Thursday, October 13, 2005
Blogs are great because no-one reads them!
From Cynthia Gornick's excellent history of the abortion "wars," "Articles Of Faith":
"Douglas' majority opinion in Griswold was to become famous among many generations of law students chiefly for the elegant and somewhat mysterious vocabulary it used to identify the places in whch this "zone of privacy" could be located in the Constitution. The Constitution's Bill of Rights, Douglas wrote, contained certain "penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." And what exactly was a penumbra? Apparently it was a semishadow, one law review author wrote after the ruling, having consulted his Oxford English Dictionary: the "partially shaded region around the shadow of an opaque body, where only a part of the light from the luminous body is cut off."
This is pretty atypical passage of the book. I love it for so successfully using a narrative structure. Also, it clearly explains the biology of pregnancy and abortion, the history of the law, the ideologies and parties in conflict, the interplay between law, legislation and politics. Most preciously, it challenged my opinions and left me to reconsider the question afresh. Moreover, it investigates the fascinating question: What is it about the abortion conflict that takes over people's lives, gives their lives meaning, one single purpose?
Anyhow, I like that passage because of the amusing light it sheds on the law community. There's nothing I like better than a book that sheds light on the sociology of a community, from it's history to it's inside jokes etc. (ie. the movie "The Artistocrats"... heaven!)
More:
"'We need not resolve the difficult question of when life beings,' began what in right-to-life ranks were soon to become the most famous two sentences in the history of the Supreme Court. 'When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a postion to speculate as to the answer.'"
From Cynthia Gornick's excellent history of the abortion "wars," "Articles Of Faith":
"Douglas' majority opinion in Griswold was to become famous among many generations of law students chiefly for the elegant and somewhat mysterious vocabulary it used to identify the places in whch this "zone of privacy" could be located in the Constitution. The Constitution's Bill of Rights, Douglas wrote, contained certain "penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." And what exactly was a penumbra? Apparently it was a semishadow, one law review author wrote after the ruling, having consulted his Oxford English Dictionary: the "partially shaded region around the shadow of an opaque body, where only a part of the light from the luminous body is cut off."
This is pretty atypical passage of the book. I love it for so successfully using a narrative structure. Also, it clearly explains the biology of pregnancy and abortion, the history of the law, the ideologies and parties in conflict, the interplay between law, legislation and politics. Most preciously, it challenged my opinions and left me to reconsider the question afresh. Moreover, it investigates the fascinating question: What is it about the abortion conflict that takes over people's lives, gives their lives meaning, one single purpose?
Anyhow, I like that passage because of the amusing light it sheds on the law community. There's nothing I like better than a book that sheds light on the sociology of a community, from it's history to it's inside jokes etc. (ie. the movie "The Artistocrats"... heaven!)
More:
"'We need not resolve the difficult question of when life beings,' began what in right-to-life ranks were soon to become the most famous two sentences in the history of the Supreme Court. 'When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a postion to speculate as to the answer.'"
