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| 5/25 |
| 2005/4/6-8 [Politics/Domestic/President/Bush, Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:37081 Activity:moderate |
4/5 Watch total moron write about how "we were ALL wrong!" on WMDs:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28418-2005Apr5.html
(Yes, you can be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals and be an idiot.)
\- Richard Posner has been called a lot of things for sure, but
nobody ever calls him an idiot. The same is said for Scalia, but
Posner >> Scalia. --psb
\_ OK, he has a lot of poorly founded assumptions in there, and
neglects a lot of very compelling arguments that counter his
article's points. -John (!op)
\- He's writing in the WaPo. He writes more substantially
but still to the general informed reader at:
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com
You can also follow Poser via "Article iii groupie". --psb
\- This is a good article about Posner, by Alan Ryan, who
is well-regarded philosopher. --psb
http://csua.org/u/blb
\_ OK, I wasn't commenting on Posner per se, as I know he
can be a smart guy, but even smart guys write shit
articles occasionally. And this one is not worthy. -John
\- Posner does "skip steps" a lot. You have to have some
insight into the Giant Hedgehog World View to follow
what he is saying often. Also, sometimes he is
making a narrow technical point and should do a little
more to circumscribe his comments and clearly indicate
certain generalizations should not be drawn. He really
is somebody who weighs in on everything (see google).
One reason he probably wont be nominated to USSC. --psb
\_ If there is an opening, many feel that Posner
will be nominated b/c he is universally recognized
as one of the finest minds in the judiciary, the
Cardozo or Holmes of our generation if you will.
\- you mean you dont think BUSH I was correct when
he said THOMAS was the best man for the job?
while i think he'd be a good chief [would be
respected by current justices, is a machine
when it comes to productivity] i would be
surprise to see ROVECO nominate him, --psb
\- You know if by some miracle posner became
chief justice, he might bag on THOMAS some,
which would be really awesome. here is the
hatchet job on DOUGLAS. --psb
http://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/posner-antihero.html
\_ I think Posner is better than Thomas,
\- gee, really?
(which does not imply that Thomas is
a bad justice, I would be overjoyed
to be as "bad" as Thomas.)
\_ Is Posner being a devious asshole, by ignoring his higher
intellectual faculties? Is Posner helping his good friends /
associates while consciously ignoring the obvious truth of the
matter?
Perhaps. Until then, he's an idiot.
His reputation for non-idiocy may have gotten him on the Post
opinions page for this article, but his non-idiot cachet just
took a big hit.
\_ He's not an idiot. He is a very smart and clever propagandist.
Note his use of "nearly every competent observer." Anyone who
disagrees with the Establishment line, is by definition,
incompetent and not worth listening to. It is this kind of
self-sustaining insular world view that has put Washington DC
on such a collision course with the rest of the world. These
people are like Michael Jackson: they are nuts, but so wealthy
and powerful that they can just fire anyone who tells them
anything they don't want to hear.
\_ Competent observer means those who have invested sufficient
time and resources into investigating and observing the
situation. This does not mean anyone who disagrees w/ the
establishment's line is incompetent. In this case there were
no parties who had invested as much time and effort as MI-6,
CIA, &c. into investigating the situation and had reached a
dissenting opinion.
When it comes down to it, who are you going to trust, the
spooks or a bunch of loony tie-dye pot smoking kooks w/
purple hair and body piercings shouting free mumia, free pot
and no blood for oil? I'd go w/ the spooks everytime, they
have a much better track record than the kooks.
