Law and Magic Blog

Vanishing Act

Here's a story I read about in this month's Genii Magazine, then tracked to the Weekly Japan Update. An enterprising (and hungry) fellow visits an eatery, then tells the staff and others in the place that he doesn't have enough money on him to pay for the meal, but if they pony up the cash, he'll entertain them with some prestidigitation. Of course he doesn't, instead making tracks out the door. Apparently he has disappeared some hefty sums of money out of the wallets of those in the potential audiences. The moral? If you're going to be kind to a starving soul, just be kind. Don't expect magic.

Poof! You Can Practice in Wisconsin!

Like magic, the "diploma privilege" in the past has allowed, and continues to allow, graduates of certain law schools in a particular state to practice law in that state without taking the bar. At one time, several states offered the privilege, Montana among them. Now it appears that Wisconsin is the only state that still allows grads of its law schools, the University of Wisconsin and Marquette, to practice without taking the bar. (They do have to meet certain requirements set by the Wisconsin Supreme Court). Out of state law school graduates, however, must take the bar in order to practice. An out of state law school graduate, Christopher Wiesmuller, challenged the rule, only to have his lawsuit tossed by a district court judge, but the Seventh Circuit has reinstated the suit.

Should a state or its designated representatives be allowed to grant such privileges to grads of its in-state law schools? What's the reason for offering magic entrance to such a desirable profession? And what's the justification for allowing it to continue? If out of state graduates are certified as a class and the suit continues, we may hear arguments pro and con on this issue in future.

The Second Sex (Even After Death)

Gina Barreca, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, and a blogger with the Chronicle's Brainstorm blog, has a fun post about gender differences between ghosts. She comments both on what seems like an interminable list of "reality TV" shows about ghosts to which we now seem to be treated, and on the ghost stories she's been reading (call it research). Among her observations:

Unlike the ghost of Jacob Marley, “dead as a doornail,” who appears to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, the ghosts of women tend not to walk the earth for penance. They don’t come around, for example “wearing the chains they forged in life,” as is the case with Scrooge’s former partner. Instead, female spirits seem to sense that something has escaped them during their lifetimes. They come back, not to frighten those they left behind, but to console them.

Girl ghosts can be found in kitchens, laundry rooms, flee markets, and hospitals (where they appear as pretty young nurses still trying to care for their long-lost patients, or sad specters of those long-lost patients who rang for a nurse, but whose bell was never heard — I’ve heard a lot of ghost stories from people who work in hospitals).

Girl ghosts return to those places they inhabited in life, not so much the creatures of midnight walks or foggy moors, but as less vibrant versions of the same women who occupy those places today. It’s as if the wall between the living and dead has thinned and become permeable. It seems boy ghosts come back to avenge what happened to them while alive; girl ghosts return because, having been denied the chance to fully participate in life, they’re damned if they’re not going to get their money’s worth after they die.

Now, I'm not certain I agree completely. I think I've seen some accounts that attribute vindictiveness to some "female entities" (think of the Bell Witch), and some accounts that allege that male ghosts hang around the places where they have passed. But on the whole, Dr. Barreca may be on to something. It may make a kind of weird sense that (assuming that ghosts exist, and in my humble opinion that's a BIG assumption), female ghosts, overwhelmingly represented in the helping professions, would continue in those professions. However, would they carry on helping? I suppose there's no Social Security or pension after death. Or would they pick up on the feminist revolution, and decide to join in? Maybe that's the reason for the banging and levitations. Do ghosts have rights? I think I smell a conference (or at least a panel) on Gender Differences, Rights, and Sentience in Paranormal Entities. Anyone up for applying for a grant?

Monk and the Electro-Magnet Illusion

Attention: Spoiler

The second season of the USA detective series Monk includes an episode that makes use of Robert-Houdin's famous electro-magnet illusion as the gimmick through which the killer commits the murder. In "Mr. Monk Meets the Playboy", first aired August 15, 2003, a publisher of what are colloquially known as "men's magazines" does in a corporate honcho who wants to shut down his publication, and consequently, his lovely little bachelor playground. What does he use? That ubiquitous Robert-Houdin magnet. Monk figures it out when he realizes that all the electronic equipment in the victim's apartment has gone blooey. I'm not an expert on magnets; is this magnet powerful enough to do what it's supposed to in this episode? Nevertheless, good fun, even if you already know howdunit.

There's Such a Thing As Being TOO Multicultural

When the Miss Toronto Tourism people went looking for judges, they thought the reigning Miss Canada Plus, Stephanie Conover, would be a good choice, until they found out that the practicing Wiccan reads tarot cards and practices reiki, a Japanese healing art. So they sent her a letter, quoting the Bible and telling her, among other things, that "We hope that Stephanie Conover will turn from these belief systems and will repent from her practice of them." Ms. Conover told the Toronto paper the Star that "she's looking into challenging the Miss Toronto Tourism pageant in court, or at a human rights tribunal."

I checked out the Miss Toronto Tourism website and found this explanation of its purpose.

The Miss Toronto Tourism Charities started in the year 1999 by its founder Susan Reid. In the year 2002, the organization is newly managed by its Board Of Directors. The main purpose of our organization is to promote Tourism, Charities, and Events in the City of Toronto. Miss Toronto Tourism 2007 is represented by our present title holder, Jessica Barone who helps promote different Events and Charities in the City of Toronto. Miss Multicultural promotes Multiculturalism, as Toronto is the City of all cultures. Miss Toronto Tourism 2007 brings public awareness to Events and and Charities in the City of Toronto.

