for its role in serving as midwife to what appears to be the political line to be taken by the incoming Secretary of State, Mrs. H.R. Clinton. The Origins of Clinton's Soft Power, Foreign Affairs Newsletter, Jan...

Democracy Part XIV: ?For Now We See Through A Glass, Darkly; But Then Face to Face?; On President Obama's Inauguration Speech

Posted on January 21, 2009
The Christian Bible?s New Testament remains a powerful source of guidance in times of trouble in the United States. Recourse to its insights, molded to the tastes of the speaker, have been a hallmark of political speech since the founding of the Republic, especially on the cusp of revolutionary times...

Glimmerings of Rule of Law Through the Party Apparatus in Cuba: Raul Castro Speaks

Posted on January 18, 2009
I have been suggesting that it might be possible to construct a legitimately constitutionalist state grounded in single party governance. Backer, Larry Catá, The Party as Polity, the Communist Party, and the Chinese Constitutional State: A Theory of State-Party Constitutionalism (January 10, 2009), Journal of Chinese and Comparative Law, Vol...

Employees, the Enterprise and the State: Professor Mary Kreiner Ramirez on Whistleblower Protection

Posted on January 14, 2009
Professor Mary Kreiner Ramirez of Washburn University Law School has published an article well worth reading, "Blowing the Whistle on Whistleblower Protection: A Tale of Reform," 76:1 University of Cincinnati Law Review 183 (2007).Professor Ramirez has taken on a difficult problem in Blowing the Whistle, harmonizing the objectives of general framework legislation with the distinct imperatives of the specific regulatory contexts in which such a framework must be effectively implemented...

Global Economic Collapse and the Search for Sources of Values in Economic Theory: The Role of Religion, a Catholic Perspective

Posted on January 07, 2009
The following paper was presented on January 7, 2009 at the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting at the extended section program hosted by the Section on Socio-Economics in a Panel entitled: Socio-Economics and Faith in a Higher Power. The mwwting was held in San Diego, California...

Journalism and Self Referencing Systems

Posted on January 05, 2009
There is nothing like reading a good screed to get one thinking along different lines. One of the more bracing modern extended tirades I have run across is William Gaddis, Agapê Agape (New York: Penguin Books, 2002). The work is an extended tirade on the contradictions between the few and the many, the elite and the mob, the production of culture and its mechanical reproduction, and the hierarchy of those binaries...

On the 50th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution

Posted on January 01, 2009
It has been half a century since the present government of the Cuban Republic was established. That half century has seen great changes on the Island. It has also seen perhaps even greater changes in the United States, that turned from a de facto controller to an enemy of the regime, and which provided a safe haven for a vibrant segment of Cubans in a new land--from which they continue to prosper...

Fear: A Look Forward to 2009

Posted on December 31, 2008
In this final day of 2008, Friedrich Nietzsche provides the thought for the day, and a reminder of the ambiguities that may plague the year to come:"In the last analysis, 'love of the neighbor' is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary-illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor...

Guest Essay: Jason Buhi on Sovereign Wealth Funds

Posted on December 28, 2008
My former student, Jason Buhi, has recently written an excellent and provocative working paper on Sovereign Wealth Funds. He will be publishing the final version of the essay soon.Mr. Buhi graduated from Penn State Law School in 2006, and received an LL...

From Pedophiles to Retail Securities Con Men: On the Pathologies of Criminality and its Relation to the Public Policy of Legal Responses

Posted on December 24, 2008
Over the course of the last century, the movement to conflate criminality and pathology?to construct categories of mental illness and then to use that construction as a basis of controlling anti-social behavior beyond the criminal law, has continued to gain strength...

Neither Here nor There?Islamist or Transnational Constitutionalism in Pakistan and Egypt

Posted on December 22, 2008
div style="text-align: justify;"I have suggested that constitutionalism, as a legal and political subject can be understood as a world view. (Backer 2009). That world view produces an ideology that can be divided into five parts: br /blockquoteConstitutionalism is: (1) a system of classification, (2) the core object of which is to define the characteristics of constitutions (those documents organizing political power within an institutional apparatus), (3) to be used to determine the legitimacy of the constitutional system as conceived or as implemented, (4) based on rule of law as the fundamental postulate of government (that government be established and operated in a way that limits the ability of individuals to use government power for personal welfare maximizing ends), and (5) grounded on a metric of substantive values derived from a source beyond the control of any individual...

