All History is Sacred
Headwork, mindscape––to keep track of powerful, commonsense notions as well as unusual, esoteric ideas. Item. One’s life is defined not by the number of years, not by its fleeting rank, title, or status, but by its guiding idea. Some, perhaps many, pass their years without an awareness of what form that idea might take. To […]
Clarity and Inconsistency
Misread signals, miscommunication, divergent interpretations––the disconnect between the speaker’s message and the listener’s response. Any number of reasons might explain this. Comprehension. The listener does not understand what’s being expressed. It could be the terminology being used is tied to a particular specialty. It could be the message itself expresses a thought foreign to the […]
The Supremacy of Facts
The typical case is fact-specific where the outcome turns on the precise circumstances involved. Large ideas—the right to privacy, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, etc.—really do not play that important a role. The finder of fact is more interested in answering a simple question—what actually happened? But at the appellate level courts routinely have […]
Invisible Facts
Matter, we are told, has three primary states—solid, liquid, and gas. Today of course scientists recognize many more states of matter, including plasma as well as the more recently discovered states of matter such as superfluid, quantum spin liquid, string-net liquid, and many others. However, the basic framework into which the facts of a contested […]
Motive’s Irrelevance
It may seem surprising to some that a negligence case brought to recover damages turns entirely on conduct. For some, this may feel a bit incomplete. Genuine culpability, it would seem, would require at least some degree of ill motive or improper design. If the person’s intentions are entirely benevolent but their conduct inadvertently causes […]
