"In order to return to the university, some students would be required to complete a 49-page set of reading and tasks — 'modules' — known as the Ethos Integrity Series..."

"... geared at helping participants 'make gains' in 'moral reasoning' and 'ethical decision making.'... Some students would be assigned a 'reflection paper'... address[ing] several questions, among them: What are your values? Did the decision you made align with your personal values? What have you done or need still to do to make things right? Explicitly instructed not to 'justify' their actions, the students were told to turn their papers in by May 29 in '12-point Times New Roman or similar font.'..."

Writes Ginia Bellafante, in "Why Is N.Y.U. Forcing Protesters to Write Apology Letters?/The university calls it a 'restorative practice'; the students call it a coerced confession" (NYT).

A university spokesman characterized the assignment as consistent with what are called "restorative practices." Bellafante writes:

In this instance, though, the exercise cannibalizes the mission, favoring a will to dishonesty — inviting a charade of guilt. Anyone driven to protest is marching and chanting precisely as an expression of a certain set of fiercely held moral beliefs and values — not in deviation from them....

In this instance... what about other instances? Is this instance so special? I'd like to see more depth on this topic of "restorative practices" and the horrors of forced speech and compulsory insincerity. 

I liked this comment over there, from Jeremy:

"Out of control New York University protesters swarmed and berated an NYPD chief and his officers – calling them 'f–king fascists'..."

"... after they cuffed one of the demonstrators at an anti-Israel rally, wild new video shows. The viral video... shows NYPD Assistant Chief James McCarthy and his officers being chased and surrounded by protestors on Monday night while trying to get inside the NYU Catholic Center after arresting one of them. 'F–k you! F–k you, pigs,' the crowd could be heard shouting as they harassed the officers and demanded they release the woman in custody."

From "NYPD chief swarmed by anti-Israel protesters and berated while seeking shelter in NYU building" (NY Post)(video at link).

NYPD Assistant Chief James Mccarthy and a few officers are chased by protestors after making an arrest at NYU last night.

Mccarthy is seen attempting to get inside the NYU Catholic Center, but couldn't open the door. He eventually finds an unlocked door around the corner.… pic.twitter.com/WVVriOBbMP

— Peter H (@peterhvideo) April 24, 2024

From the top comment at the Post: "I don't believe this ever would have been allowed to take place when Giuliani and Bratton were in charge. There was law and order in those days. Sadly, not sure we will ever see anything like that again."

Meanwhile, Giuliani just got indicted, for something that happened back in 2020.

What are the chances that in the normal course of blogging, I would encounter 2 NYU bioethics professors in a row?

After writing the last post — the one began with a quote from an NYU bioethics professor instructing us to view a violent attack in Prospect Park as "complicated" — the next article I see makes me want to blog it and begin with a quote that just happens to come from an NYU bioethics professor.

The article is "Cyborg cockroaches are coming, and they just want to help/Inspired by insects, robotic engineers are creating machines that could aid in search-and-rescue, pollinate plants and sniff out gas leaks" (WaPo).

Here's the chunk of text that I found: 

When it comes to cyborg insects, not everyone is excited. Jeff Sebo, an animal bioethics professor at New York University, said he worries how live insects might feel being controlled by humans while carrying heavy technology. It’s unclear if they feel pain or distress from it, he said, but that doesn’t mean humans should ignore that.

“We’re not even paying lip service to their welfare or rights,” he said. “We’re not even going through the motion of having laws or policies or review boards in place so that we can halfheartedly try to reduce the harms that we impose on them.”

There seems to be a theme in NYU bioethics: When you see the empathy going one way, search for other possible recipients of empathy. Challenge people to widen their scope of empathy and not to become over-attached to what has the most obvious appeal to your emotions.

"Hey Siri, play music."

I said into my AirPods. So nonspecific! I was out and about and not in a good position to skip things, but I was also forcing myself to accept whatever it was that I had put into my iPhone music library. I have so many audiobooks, but they're in a different app, so it's only rarely that spoken word comes up when I'm playing the "Music" app randomly. I can tell Siri to skip a track, so it's not as though I'd need to dig the iPhone out of my bag and squint to read it in the sunlight. But I sometimes adopt a discipline of listening to what The Randomness wants from me at any given moment.

Yesterday, it was "Kaddish," written and spoken by Allen Ginsberg, because a CD collection I bought long ago — "Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs" — took up residence in the Music app and not the audiobook app. There's other spoken word in the Music app. In fact, there was one thing I told Siri to skip yesterday — the oral argument in King v. Burwell. I will submit to The Randomness, but only so far. I considered skipping "Kaddish," but, I thought, I can do this. How long can it be? I dug in. It's an hour. (Audio. Text.)