\_ The kooks knew about COINTELPRO before anyone else. |
| 5/25 |
|
| www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28418-2005Apr5.html All RSS Feeds Intelligence Critique Fatigue By Richard A Posner Wednesday, April 6, 2005; Page A19 We can thank the well-publicized recent intelligence failures for one thi ng: the brand-new genre of the beautifully written intelligence critique . Now comes the report of t he Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Rega rding Weapons of Mass Destruction, co-chaired by retired judge Laurence Silberman and former senator Charles Robb. The heart of this report is a nother brilliant narrative, that of the mistakes -- notably deception by the well-code-named spy "Curveball" -- that convinced the intelligence community that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The WMD commission devotes 300 pa ges to defending its lengthy menu of reform proposals, many sensible -- especially those the intelligence community had adopted in advance of th e report. Sign Up Now For all of its genuine distinction, the report has weaknesses. Foremost a mong them -- a product of the blinding clarity of hindsight -- is a misp laced perfectionism that feeds the dangerous fallacy that all intelligen ce failures are the product of culpable, and therefore remediable, blund ers. Actually, most such failures are the inevitable result of the inher ent limitations of intelligence. Before the invasion of Iraq, nearly eve ry competent observer, including the intelligence services of foreign na tions opposed to the invasion, believed that Saddam Hussein had a stockp ile of chemical and biological weapons and was trying to build nuclear b ombs as well. Hussein's history, and above all the logic of the situatio n -- surely he wouldn't risk his regime by failing to come clean if did not have such weapons -- created a presumption that he had them. The com mission criticizes the intelligence agencies for embracing the presumpti on. But no inquiry operates without preconceptions that shift the burden of proof to the doubters -- of whom there were, in the case of the Iraq i weapons, precious few. The commission also neglected the elementary statistical principle that w eak data, all pointing in the same direction, can add up to strong evide nce. If two independent observations each have a 40 percent probability of being false, the probability that both are false is only 16 percent. The costs of disregarding this evidence might have been horrendous, Sept. It suggests that the office of the director of national intelligence (the principal legacy o f the Sept. But then all the 15 agencie s that make up the US intelligence system would be fighting each other in each division, and coordination would occur only at the very top. Ac tually the agencies sort nicely into four groups -- military intelligenc e agencies, technical agencies (mainly utilizing spy satellites), foreig n intelligence agencies and domestic intelligence agencies. That is roughly the structure of Britain's well-regarded intelligence com munity -- which points up another deficiency of the WMD commission's rep ort: indifference to theoretical, historical (intelligence failures go b ack to the Trojan War) and comparative perspectives. Every nation that w e take seriously -- even Canada -- has a domestic intelligence agency se parate from its national police force, the best known being Britain's MI 5 Only the United States buries its principal domestic intelligence ser vice in a police force (the FBI). Police hunt criminals, and criminal la w enforcement will not defeat terrorism. An agency 100 percent dedicated to domestic intelligence is more likely to do a good job than the FBI, which is 10 percent intelligence and 90 percent criminal investigation. I hope bin Laden isn' t reading the commission's report. The writer is a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit an d a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago. |
| www.becker-posner-blog.com The Becker-Posner Blog home April 03, 2005 Will China Become the Leading Nation of the 21st Century? So we will discuss internatio nal issues more frequently, starting with our entries on China. Chinas economic growth since it freed agriculture from the oppressive han d of government has been spectacular, averaging some 7-10 per cent per y ear in real GDP since 1980, even allowing for some inflation in the offi cial numbers. It has becoming a leading destination of foreign investmen t, one of the worlds biggest exporters, and among the largest users of o il and other natural resources. Its potential seems to be so limitless, after awakening from a slumber th at lasted for centuries, that many are already forecasting that China wi ll replace the United States during the 21st century as the leading econ omic power. Perhaps these forecasts will be correct-my crystal ball is v ery cloudy- but some cautionary comments are needed because we have hear d that tune before. The German miracle after World War II was so impressive that many forecas t Germany would overtake the United States rather quickly, in part becau se Germany supposedly discovered a new way to organize economic society- a social contract among workers and companies- that would propel that n ation past Americas old fashioned capitalism. But Germany began to floun der in the 1980s, did much worse in the 1990s, and is considered by many now to be the sick man of the European Union. Krushchevs prophesy in the late 1950s that the USSR would bury the US was not about military victory but economic superiority. This was made when Soviet official statistics