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As Saul Bellow said, "Fiction is the higher autobiography." This
"memoir" is a work of fictionalized fact. I have used fiction to
tell the truth in order to avoid negative consequences. It's true
that I have endured the writing life documented here. I toiled as
you do under the autocrat's hammer. I routinely drifted off into
homicidal dreams, but in fact I never murdered anyone. All else is
true. The book characterizes people I have known and jobs I have
held as I toiled away in high school and college, just like you, as
well as in newspaper and magazine publishing, advertising, and
e-commerce during the halcyon three-martini lunch days of the
Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, the no more long lunch Nineties, and
the can't afford lunch anymore Two Thousands. Cheers
The "rule of law" has become a shibboleth of American democracy,
but the emphasis on procedural and abstract rather than substantive
justice that is embedded both in the workings of our judicial
system and in the writings of our leading philosophers of law, John
Anderson argues, had led to much real injustice. This book draws
inspiration from Aristotle's notion of "natural justice" found in
communities based on ties of friendship to point the way toward a
more humane practice of law. Starting with concrete examples of
injustice produced in our legal system, the author examines the
distorting effects of legal argumentation and strategy on
affirmative action, overzealous prosecutions, abusive enforcement
of the tax code, sexual harassment litigation, and many other
issues troubling our society. The jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin,
with his notion of a "community of principle," is identified as
best articulating the justification for our current system and is
subjected to a thorough critique from an Aristotelian perspective.
Kant's "kingdom of ends" is located at the root of rights-based
notions of justice and is also argued to be inadequate because it
lacks the flexibility allowed by the classical understanding of
epieikeia (equity). What issues from this investigation of the
faults of our present legal regime is a set of proposals for reform
that include abolition of the legal profession and term limits for
judges as well as politicians. John C. Anderson holds a law degree
and a doctoral degree in philosophy from The Catholic University of
America, and practiced law for five years in Washington, D.C. An
independent scholar, he now works for the Army.
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