Anyway... that radically changed the nature of my outing. But I stuck it out. Sample text:

"When Chelsea Clinton showed up at a vigil Friday night in New York City for victims of the New Zealand mosque massacre, she was confronted by a small group of college students who blamed her for inciting the violence."

"Last month, the former first daughter joined throngs of Democrats and Republicans in condemning language used by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), one of the two first Muslim women elected to Congress last year, to critique U.S. policy in Israel as perpetuating anti-Semitic stereotypes. At the vigil, the New York University students said reactions like Clinton’s 'stoked' hatred of Muslims. 'This, right here, is a result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world,' one student told Clinton, according to a video of the confrontation. 'And I want you to know that and I want you to feel that deep down inside. Forty-nine people died because of the rhetoric you put out there.' 'I’m so sorry that you feel that way,' Clinton said. 'Certainly, it was never my intention. I do believe words matter. I believe we have to show solidarity.'"

WaPo reports. Here's the video:

Here's the video that @Esor__Fasa put up where her friend is attacking Chelsea Clinton at a memorial service and linking her to the New Zealand massacre because Chelsea dared to call out Ilhan Omar's anti-Semitism.

After heavy criticism, @Esor__Fasa deleted her account. pic.twitter.com/njjL9LsRKI

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) March 16, 2019

Did NYU serve a racist dinner to celebrate Black History Month?

The NYT describes the controversy:

On Tuesday, a dining hall at New York University advertised a special meal in honor of Black History Month. On the menu? Barbecue ribs, corn bread, collard greens, and two beverages with racist connotations: Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water.

Nia Harris, a sophomore in N.Y.U.’s College of Arts & Science, sought an explanation from Weinstein Passport Dining Hall’s head cook. The cook dismissed her objections, Ms. Harris said in an email to university officials, telling her that the Kool-Aid was actually fruit punch (it was not, she said) and that the dining hall served fruit-flavored water “all the time” (it does, she said, but not watermelon).

The head cook also told Ms. Harris that the employees who planned the menu were black.

Ms. Harris, 19, posted a screen shot of her email on Facebook, along with a post that began, “This is what it’s like to be a black student at New York University.” It spread quickly....

The university president blamed Aramark, the company that provides the university's food service. Aramark blamed 2 of its workers. Supposedly, they deviated from the company's "longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion." So those 2 guys got fired, which can't be what Nia Harris wanted, can it?

In a phone interview Wednesday evening, Ms. Harris said she chose to believe that the Aramark employees had acted out of ignorance of their menu’s implications, not out of malice. But she added that, while she was glad they had been fired, it should not have been her responsibility to point out the problem — one that she said went far beyond a single incident.

To fire the 2 low-level workers is to say this is not a systemic problem but an inconsequential deviation from the norm by 2 inconsequential people. They're out and now we can return to our proud tradition of diversity and inclusion. [AND: The article is cagy about revealing the facts, but if I'm reading this correctly, the 2 men who lost their job are black.]

ADDED: This post caused me to make a new tag, "watermelon," and to apply to posts in the archive. In this process of retroactive tagging, I found 2 fascinating things.

First, the time Dan Rather said, about our first black President, Barack Obama, "if a state trooper is flagging down the traffic on a highway, Obama couldn't sell watermelons."

Second, the story of how Sayyid Qutb — who inspired al Qaeda — grew to hate Americans. So I dug up the text of "The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values" Sayyid Qutb ash-Shaheed (1951). The relevant excerpt:

As for their food, that too is very strange. You will attract attention, and cause disbelief, if you request another cube of sugar for the cup of coffee or tea that you drink in America. Sugar is reserved for pickles and salads, while salt, my good sir, is saved for apples and watermelons.

On your plate you will find combined a piece of salted meat, some boiled corn, some boiled peas, and some sweet jam. And on top of all this is what Americans call gravy, which is composed sometimes of fat, vinegar, flour, broth, apples, salt and pepper, and sugar, and water.

We were at the table in one of the cafeterias of the University, when I saw some Americans putting salt on their watermelon. And I was prepared to see these strange fads and also to play jokes on them from time to time. And I said, faking innocence, "I see you sprinkling salt on the watermelon." One of them said," Yes! Don't you do the same in Egypt?" I said, "No! We sprinkle pepper!" A surprised and curious giri said," How would that taste?" I said, "You can try for yourself!" She tasted it and said approvingly," It's tasty!" and so did all the others.