showed extremely rapid economic growth. The apparent miracle of Soviet growth suggested to the great economists Jose ph Schumpeter and Paul Samuelson, and many others that central planning might be superior economically to capitalism and decentralization of eco nomic power. The latest case prior to China is Japan, which experienced impressive eco nomic growth from the early 1950s into the late 80s that propelled Japan into the elite club of the richest economic powers. Japan too had suppo sedly discovered a new approach of consensus capitalism with a long-term business outlook that was allegedly superior to old Adam Smith varietie s of competitive capitalism. This alleged superiority of the Japanese sy stem was extolled in a series of articles by the very good economist Ala n Blinder, and in books with various titles, such as The Japan That Can Say No. Yet Japan basically stagnated since the early 1990s, and now the concern is whether it can ever come out of this stagnation and deflatio n (I am confident it will eventually). Its economic model now seems ridd led with inefficiencies and drawbacks, and is no longer considered a new wave of capitalism. None of this proves that China will not be an exception, and continue to grow well beyond other nations, but these examples do suggest caution in conceding the next 50 years or so to Chinas economy. Countries invariab ly discover that it is much easier to grow rapidly when they are economi cally way behind since they could then import the knowledge embodied in technology and human capital developed by leading countries. As a countr y begins to catch up to the knowledge frontier, a simple transfer of kno wledge is no longer productive. It then has to participate in the genera tion of new technologies and approaches, which is far harder than simply using advances made elsewhere. To be sure, China has considerable strengths that should enable it to gro w relatively rapidly for much longer. China has an abundant, hard-workin g, and ambitious labor force. The government also radically liberalized the incredibly rigid labor markets under its old style central planning toward flexible markets that allow companies to hire and fire easily. Al so workers now have the freedom, they did not before, to find jobs that best suit their talents and interests. China has opened its economy to f oreign investments and domestic entreprenuers, something the Soviet Unio n, Japan, or even Germany never really did, and China has been learning from the new technologies brought by these investors. China has also created a highly competitive environment in most markets, where companies have flexibility to change prices as costs change, and a s competitors alter their prices and terms of sale. Chinas long history of great respect for knowledge and scholars has returned. Even poor fami lies now sacrifice their meager resources to insure their children a dec ent education and other investments in human capital. During the past couple of decades, China has been blessed with far-sighte d leaders that have generally wisely approached liberalizing its economy . They started off with relatively simple steps that gave farmers greate r freedom to decide what to produce on their small private plots, and to sell their output at more market-based prices. After seeing the overwhe lming success of these first steps, they gradually liberalized much of t he rest of the economy, allowing workers freedom to choose jobs, employe rs freedom to determine hiring and firing, markets freedom to set most w ages and prices, foreign investors to start factories, often in partners hip with local governments, and stock exchanges to develop in Shanghai a nd elsewhere. Meanwhile, the mainland has largely lived up to its agreem ent to give considerable economic autonomy to Hong Kong. This rapid development of the Chinese economy has provided many benefits to the US and other rich economies. Chinese has exported clothing, toys, simple electronics, and many other labor-intensive goods at prices far below those possible without Chinas development. Chinas growth helps pro vide a much larger and richer market for the knowledge-intensive product s and services produced by rich nations, such as cars, computers, drugs and medical instruments, kitchen appliances, and many others. Chinas development so far poses economic problems mainly not for the adva nced nations, but for developing nations that produce the same types of labor-intensive products as China does. These nations include Mexico, Pa kistan, Brazil, and some countries of Africa. It is a general but someti mes neglected result in trade theory that the growth of a large nation w ill raise world GDP per capita, but can hurt the nations that are most s imilar to the growing nation. Richer nations could be hurt eventually if China continues to move up the product ladder. It would then produce and export more knowledge-intensi ve products, partly made possible by Chinas disrespect for property righ ts, intellectual property, and patent protection laws. But even so, I be lieve that rich nations will generally benefit from Chinas progress sinc e different richer nations generally specialize in different types and v arieties of products and services. Moreover, as China gets richer, it wi ll provide even larger markets for exports from other nations. But to return to the main theme, as with Russia, Germany, and Japan, it i s not inevitable that China will continue to grow rapidly enough to equa l or surpass eventually the growing per capita incomes of the US and Wes tern Europe. For like the other nations that looked