I'll put aside the awkward sentence structure and punctuation. Who or what is Miss Multicultural? A different person, title or pageant? Or is that a typo, and is the writer actually referring to Miss Toronto Tourism? In any case, if the purpose is to promote multiculturalism, Ms. Conover looks fairly multicultural to me, and multiculturalism in a judge (who is also a pageant winner) would seem to be a good thing. But the pageant officials are standing on their rights to choose their judges, since the pageant is an independent, and apparently private, entity. Stay tuned.

Some People Think IDIC Is the Answer, And For Some People It's the Force

A new religion: The Church of Yoda.

A New Article on Religion and the First Amendment

John M. Kang, St. Thomas  University School of Law, has published "Deliberating the Divine: On Extending the Justification From Truth To Religious Expression," at 73 Brooklyn Law Review 1 (2007). Here is the abstract.

The principal argument used by the U.S. Supreme Court to justify the right of free speech derives from the assumption that deliberation over a diversity of perspectives is more likely than their paucity to help the audience discover some provisional truth. I call this the justification from truth and its advocates are plentiful and prominent, including justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Louis Brandeis as well as the philosophers John Stuart Mill and John Milton.

Puzzlingly, the Court has generally avoided applying this justification to religious expression and neither the Court nor any scholar has offered a sufficiently developed account of what an application of the justification from truth to religious expression might look like. I attempt to do so in this article. The justification from truth is one of the most discussed topics for law since the European Enlightenment and the topic of religion has obviously provoked voluminous discussion. I hope to offer in my article a novel and engaging conceptual bridge between these two categories that will be of interest to scholars who study constitutional law as well as to those who study church-state relations and the many readers who find intriguing questions about the search for religious truth. I employ a series of case suites in the latter part of the article manuscript to illustrate how the justification from truth can be applied to religious expression, and it is my hope that such case suites will serve as a useful practical guide to judges.

Download the entire article from SSRN here.

In part, Professor Kang discusses the attitude of various thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson toward miracles.

A diversity of perspectives concerning the nature of religion can help people to arrive at more justifiable conclusions about religious truth. While he is generally remembered as the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson was a thoughtful student of religion, and his arguments deserve to be considered because he illustrates how a diversity of viewpoints can be used to analyze the integrity of a faith from a perspective outside the religious canon. During his presidency, Jefferson was condemned by some religionists as a stubborn atheist, but he took religious faith quite seriously and insisted that people’s religious choices should be respected, especially if they were the product of careful deliberation over competing viewpoints, including competing viewpoints that were grounded in those modes of logic and deduction characteristic of secular enlightenment inquiry. A sustained explanation of his position is found in his letter to Peter Carr, his nephew. Jefferson writes to him:

Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object [of religion]. In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, and the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand, shake off all the fears and servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Striking in the passage is its employment of those tropes that structured Justice Brandeis’s Whitney concurrence: reason, fear and courage. Like Brandeis, Jefferson contrasts reason, which does not come naturally but must be propelled by courage, against prejudice, which is a byproduct of fear. Reason, as Jefferson conceives it, resembles Brandeis’s conception in that it is meant to evoke a posture of critical inquiry, not necessarily a deeper philosophical commitment that rejects religion or considers reason incompatible with religion. Indeed, the lens of reason could, according to Jefferson, theoretically steer its possessor to admit the existence of God. [pp. 50-51; footnotes omitted]

And More On Those UFOs

Okay, now there ARE photos and films of those lights in the sky, over Stephenville and (now) Dublin, Texas. See here.

Luck, Planning, and Law

The current issue, volume 9, number 1 (2008) of Theoretical Inquiries in Law is devoted to "Moral and Legal Luck". Among the articles included are Meir Dan-Cohen, Luck and Identity and Tom Baker, Liability Insurance, Moral Luck, and Auto Accidents.

The authors of these essays explore, among other things, critical thinking, moral and legal responsibility, and predestination. Check out Benjamin C. Zipursky's Two Dimensions of Responsibility in Crime, Tort, and Moral Luck, or Jeremy Waldron's Lucky in Your Judge. Interesting stuff.

Keep Watching the Skies, or WalMart is Everywhere

A number of people near Stephenville, Texas say they saw a UFO, "bigger than a WalMart" recently,(although I don't know how one can judge the size of an object in the sky if one is lacking reference points) that sped away at 3000 MPH. That sighting caused a lot of talk. The media had descended on the town to get first hand reports. The lights in the sky apparently started last week. Here's coverage from The Daily Telegraph. But, strangely enough, no one had video or still pictures, which normally accompany these kinds of sightings. Rats.

Still, if you don't know what it is, to you it's a UFO--an unidentified flying object--until someone explains it to you, which seems now to have happened. The military, which initially said it scrambled no jets to chase whatever the thing was, now says it was on manuevers in the area, flying 10 F-16s, and there was no flying thing as big as a WalMart. Glad we got that cleared up, but why couldn't the DOD have told us that to begin with? Lack of transparency and delay are the sorts of things that encourage otherwise rational people to start constructing conspiracy theories, and I can't say I blame them, particularly.