On another day in which watermelon was served, and most of the same people were at the table, I said "Some of us in Egypt use sugar at times instead of pepper." One of them tried it and said, "How tasty!" and so did all the others.

How nice we were to him!

"NYU Students Protest Inclusion of ICE Recruiters in Law School Job Fair."

NYU Local reports:

Students have been asked to gather at the NYU Law School’s Vanderbilt Hall on Thursday at 2PM in solidarity against the inclusion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruiters in the school’s Public Interest Job Fair. Allowing ICE recruiters on campus is particularly sensitive at this time given President Trump’s recent executive order and NYU’s vague position on Sanctuary Campus status.

I don't see an update there. What happened?

Googling, I find "Hundreds attend IYSSE rallies to defend immigrant rights in New York and San Diego" at World Socialist Web Site — "Students and workers at San Diego State University (SDSU) and New York University (NYU) rallied Thursday afternoon" — but that's not the Law School event. Somewhat interesting though:

IYSSE leaders who spoke at the rallies provided an international socialist perspective, emphasizing that Trump’s attack on immigrants is part of an attack on the entire working class supported by both Democrats and Republicans. Speakers reviewed the danger of war, the terrible social conditions facing workers and youth and the need to break with the Democratic Party and build an independent party of the working class.

Liberals attacked from the left — now, that is one of my favorite subjects:

Nicole, a student at SDSU, said after the meeting that she was particularly happy to hear about the IYSSE’s affiliation with the SEP, stating that the two-party system was a dead end. “You know, we have never had a poor president,” Nicole explained, adding, “What do they know about the interests of the poor?”

"They are actually pushing me out the door for having a different perspective," said the "liberal studies" professor.

Michael Rectenwald, 57, is on paid leave, he says, for what he wrote pseudonymously on Twitter. Beginning in mid-September, calling himself Deplorable NYU Prof, Rectenwald tweeted about campus things like safe spaces, trigger warnings, and Halloween costumes. For example, about the costumes, he tweeted: "The scariest thing about Halloween today is . . . the liberal totalitarian costume surveillance. NYU RAs gone mad." (RAs had put out a flyer about avoiding offensive Halloween costumes.)

Speaking of costumes, a pseudonym on Twitter works as a kind of costume, a disguise, allowing someone to inhabit a character. Twitter, with a pseudonym, can be a safe space for the writer, who has a real-world reputation and relationships to protect as he works out his transgressive ideas in public.

But Rectenwald was not outed. He chose to unmask himself, to connect the tweets with his name. He gave an interview to the student newspaper, Washington Square News. Two days later:

A 12-person committee calling itself the Liberal Studies Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group, including two deans, published a letter to the editor in the same paper.

“As long as he airs his views with so little appeal to evidence and civility, we must find him guilty of illogic and incivility in a community that predicates its work in great part on rational thought and the civil exchange of ideas,” they wrote of the untenured assistant professor. 

I don't see any "illogic." Maybe "liberal studies" is a field where "logic" is used loosely. I can see that "liberal" is used loosely. As for civility... well, you know I have a tag for that: civility bullshit. It represents my belief that demands for civility are always bullshit — not really about a neutral value but an effort to get your opponents to tone it down.

Anyway, Rectenwald says the dean and an HR representative met with him and "expressed concern about [his] mental health" and wanted him to "leave and get help." An NYU spokesman asserts that the leave does not have anything to do with the tweeting and his opinions. Perhaps the university means that it's not reacting to the substance of the ideas in the words, but the words as evidence of insanity. That would deserve comparison to the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.

Slate/Inside Higher Ed has an article by Colleen Flaherty on Rectenwald's predicament. I see there that Rectenwald says he is a communist and that he diagnoses the university community as insane:

Identity politics, over all, Rectenwald told the [student] newspaper, “have made an infirmary of the whole damn campus. Let’s face it: every room is like a hospital ward. What are we supposed to do? I can’t deal with it—it’s insane.” 