unstoppable, China h as serious problems, and other problems might surface as it becomes rich er. China has a disastrous capital market, with government banks that have be en forced to make loans to inefficient public companies. The result has been hundreds of billions of dollars of debt that will never be repaid, and are now being auctioned off. Perhaps that debt overhang will be rapi dly absorbed, but Japan suffered for more than decade with a huge supply of bad bank debt that they did not absorb efficiently; indeed, the gove rnment has continued to encourage the creation of more bad debt. China still has many highly inefficient public enterprises that authoriti es are reluctant to close because they fear discontent from laid off wor kers. These enterprises can stay in business only because they receive u neconomic loans from other state enterprises; China d oes not have a developed syst... |
| csua.org/u/blb -> query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E7D61038F937A2575AC0A9659C8B63 Most E-Mailed Articles LAW, PRAGMATISM, AND DEMOCRACY By Richard A Posner. If he did not exist, it wou ld be hard to believe that he could. He is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, and -- one would th ink -- a busy man. But he writes on almost every legal issue of the day, from Bush v Gore to Roe v Wade. He has published ''Public Intellectua ls'' and a biography of Benjamin Cardozo. Thirty years ago, his book ''T he Economic Analysis of Law'' began a revolution in legal theory whose e ffects are still being digested. Ten years ago, ''Sex and Reason'' scand alized just about everyone by coolly and rationally analyzing the way th e law should treat sex and its consequences. Posner keeps up a rate of p roduction of polemical essays on politics, law and moral philosophy that would do credit to an entire law school. He writes with a flair that pu ts most journalists to shame and a depth of knowledge that puts most pro fessors to shame. Posner's take on the matter is t hat the enthusiasts for deliberative democracy want to substitute the mo ral prejudices of professors for the wishes of the plain man or the slig htly less plain politician. His other target is the ''formalist'' view of law, which says that courts should always ask one question only: what does the law require? In the formalist view, there will always be a single answer, and the task of ju dges is to declare it. The present Supreme Court is addicted to presenti ng its decisions in formalist terms. But, Posner unflinchingly insists, although the court eventually made the right decision in Bush v Gore, i t gave such an incoherent and unconvincing account of what it was doing that it ultimately impaired its own authority. Conversely, in Clinton v Jones, the court made a mistake that a pragmatic judge would not have m ade, because that decision opened the door to the whole sorry farce of t he impeachment of President Clinton. The link is that they a re the antitheses of what he wants to argue for -- legal and democratic pragmatism. True to form, he does not suggest that we should all run out and read the works of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John De wey (although he himself appears to have done so). He wants to argue for pragmatism in the ordinary sense of the term: paying greater attention to the consequences of what we do than to high principle, making institu tions work a bit better on the assumption that perfection is out of reac h and is, in any case, a dangerous goal. Still, Posner is an intellectual to the end of his fingers, and like most others of the breed, he hates to leave his opponents in possession of a ny territory that he can seize. This means that ''Law, Pragmatism, and D emocracy'' is several books in one. Roughly a third of it will be useful to students in law school who need a quick route into the role of pragm atism in American law. That is in fact what they created -- with monarchic al elements in the presidency, aristocratic elements in the Senate and S upreme Court and democratic elements in the lower house. The whole thing was intended to be a balance of interests in the way Cicero said succes sful republics must be. Some of us have said for 40 years that what we c all ''representative democracy'' is what an earlier age understood as el ective aristocracy. The only regret is that he does little to spell out the reason for wantin g populist elements in a mixed constitution -- essentially, that once yo u have agreed that government is a job for the full-time expert and that ''rule by the people'' is literally impossible, you need some way in wh ich the ordinary man can stop the elite from walking off with the store. universal suffrag e serves the same purpose with less damage. Posner writes only about the representation of interests, which is not the Athenian view that democr acy was a mechanism for putting the fear of God into the ruling elite. At least, he has falle n in love with the two chapters in which Schumpeter destroyed what he ca lled the classical theory of democracy and defended what he considered a realistic one. Schumpeter argues that democracy is a system in which would-be rulers com pete for the people's vote. what matters is that the government is the winner of a genuinely compe titive election. Posner, who is fascinated by economics, seizes on the w ay that Schumpeter's theory emphasizes competition between elites. It lo oks, as many writers have said, like the beginnings of an economic theor y of democracy. And Posner has some interesting thoughts on ways in whic h we might make American democracy more competitive -- giving would-be t hird parties a fairer chance to enter the political marketplace, for ins tance. But Schumpeter was not an enthusiast for making politics more competitive . He was profoundly distrustful of the ordinary man, whose views he thou ght irrational and ill informed, and he deplored the activities of that great American institution, the pressure group. Posner mildly criticizes Schumpeter for not saying enough about what should happen between elect ions. If you think that politics should operate like a market, it's a fa ir point; nobody makes once-and-for-all choices in the ordinary marketpl ace. In fact, the one thing that Schumpeter said about what should happe n between elections was that the voters should not put pressure on gover nment, but should simply allow it to govern. Many readers of ''Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy'' may choose to leave Po sner's discussion of democratic theory for last, turning first to his il lustrations of pragmatic adjudication in action to see what the ''cash v alue'' of the theoretical chapters is. Posner's premise is that there is no such thing as legal reasoning. Lawyers and judges know a lot about l egislation, previous cases and the like. But on all else, they should de fer to experts in nonlegal fields, who provide the raw materials for int erpretation and decision. But if there is no such thing as legal reasoni ng, what will limit judges from going off in any direction? A large cons traint, Posner argues, is the need not to be overruled too often and too embarrassingly by a higher court. Its task is to make sensible decisions t hat will have good consequences for the country as a whole. In Bush v G ore, for instance, there was a need to bring an end to the electoral mes s, and there were ways of doing this discreetly. Justice Scalia is told off particularly severely for political ineptitude. his concurring judgment gave the dissenters a target and a chance to grandstand. In Clinton v Jones, the pomposity of the court's declaration that ''no m an is above the law'' blinded the justices to the need to let quite a lo t of people be a little above the law. Given what sexual harassment suit s are like, Posner says, the president should have been protected while in office; a narrowly tailored immunity would have served the nation wel l These agreeably unprincipled views look less appealing when Posner turns to the erosion of civil liberties during emergencies. Here, the message is that civil libertarians should stop whining, and get used to the idea that in a crisis we have less freedom. No doubt -- though one would exp ect a thinker like Posner to regret the loss rather than celebrate it so enthusiastically. Still, his argument is an elegant illustration of wha t is lost by pragmatism's abandonment of principle. Perhaps we ought to be grateful for it, as just one more of Richard A Posner's many provoca tions. Alan Ryan is the warden of New College and a professor of politics at the University of Oxford. |
| www.law.uchicago.edu/news/posner-antihero.html Douglas struck m e as cold and brusque but charismatic--the most charismatic judge (well, the only charismatic judge) on the Court. Little did I know that this e lderly gentleman (he was sixty-four when I was a law clerk) was having s ex with his soon-to-be third wife in his Supreme Court office, that he w as being stalked by his justifiably suspicious soon-to-be ex-wife, and t hat on one occasion he had to hide the wife-to-be in his closet in order to prevent the current wife from discovering her. This is just one of t he gamy bits in Bruce Allen Murphy's riveting biography of one of the mo st unwholesome figures in modern American political history, a field wit h many contenders. Murphy explains that he had expected the biography to take six years to complete but that it actually took almost fifteen. Fo r Douglas turned out to be a liar to rival Baron Munchausen, and a great deal o0f patient digging was required to reconstruct his true life stor y One of his typical lies, not only repeated in a judicial opinion but inscribed on his tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery, was that he h ad been a soldier in World War I Douglas was never in the Armed Forces. The lie metastasized: a book about Arlington National Cemetery, publish ed in 1986, reports: "Refusing to allow his polio to keep him from fight ing for his nation during World War I, Douglas enlisted in the United St ates Army and fought in Europe." Apart from being a flagrant liar, Douglas was a compulsive womanizer, a h eavy drinker, a terrible husband to each of his four wives, a terrible f ather to his two children, and a bored, distracted, uncollegial, irrespo nsible, and at times unethical Supreme Court justice who regularly left the Court for his summer vacation weeks before the term ended. Rude, ice -cold, hot-tempered, ungrateful, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed, and devour ed by ambition, he was also financially reckless--at once a big spender, a tightwad, and a sponge--who, while he was serving as a justice, recei ved a substantial salary from a foundation established and controlled by a shady Las Vegas businessman. For at least a decade before he was felled in 1974 by the massive stroke that forced his retirement from the Court a year later, Douglas (perhaps as a consequence of his heavy drinking) had been deteriorating morally and psychologically from an already low level. The deterioration manifes ted itself in paranoid delusions, senile rages and sulks, sadistic treat ment of his staff to the point where his law clerks--whom