The Party as Polity, The Communist Party and the Chinese Constitutional State: A Theory of Party-State Constitutionalism

Posted on December 11, 2008
What follows is a working draft of the paper I presented as part of the panel, "Constitutionalism in China (Practice) (II)" held as part of the excellent conference, "Constitutionalism in China in the Past 100 Years and Its Future," sponsored by the Centre for Chinese and Comparative Law (RCCL) School of Law, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, and its director Dr...

Castro on Obama: Class and Intellectual Allegiances Trump Race

Posted on December 09, 2008
One used to speak of President Bush as a "teflon" president--a man against which little scandal attached. President elect Obama appears to have inherited a similar quality, especially among his natural critics in places like Cuba. One gets a great sense of both the reticence of forwign leaders to criticize the incoming President and also the dismay at what they see as a return not to "change" but pre-Bush business as usual, in the recent quirte disappointed but restrained reaction of the former Cuban President to the announcement of Mr...

Scientific Development (?????) and Deepening CCP Governance at the Local Level--The Challenge

Posted on December 06, 2008
I have previously discussed the importance of so-called ideological campaigns to the development of Chinese political norms. See Larry Catá Backer, The Rule of Law, the Chinese Communist Party, and Ideological Campaigns: Sange Daibiao (the 'Three Represents'), Socialist Rule of Law, and Modern Chinese Constitutionalism...

Theatre of the Absurd: The "Blockade" of Gaza

Posted on December 04, 2008
Much has been made of blockades in recent years. Sometimes they are viewed as valuable efforts in the service of some worthy cause that brings about change--the isolation of apartheid South Africa is a case in point. Sometimes, and especially in highly contested political battles, where there is no consensus, blockades are viewed as less positive...

Mumbai Massacre: Parsis, Jews and the Rise of Warfare for the Masses

Posted on November 27, 2008
People complain about the religious intolerance of the West. And in particular they point to the rising Islamophobia of Western culture. And they are right to worry about such mindlessness in the development of cultural attitudes and the conduct of overt and covert political activity...

A Post Colonial Spectacle: Carving Up Zimbabwe

Posted on November 25, 2008
I like opera, especially European opera of the 18th through 20th centuries. There is nothing like it for its power to fuse distinctive musical forms within a theatrical experience in which all human proclivities are intensified and exaggerated to illuminate their reality, and its pathos...

A Constitutional Court for China Within the Chinese Communist Party: Scientific Development and the Institutional Role of the CCP

Posted on November 20, 2008
There are great shifts in constitutional thinking taking place today in China among elite Chinese constitutional scholars. Among its elite constitutional law scholars, Ho Jintao's concept of scientific development (?????,) has taken a concrete turn in the advancement of theories of Chinese constitutionalism under its current normative framework...

Report From the National Feedlot: Looking at the U.S. Investments in Banks Under EESA 2008

Posted on November 18, 2008
My research assistant, Sandra Gonzalez del Pilar prepared the following update on activity under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:The Troubled Asset Relief Program (?TARP?) originally contemplated under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (?EESA?) ?enacted into law on October 3, 2008- has mutated and will likely continue to morph...

Castro and the G-20 Meeting Remaking Global Finance--Betrayal or Socialization in the Culture of Power?

Posted on November 17, 2008
<div style="text-align: justify;">There is nothing like a little betrayal to sharpen the mind. . .and the pen. So Fidel Castro, working diligently for over a year to prepare his allies, principally Lula of Brazil, to serve as the Cuban proxy at the G-20 meeting, has found that money and power (and the allure of admission to the highest levels of inter-governmental political community) can trump ideology...

Cuban Puritanism and American Internationalism on the Road to the Global Financial Estates General of 2008

Posted on November 11, 2008
"On October 22, the White House announced that President Bush invited the heads of state of the Group of 20 (G20) to join him for a summit on November 15 to discuss the current global financial and economic crisis. The G20 includes 10 major emerging economies of the world?including Brazil, China, India, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa among others?along with the members of the G8, Australia and the European Union...

Brazil and the Washington Consensus

Posted on November 10, 2008
Over the last several weeks, Brazil's leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has been lobbying critical actors in the financial regulatory arena for the upcoming international convocation of richer nations to discuss the world financial crisis. This week he has been to Italy...

Skunk: Israel Advances Non-Lethal Methods of Social Control, The Palestinian Government May be the First to Purchase It

Posted on November 08, 2008
For years,the Israeli government has been criticized severely for the way it which it deals with both insurgency and protest. It has become something of a truism within the European media class and certain elements of European civil society that the Israeli's are always to be criticized in this respect...

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