So what does this have to do with Donald Trump? The student newspaper interview asked that question because "deplorable" in the pseudonym made him seem like a Trump supporter (something he admits he intended to do). Rectenwald answered:

I don’t support Trump at all. I hate him — I think he’s horrible. I’m hiding amongst the alt-right, alright? And the point is, this character is meant to exhibit and illustrate the notion that it’s this crazy social-justice-warrior-knee-jerk-reaction-triggered-happy-safe-space-seeking-blah, blah, blah, blah culture that it’s producing this alt-right. Now, I’m not dumb enough to go there. And my own politics are very strong — I’m a left communist. But I think that in fact, the crazier and crazier that this left gets, this version of the left, the more the more the alt-right is going to be laughing their asses off plus getting more pissed. Every time a speaker is booed off campus or shooed off campus because they might say something that bothers someone, that just feeds the notion that the left is totalitarian, and they have a point....

Rectenwald chose to create an alternate identity on Twitter, to "hid[e] this character in the alt-right" — "because otherwise, the social justice warriors are going to come onto me like flies, and they can be so extreme... It’s a nightmare." That is, he's a lefty, criticizing lefties, but he wanted to disguise himself as a righty. Talk about costumes! When do we get to inhabit someone else's identity?

Quite aside from what's permissible and what deserves punishment — I'd say it's all permissible and unpunishable — when is it effective for a speaker to appear to stand on the opposite side from his true ideology? Does the speaker really know himself? Rectenwald seems pretty certain he's a communist and that the alt-right was his mask. That puts him in the tradition of mobys and false flag operations. But there are far more subtle situations, like this blog you are reading now.

"An anonymous person or group has started a 'Union of White NYU Students' Facebook page..."

"... these kinds of pages have cropped up at a number of universities that have sought to have a real dialogue about race and inclusion. There is no such organization as this at NYU. We call on all parties to contribute thoughtfully and respectfully to the discourse on race and to reject efforts to derail or distort the conversation."

"A message to the NYU community" at NYU's Facebook page. I just happened to randomly click on the NYU page. Wasn't looking for this.

Here's the "Union of White NYU Students" page. Here's a Gawker article about it: "Who’s Behind the Fake 'Union of White NYU Students'?"  Gawker contacted the anonymous administrator of the page, asking for proof that he was really an NYU student. The administrator responded but didn't break his anonymity, citing death threats and accusations. ("When I chose to do this, I knew that it would not be long before the accusations of KKK, Nazi etc came out. But I hope to use these to make my point. White identity cannot be discussed constructively because of this sort of slander.")

The Daily Beast take is "Racist Trolls Are Behind NYU’s ‘White Student Union’ Hoax."

"When I began as a young lawyer in the 1960s, text was an interesting jumping-off point."

"It was sometimes even read from beginning to end. But it was rarely dispositive…. One of the great triumphs of Justice Scalia’s work on the Court over the years — with help from a number of the other justices — was to remind us that text does play an important role, and that we should be spending more time with the text."

Said NYU lawprof Burt Neuborne, talking about his new book, "Madison's Music: On Reading the First Amendment." Alongside him was Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whom he thanked for "her human voice." Is that a compliment? Is this a compliment: "It’s a fun book for someone who's not immersed in the law"? That's what she said about his book.

I got to that NYU page via email that promotes NYU School of Law things to the school's graduates (which include me). I hesitated to link to it, however, because I'm ashamed of the inaccuracy of this sentence:

"Part of being a student is the freedom to hold all manner of idealistic stances with the tenacity of a petty commissar."

"Every arguably 'moral' conflict is an all-or-nothing proposition within the Ivory Tower because there’s pretty much no downside to ranting about every slight, real or perceived. And that’s generally a good thing. It lets students work out the kinks in their personal ethics — learning to pick and choose their battles — so they won’t grow up to be hopeless, untethered rage-aholics. But part of that learning process is smacking down that unfettered idealism from time to time and forcing the students to get some perspective. That time has come for the assembled NYU Law students throwing a fit over the school letting Harold Koh teach an international law course...."

Writes Joe Patrice at Above the Law in a piece titled "NYU Law Students Need To Get Off Their High Horse."

From the law students' letter:

While we believe that NYU Law should remain committed to academic freedom, we take issue not with Mr. Koh’s opinions but rather with his actions — that is, his direct facilitation of the U.S. government’s extrajudicial imposition of death sentences on U.S. citizens along with civilians of other nationalities....

Pick a law school: Columbia or NYU.

Alumni email to new law students at NYU:

But just a friendly reminder – we aren’t Columbia. You don’t already need outlines for your classes. You don’t already need to be doing reading assignments (holy shit, seriously enjoy this last part of your summer because you will never have another one). Don’t be the gunner everyone hates before classes even start.

Alumni email to new law students at Columbia:

But here’s some advice — we’re not NYU. Show up to class prepared. Nobody wants to be slowed down while the professors has to wait for your dumb ass to catch up. Everybody will assume you will be ready to hit the ground running. So, no need to be a “gunner” about it. Everybody has already thought of everything you are thinking of asking.