he described a s "the lowest form of human life"--took to calling him "shithead" behind his back, and increasingly bizarre behavior toward women, which include d an assault in his office on an airline stewardess who had unsuspecting ly accepted an invitation from this kindly seeming old man to visit him there. His third marriage, to a woman in her early twenties (the woman i n the closet), lasted only two years, and began to disintegrate within w eeks of the wedding. After that divorce Douglas speedily took up with tw o more women in their twenties, marrying one on an impulse but later res uming romantic relations with the other. This fourth marriage might well have dissolved had his stroke held off. As Murphy puts it, Douglas had "buyer's remorse" in the marriage market. It would not--had not Douglas in his autobiograp hical writings and elsewhere presented his life to the public as exempla ry of American individualism and achievement. I cannot begin to imagine his thinking in publishing lies that were readily refutable by documents certain one day to be discovered. William Orville Douglas was born in 1898 in Yakima, Washington. In his au tobiography he claimed that his grandfather Orville had fought in Grant' s army at Vicksburg, when in fact Orville had deserted from the Union Ar my twice without ever seeing combat. Douglas's father, an eccentric itin erant preacher notably neglectful of his children (like father, like son ), died when Douglas, the couple's firstborn son, was a young child. Dou glas himself almost died of an intestinal disease as an infant. He became her "treasure" and she de clared that he would someday be president of the United States, thus pla nting in him the seed of a lifelong ambition. It was also in his autobio graphy that Douglas reported having cured himself of polio by sheer forc e of will. He wanted to link himself to Franklin Roosevelt, whom he had hoped to succeed as president--with the difference of having actually cu red himself of the disease, a feat beyond FDR's ability. This was another lie: his mother had been left surprisingly well provided for as a widow, and the family, though poor by modern standards (as most people were a cent ury ago), was middle class. What is true is that Douglas's mother was ve ry tight with money (another parental trait the son inherited, though th is one only fitfully); and as a result Douglas believed until he was an adult that the family had been poor. His discovery of the truth led to a lifelong resentment against his mother, who he thought should have paid for him to attend Washington State University, which he believed would have led to his obtaining a Rhodes Scholarship. On his deathbed Douglas told his wife: "I want you always to know that no one has ever been bett er to me since my mother." Douglas's daughter told Murphy that this was actually an insult, given Douglas's hostility toward his mother. After graduating from Whitman College in Washington (Douglas claimed that at Whitman he had lived in a tent, when in fact he had lived in a frate rnity house, though in hot weather the frat boys sometimes slept outside ), Douglas taught high school for two years and then enrolled in Columbi a Law School. He claimed to have arrived in New York, having ridden the brake rods of a train or possibly in an open boxcar, with just six cents in his pocket--all lies. By this time he was married, and his wife, a s choolteacher, was his major support in law school. He concealed this in his autobiography, in part by postdating his marriage by a year, and cla imed to have worked his way through law school. He also claimed to have heard Caruso sing at the Metropolitan Opera House, though the tenor died the year before Douglas arrived in New York. Of greater consequence, Douglas claimed to have graduated second in his l aw school class, which was not true, although he was a good student, and made the law review, and was hired by the Cravath firm (despite looking , according to John J McCloy, the associate who hired him, like "a sing ed cat"), then as now a leading Wall Street firm. He quit after four and a half months and fled back to Yakima, his hometown, hoping to practice law there but abandoning the idea after just four days. A spell of unem ployment followed, during which he was supported by his wife. He returne d to the Cravath firm for seven months and then went into teaching, firs t at Columbia and then at Yale, where he represented himself as having b een a successful Wall Street lawyer. His academic career was short, lasting from 1927 to 1935, but it was spec tacularly successful. Attracted as a student to legal realism, of which Columbia was the hotbed, as a professor he quickly became a prominent me mber of the movement. Yale soon hired him away from Columbia, with which he had become disaffected by the school's failure to appoint a legal re alist as dean. He had made a tremendous impression on Robert Maynard Hut chins, Yale's young dean. When shortly afterward Hutchins became preside nt of the University of Chicago, he offered Douglas an appointment and D ouglas accepted, and he was listed for two years in the Chicago catalog as a member of the faculty visiting at Yale. But he never taught at Chic ago, instead using his dual status to extract a Sterling professorship a nd high salary at Yale. The legal realists recognized that law is not an autonomous body of thoug ht. Douglas knew no social science, b ut he understood the value of grounding analysis of business law in empi rical inquiry, and he organized and supervised a number of ambitious emp irical projects. His articles and h... |