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 Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate.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

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James Madison Has Left the Building (reviewing Constitutional Deliberation in Congress: The Impact of Judicial Review in a Separated System by J. Mitchell Pickerill)

This chapter examines William Rehnquist and his constitutional arguments and jurisprudence in the context of the conservative critique of the Warren Court. Rehnquist's appointment to the Court by President Richard Nixon was, almost by accident, the one full realization of Nixon's goal of placing a "strict constructionist" on the bench, one who possessed both the intellectual capacity and jurisprudential ambition to rollback the work of the Warren Court. Similarly, Rehnquist's elevation to Chief Justice appropriately symbolized the Reagan administration's conservative constitutional ambitions, which Rehnquist had anticipated and shaped. Rehnquist's jurisprudence evidences a distrust of judicially enforced individual rights that do not have strong foundations in the constitutional text and its historical origins, while giving broader scope to the Court to act as an arbiter between the other branches of the national government and between the state and federal governments.

William H. Rehnquist: Nixon's Strict Constructionist, Reagan's Chief Justice

This chapter overviews the Burger Court and situates it in the political and legal context of the collapse of the New Deal-Great Society political coalition and ideological framework and the emergence of the new conservatism. The Burger Court marked a transition between the liberal activism of the Warren Court and the conservatism of the Rehnquist Court. Through accident of the appointment process and political and ideological proclivities of the major players, the Burger Court moved in a clearly conservative direction in very few areas, most notably criminal justice. In other areas of the law, the Burger Court either extended the activist legacy of the Warren Court or fractured into multiple competing visions of the constitutional future.

The Burger Court: Once More in Transition

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.

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Free Speech and the Diverse University

It is not unreasonable to assume that the free speech clauses of the First Amendment are primarily concerned with political speech. As many have argued, free speech regarding politically relevant matters can be considered a prerequisite of a function ing democracy. The boundaries of political speech are less clear, however, and they have tended to expand over time as it was recognized that republican politics required more varied and wide-ranging speech than was previously thought. Although the contours of the appropriately protected speech were being estab lished in Britain before the American Revolution, the Sedition Act controversy demonstrated that constitutionally protected speech would have to be conceptualized more broadly than was once the case in order to have a viable system of competitive elections.1 Harsh and unruly criticism of government officials and political candidates would have to be incorporated into the free speech regime. The antebellum debate over slavery simi larly made clear that free-ranging debate over social institutions and practices that were potentially subject to government action and political inquiry would likewise need to be protected as political.2 The jurisprudential debates over seditious speech in the early twentieth century likewise indicated the scope of polit ical speech that would need to be protected if the Declaration's claim to a right to alter the form of government was to be taken seriously.3 The citizenry not only needed to hear whether the Adams administration was departing from republican principles, but also whether socialism was an attractive alternative to republican capitalism. Of course, there might well be social value in other types of speech, but that may not be reason enough to protect them under the free speech clauses. Free speech relating to reli gion, perhaps the origin of free speech rights, may be understood to be independently protected under the religion clauses of the First Amendment.4 We might well believe that other forms of speech are adequately protected by the structural features of American democracy. We might worry that a government empowered with the authority to regulate speech might use it to silence political dissent or criticism of the government itself or might act on behalf of religious majorities to similarly silence religious dissent or criticism. We might consider the value of artistic, scientific or commercial speech less fundamental, how ever, such that it is properly subject to a regulatory calculation, or we might think that the political salience of such speech is such that it is less prone to the temptations of abuse that beset political and religious speech and thus less in need of special co stitutional and judicial protection.5 Economic activity or comme cial speech would receive heightened protection only to the extent that it fed useful information into the political sphere. Thus, "peaceful" labor picketing may be constitutionally pro tected to the extent that, "[f]ree discussion concerning the condi tions in industry and the causes of labor disputes appears to us in spe sable to the effective and intelligent use of the processes of popular government to shape the destiny of modern industrial society. The issues raised by regulations, such as are challenged here, infringing upon the right of employees effectively to in orm the public of the facts of a labor dispute are part of this larger problem."6 On the other hand, since the point is to protect speech/activity relevant to policymaking rather than freedom of ac ion a such or activity relevant to the economic dispute or compe ition, other forms of labor action are left outside consti tu ional protections.7 The metaphor of the marketplace of ideas fits this functional ist understanding of free speech. With its economic referent, it suggests a group of producers and consumers with exogenous pr ferences. The producers of ideas pump out speech in the hopes of winning market share, and the consumers gobble up those ideas that happen to match up with their preexist ing preferences (the relevant prefer ences may not directly be for the idea itself but for something else that the idea might relate to we have a prefer ence for wealth and we are in the mar ket for a good idea as to how to pro duce it). The success of ideas in the marketplace depends on the i genuity of the producers and the distribution of preferences am ng consumers. Sellers of socialism may not get very far in the American marketplace, but Horatio Alger stories can be blockbusters. In the competition among ideas in the market place, the good ideas will hopefully over time squeeze out the bad ideas. From a constitutional perspective, the goal is to regu la e this marketplace so that it might be as free and as efficient as possible, for example by preventing artificial barriers to entry. The Court has been increasingly sympathetic to the protection of commercial speech beyond its utility in informing citizens on mat ers relating to public policy. The interests of consumers in Of course, there might well be social value in other types of speech, but that may not be reason enough to protect them under the free speech clauses.

Keith E. Whittington

Papers

James Madison Has Left the Building (reviewing Constitutional Deliberation in Congress: The Impact of Judicial Review in a Separated System by J. Mitchell Pickerill)

William H. Rehnquist: Nixon's Strict Constructionist, Reagan's Chief Justice

The Burger Court: Once More in Transition

Free Speech and the Diverse University

A Note on Commercial Speech in the Era of Late Capitalism