Yes, you have to go to law school. Don't change the hypothetical. Where do you go?

Columbia

NYU

 

pollcode.com free polls

"And you actually enjoy studying law? That's weird."

From the finalists in Above the Law's Law Revue Video Contest, this one's from my old law school NYU (language warning):



For the record, I think the main character in this video has it right, it's what I expect from all my students, and it's the way I pretty much (kind of) was as a law student (30+ years ago)(except that I added a level of difficulty — pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation — to my 3L year).

"Althouse, who do you root for when Wisconsin faces Michigan?"

Asked Chuck, in the comments to the post on last night's basketball game, which the Badgers won. The Wolverines still need to win tonight, but if they do, the next game will be Wisconsin vs. Michigan.

My one-word answer was easy and instantaneous: "Wisconsin."

Chuck's reply:

I can't imagine that; a Michigan undergrad rooting for a conference rival. I know a former UW prof who used to live in your neighborhood. She's an Ohio State undergrad/University of Chicago Ph.D. Even as a Wisconsin faculty member, she knew who to root for. No doubt; no hesitation.

Key word: "former." How long was she here? I have been on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin for 30 years.

When she was here, how long ago had she been at Ohio State? At this point in my life, 40 years separate me from my Michigan student self.

But let me tell you about my Michigan student self. These were hippie days, Vietnam War protest days, days of the "10 for 2" "John Sinclair Freedom Rally," days of a student strike to demand that the Michigan regents adopt a policy of affirmative action. If you had told Student Althouse that one day she would be a law professor teaching about a Supreme Court case that said the University of Michigan regents violated the Constitution by doing affirmative action, it would have perplexed the hell out of her. What bizarre turns of events would need to occur for that to become reality? If you had told Student Althouse that later years would find her living in a hovel, tending a subsistence garden, and selling tiny ink drawings on the street, she'd have recognized a future that flowed — organically — from this education at the University of Michigan.

I'm lucky they let me into law school after that. (Thank you, NYU, and thank you, LSAT.)

So spectator sports have not had much of a place in my life. In 30 years living practically on campus at the University of Wisconsin, I've gone to exactly one event — a football game where the Badgers played Purdue, and that was to go with Meade, who has longstanding ties to Purdue. (He grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana.)

But I do feel the mood of my environment. I get the vicarious experience of the emotion people around me in my city feel about what happens to the Wisconsin teams. From my house, I hear the cheering in the football stadium. For decades, the sound of the marching band playing "On Wisconsin" has drifted up from the practice field over by the lake to my windows. I like it when the people of Madison, Wisconsin feel good.

I don't like it enough to want my fellow citizens to get their way in politics. But unlike the outcomes of elections, there are no consequences to the outcomes of sports events. There are winners and losers, some people will be happy and some will be sad, so I can safely and easily prefer that the people who are happy are the people in my immediate proximity. I know the Madison citizenry feels aggrieved politically, and this grimness sometimes affects me and I deal with it.

But to walk down the street in the real, physical space that is Madison, Wisconsin is — on most occasions — to see the great satisfaction we feel in our long-term relationship with the Badgers.

"Is it possible to accept lucrative subsidies from dictatorships, operate campuses on their territory and still preserve the values that make American universities great, including academic freedom?"

"The schools all say yes, pointing to pieces of paper — some of them undisclosed — that they have signed with their host governments. The real answer is: of course not."

1. Chelsea Clinton running NYU's "multifaith" institute. 2. The Harvard Kennedy School granting a PhD for a dissertation about the IQ of Hispanic immigrants.

1. We learn today that Chelsea Clinton will take on "a 'multifaith' role as co-founder and co-chair of [NYU's] brand-new Of Many Institute, a program to "develop multifaith dialogue and train multifaith leaders." It should be noted, in this context, that Chelsea Clinton's degree is a Master's of Public Health, and that she has been teaching at the graduate level at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

2. Yesterday, we were talking about the Harvard students who are petitioning for an investigation into how the Harvard Kennedy School accepted a dissertation that reached conclusions that the students regarded as unethical, because it supported discrimination against persons of a particular ethnicity on the ground of purported lower intelligence.

Let's talk about these 2 stories together. Here are 3 highly prestigious institutions — NYU, Columbia, and Harvard — and schools/institutes within them that most of us would assume have a political slant in the liberal direction:  NYU's Of Many Institute, Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, and Harvard's Kennedy School.

