Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

The collected works

Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Law's Empire

Taking Rights Seriously.

New democracies around the world have adopted constitutional courts to oversee the operation of democratic politics. Where does judicial power come from, how does it develop in the early stages of democratic liberalization, and what political conditions support its expansion? This book answers these questions through an examination of three constitutional courts in Asia: Taiwan, Korea, and Mongolia. In a region that has traditionally viewed law as a tool of authoritarian rulers, constitutional courts in these three societies are becoming a real constraint on government. In contrast with conventional culturalist accounts, this book argues that the design and functioning of constitutional review are largely a function of politics and interests. Judicial review - the power of judges to rule an act of a legislature or national leader unconstitutional - is a solution to the problem of uncertainty in constitutional design. By providing 'insurance' to prospective electoral losers, judicial review can facilitate democracy.

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Judicial Review in New Democracies: Constitutional Courts in Asian Cases

For more than a decade, the U.S. Supreme Court has turned a skeptical eye toward Congress. Distrustful of Congress’s capacity to respect constitutional boundaries, the Court has recently overturned federal legislation at a historically unprecedented rate. This intensified judicial scrutiny highlights the need for increased attention to how Congress approaches constitutional issues. In this important collection, leading scholars in law and political science examine the role of Congress in constitutional interpretation, demonstrating how to better integrate the legislative branch into understandings of constitutional practice.

Several contributors offer wide-ranging accounts of the workings of Congress. They look at lawmakers’ attitudes toward Congress’s role as a constitutional interpreter, the offices within Congress that help lawmakers learn about constitutional issues, Congress’s willingness to use its confirmation power to shape constitutional decisions by both the executive and the courts, and the frequency with which congressional committees take constitutional questions into account. Other contributors address congressional deliberation, paying particular attention to whether Congress’s constitutional interpretations are sound. Still others examine how Congress and the courts should respond to one another’s decisions, suggesting how the courts should evaluate Congress’s work and considering how lawmakers respond to Court decisions that strike down federal legislation. While some essayists are inclined to evaluate Congress’s constitutional interpretation positively, others argue that it could be improved and suggest institutional and procedural reforms toward that end. Whatever their conclusions, all of the essays underscore the pervasive and crucial role that Congress plays in shaping the meaning of the Constitution.

Contributors. David P. Currie, Neal Devins, William N. Eskridge Jr.. John Ferejohn, Louis Fisher, Elizabeth Garrett, Michael J. Gerhardt, Michael J. Klarman, Bruce G. Peabody, J. Mitchell Pickerill, Barbara Sinclair, Mark Tushnet, Adrian Vermeule, Keith E. Whittington, John C. Yoo

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Congress and the Constitution

The U.S. Supreme Court is an important political institution. Nonetheless, general political histories of the United States give little attention to the Court and its justices. The appointment of justices and the decisions of courts are mere footnotes, at best, in the history of presidential administrations. Perhaps this reflects the relative insignificance of the judiciary and its actions on the broader political stage. The work of the Court pales in comparison with wars, elections and legislative struggles. The history of the Court has instead been relegated to more specialized accounts. Often those accounts were written from a primarily legal perspective or framed in terms of a history of constitutional law. The relationship between politics and the judiciary was pushed into the background. For many years, the classic one-volume history of the Court has been Robert G. McCloskey’s The American Supreme Court (4th ed., revised by Sanford Levinson, 2004). Originally published in 1960, The American Supreme Court situated the history of the Court within politics. McCloskey’s concern was to describe the Court as an “agency in the American governing process, an agency with a mind and a will and an influence of its own,” which used the law to achieve or try to achieve results (p. xv). The Harvard political scientist hoped to set aside the legalistic suggestion that the justices were primarily working out the logic of the law. The justices had agency in determining the course of public policy, and the Court was an agency within the structure of the government that made and implemented policy. The Court’s power was both real and fragile. The Court’s story, according to McCloskey, could “be broadly understood as an endless search for a position in American government that is appropriate” to the political era and the “subtle limits of judicial capability” (p. 15). A central lesson of his account, he concluded, was that the historical Court had been “fully alive to such realities as the drift of public opinion and the distribution of power in the American republic” (p. 246). The point was not that the justices “slavishly” adjusted themselves to public

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The Supreme Court in Politics

The values of free speech and inclusivity have often been pitted against one another in recent debates about the future of higher education. This is an unfortunate and damaging framing. Modern universities are deeply committed to both values, and the challenge is to find ways to reconcile them and to examine their requirements with an eye toward reconciling them. Both values are related to the central mission of the university to advance and disseminate human knowledge.

If universities are to be productive in pursuit of their scholarly mission and welcoming to diverse array of individuals and groups, then they will need to nurture cultures that are supportive of the mission of the university as well as design policies that are consistent with that mission. This article argues that better realizing these twin values in modern universities requires a three-step process of reform. First, university faculty need to build agreement about a core set of principles to which they are committed and to memorialize those principles. Second, universities need to take active measures to socialize individuals joining the campus community into the principles, values and commitments that animate those communities. Third, universities need to adopt policies, rules and practices that effectively implement and administer those principles, ranging from robust protections for scholarly inquiry and teaching to mechanisms to insure the campus public sphere is open to all members of the campus community to freely discuss and debate matters of general concern.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3334118_code117569.pdf?abstractid=3334118&mirid=1

Free Speech and the Diverse University

Law and the Courts

/pdf/the-least-examined-branch-the-constitution-and-congressional-mk8n70cf94.pdf

Keith E. Whittington

Papers

Congress and the Constitution

The Supreme Court in Politics

Free Speech and the Diverse University

Law and the Courts

The Least Examined Branch: The Constitution and Congressional Committees: 1971–2000