Thanking @Hofstra_L_Rev - Conceptions of Law, Ideology, and the Rule of Law - why the rule of law project can be conducive in its moral evaluative commitments to an oppositional ideology in service of democratic agency and an ameliorative social function. hofstralawreview.org/wp-cont…

For Kant people can, of course, act according to maxims, but those can be evil as well as good -- a person being evil not by doing evil things alone but once that behavior allows us to infer evil maxims -- although evil ones are inherently incapable of being universalized.

In his third definitive article for perpetual peace, Kant says that all individuals as human beings in the world community have the right to hospitality -- that if someone approaches our shores out of need, with peaceful purpose, we cannot deny access and universal hospitality.

"There are no legal safeguards that can be written into the Constitution to prevent its violation. Even the American constitution—which, contrary to the intentions of its creators and held up as a model of checks and balances—proved vulnerable to this."

Reacting against Carnap's view that metaphysics is no more "meaningful" than poetry, as based on an underestimation of poetry, Arendt said, "It seems only natural that an emphasis on speech will discriminate against appearances, and the emphasis on sensation against thinking."

The British governor of Jamaica Edward Eyre (1865) having authorized the Morant Bay massacre of 500 men, women, & children, London's prosecutorial committee included JS Mill and Albert Venn Dicey, the defence committee Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold.

In creating the person each of us wills ourselves to be, there is not a single one of our actions that does not at the same time create an image of people as we think they ought to be. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

In 1938 the Bavarian Supreme Court (Oberlandesgericht München) suspended the double jeopardy rule and upheld the 2nd conviction and enhanced punishment of a minister who'd distributed anti-Nazi literature, holding "high treason" required this "regardless of all legal principles."

Thorough exposé of the Trump Administration's historic coalescence and alignment with carcinogenic pollutors. nytimes.com/2026/10/24/clima…

In 1861 I lost my source of income, the NY Tribune, as a result of the American Civil War. To avoid being relegated to the streets, I decided to become a "practical man" and intended to enter a railway office. Luckily, I didn't get the post due to my bad handwriting. -- Karl Marx

Locke's advance over Hobbes toward a conception of the rule of law was in including a notion of reciprocity such that, for law to serve its foundational (for Locke) ends, it'd have to bind the sovereign as well as its subjects.

"Rooted in ancient myths of divine law, adopted by Catholic doctrine and Western legal thought, Tamanaha demonstrates how natural law played a formative role in shaping Western legal systems—while also being used to justify slavery, the subordination of women, and imperialism."

Wolff: liberal pluralism fixes the interest groups to be tolerated, but then disregards the nonconformists; Moore: the scientific attitude induces a conservative tolerance of the existing order; Marcuse: tolerance becomes repressive when administered to manipulate individuals.

By the thesis that law's necessary features can be stated without moral concepts my writing does not belong to the legal positivist tradition, since it ascribes the moral concept of legitimate authority to law as an essential feature. -- Joseph Raz

The Constitution does not contemplate that the title Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy will constitute him also Commander in Chief of the country, its industries and its inhabitants. -- Justice Robert Jackson, concurring, Youngstown Sheet & Tube vs Sawyer (US 1952)

In The Blue Book, analogous to Husserl's thought, Wittgenstein critiqued "our craving for generality" as tempted by the scientific method, leading the philosopher "into complete darkness," and instilling a "contemptuous attitude towards the particular case."

In the Rechtsstaat (Rule of Law state) the courts control the executive branch of the government in the interests of legality. In the Third Reich the police power controls the courts in the interest of political expediency. -- Ernst Fraenkel (1941)

This short piece by Joseph Raz appeared five years after his book The Concept of a Legal System, and provides a nice complement.

Hart posited the social practice of "official" acceptance of the law from the internal point of view, but Raz proposed the "legal man" underlying law's authoritativeness, one who takes law's content to be just, which Hart in turn couldn't quite abide per the separation thesis.

Joseph Raz thoughtfully reflected that "'the law' is a concept used by people to understand themselves," hence that "a major task of legal theory is to advance our understanding of society by helping us understand how people understand themselves."