Both stories make the institutions look weak — NYU and Columbia for taking in the Clintons' daughter — and Harvard for awarding degrees for weak dissertations.

Be clear what I'm saying about Harvard. I mean to express no opinion about Jason Richwine's "IQ and Immigration Policy" dissertation. I haven't read it, and I'm not an expert in the field. I can't believe the professors at the Kennedy School liked where Richwine was going with his research, but I suspect that they went forward, approving his dissertation, because it wasn't any worse than the many  left/liberal dissertations they've approved over the years.

ADDED: Why is NYU's multifaith institute called "Of Many"? Is it based on "Out of many, one" — E pluribus unum?



AND: Do students at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health take courses with Chelsea because of the value of networking the Clintons? That's pretty valuable! Inference: you're a chump if you're paying high tuition and not buying access to power.

Why is Chelsea Clinton leading a big new religion program at NYU?

"The former first daughter has tackled what the school calls a 'multifaith' role as co-founder and co-chair of its brand-new Of Many Institute. The program is described by the university as aiming to 'develop multifaith dialogue and train multifaith leaders.'"

Back in September, Clinton — who’s married to banker Marc Mezvinsky — told Time of her desire to study faith and education: “With all candor, because my husband is Jewish and I’m Christian, and we’re both practicing, it’s something that’s quite close to home,” she said.

A rep for NYU told us that the Of Many program is not academic, but is a part of the university’s Center for Spiritual Life. NYU’s Web site says the institute has developed a “minor degree in multifaith and spiritual leadership” shared with the Silver School of Social Work and the Wagner School.

I have never associated Chelsea Clinton with religion. She has a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health and she's been teaching graduate level classes there.

But maybe the NYU "Of Many" concept of religion really is about "public health." Let's think about the interwoven nature of public health and religion — especially as the Clintons might understand it. When Hillary Clinton first emerged on the national scene, she was associated with religion. I remember a magazine cover — was it Tikkun? — depicting her as "St. Hillary" and lots of talk about "the politics of meaning," which was some politics-and-religion theme back in the 90s. And Hillary segued into public health in a way that we were supposed to understand, but didn't.

So here comes Hillary II, Chelsea Clinton merging health and religion. What does it all mean? How well will this lay the groundwork for a career in politics? I strongly prefer the separation of government and religion, and I don't want government to wield the powers of religion or powers over the human mind that are too much like the power of religion. And though government is going to have some role in public health, its growing and over-intrusive activity is disturbing. A politician who builds a career in health and religion should scare us. This is wedging very deeply into the realm of the individual — mind and body.

Here's some background reading: "All Politics is Cosmic," a 1996 article in The Atlantic by Lee Siegel, reviewing Michael Lerner's book "The Politics of Meaning." Excerpt:

Trevor Morrison, the new NYU School of Law dean.

Great!

(NYU was my law school.)

Ronald Dworkin — a giant among law professors — has died.

He was 81.

His legal arguments were subtly presented applications to specific problems of a classic liberal philosophy which, in turn, was grounded in his belief that law must take its authority from what ordinary people would recognise as moral virtue....

Perhaps Dworkin's greatest achievement was his insistence on a rights-based theory of law, expounded in his first and most influential book, Taking Rights Seriously (1977), in which he proposed an alternative both to Hart's legal positivism and to the newly minted theories of the Harvard philosopher of law John Rawls....

He remained an unapologetic, indeed proud, liberal Democrat, unshaken in his loyalty to the New Deal tradition set by his hero Franklin D Roosevelt, even as such ideas became less and less widely held. It is possible that this shifting of the political centre of gravity under him deprived him of a more prominent career as a public intellectual.

Read the whole thing. Click on the Dworkin tag to see what we were saying about him while he was alive.

When I went to law school beginning in 1978, at NYU — where Dworkin taught — nothing was taken more seriously than "Taking Rights Seriously." That was just before the outburst that was Critical Legal Studies, in a time and a place where we were expected to believe that rights were real. Shame on you if you suspected they were inventions of judges.

Terms used to describe NYU School of Law...

... in this Washington Examiner column:

1. "ultraliberal law school that sues the government for not doing what its professors want."

2. "litigious lodge [with] its mean junkyard dog, the Institute for Policy Integrity, an adviser-ridden think tank with a cheeky name."

3. "bastion of the dark arts." [To be fair: that's just referring to the IPI.]

(It's of possible interest that I graduated from that law school 3 decades ago.)