My voice recognition software is so sensitive that now that my voice is roughened by Covid, it does not recognize what I am saying, so I can no longer dictate!
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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
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https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0
Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
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54 comments:
Fact: Voice recognition technology is straight-up racist, and has been banned in Scotland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDnxzrbxn4&ab_channel=TheScottishComedyChannel
Get better Professor Wolff! I’m just getting over Covid myself. Drink plenty of fluids, etc.
Speaking of mystification (of the more high-brow sort), there’s an interesting piece in the current Baffler about Patrick Deneen, the political scientist who, inter alia, left Georgetown U. for Notre Dame a few years ago because he felt that the Jesuits at Georgetown were insufficiently Catholic (or so he said at the time). Deneen seems to be the coming man for the kind of Viktor Orban-style soft fascism (highbrow division, of course) that's in our future.
Deneen is my near-contemporary. I don’t know where he grew up, but I imagine it must have been in one of the middle-class nowheres-villes of the vast Eastern U.S. Suburban Sprawl. His undergrad degree (1986) was in English, from Rutgers … Then a year at the (groan) Committee for Social Thought. So he's not some exotic intellectual, some deep thinker, from a distant galaxy. He's Joe Blow from New Jersey.
Speaking for myself here, as a fellow middle-class American and lapsed/never-was/failed (but still officially enrolled) catholic, I can only just (but only just) imagine wanting to make yourself MORE catholic as you get older. I think that this would be difficult. It would be like trying to get toothpaste back into the tube … but if a nice paycheck were attached to it, I could probably manage it.
What's really interesting is how, over the last 50 years or so, the Republican Party has become a kind of emulsion with all of these catholics doing the intellectual labor while the core of the party remains committed to completely anti-intellectual sort of backwoods Protestantism. It seems unstable, it doesn't make "sense", but then politics doesn't have to make sense, does it?
That's incredible that you dictate your essays on Marxism.
They're so tightly written, with such well constructed sentences, with no linguistic dead wood.
Generally when people talk, they leave half-finished sentences, they fill space with
"ers" and "hems" or "wells", they repeat their ideas.
I once worked for a woman who was doing her PhD in linguistics at Berkeley, studying normal speech and I recorded normal conversations and then transcribed them for her.
Very very few people (and I generally recorded Berkeley students) have as well organized a mind as you do.
Pretty sure he's just dictating stuff he has already published.
Somewhat a propos(?): Apple introduced a new feature where you could record your voice and have the system learn it as a voice to use when the computer speaks text. This is designed for people who know they will be losing their voice in the near future but want their speech synthesizer to sound like them.
Of course, Anonymous is correct, but what he (I am preetty certain) neglects is that I wrote the original in the same fashion (except that I typed it rather than dictated it.)
Wishing RPW a rapid recovery.
John Pillette,
The following statements by you I find a bit strange:
"I don’t know where he [Deneen] grew up, but I imagine it must have been in one of the middle-class nowheres-villes of the vast Eastern U.S. Suburban Sprawl. His undergrad degree (1986) was in English, from Rutgers … Then a year at the (groan) Committee for Social Thought. So he's not some exotic intellectual, some deep thinker, from a distant galaxy. He's Joe Blow from New Jersey."
I know almost nothing about Deneen beyond his name (and some notion of his politics), but what does the fact that he was a (you imagine or suppose) middle-class Catholic kid from N.J. have to do with anything?
Adrian Vermeule's mother was a Harvard classics professor, but that doesn't afaik explain Vermeule's current politics, any more than Deneen's being from N.J. probably has any bearing on his.
Are only European intellectuals allowed to have wacky ideas? What gives here?
I'm from New Jersey too. New Jersey is not a glamorous place to be from. There's a movie with Al Pacino, I can't recall the title, but he's a racing car driver and he meets some exotic European beauty and confesses shamefully that he's from New Jersey.
In the beginning of the Sopranos Tony is driving on a highway and there's a sign that says
"New Jersey" and he turns there: that says it all.
When I went to college, we had to take an obligatory speech test and after it, the guy told me that I had a New Jersey accent, but with a speech course I could change that. I bet he didn't say that to students with a Manhattan accent. I told him I wasn't interested.
Actually, besides Tony Soprano, we produced a couple of great poets, William Carlos Williams and Allan Ginsberg as well as Fran Lebowitz, who can be very funny. Bruce Springsteen too.
Phillip Roth, good writer and then there's Frank Sinatra, who is a bit like Tony Soprano after all.
What class you come from has everything to do with this. In the kind of middle-class Catholic church in the tri-state area that I’m familiar with (and that I suspect Deneen is also familiar with), questioning premises or even thinking very carefully about anything was not regarded as any kind of a virtue. I arrived at the conclusion pretty early on (about 1973) that “Catholic Intellectual” was a contradiction in terms.
Somewhere on this site Prof. Wolff describes trying to get a discussion about religious sentiment going in an intro-to-philosophy class at U-Mass in the early 70’s—he found it impossible, because the students were all well-behaved lower-middle-class Catholics. I read that and laughed out loud, remembering what my mother used to tell me: “don’t ask so many questions!”
Now, it’s possible that Deneen is from a more exalted, more intellectual Catholic background. But I’ll wager he isn’t. I’ll submit that his Catholic Conservative act is purely opportunistic and nothing more than a shtick. I can’t be the only one who groaned and clutched his head in un-simulated pain when last week’s New Yorker came, because it had a lengthy “profile” of Ross Douthat, another one of these reactionary middle-brow characters.
Adrian Vermeule is a different story; his background is pure upper-class Protestant (Knickerbocker Division). I’ve known a few of these converted WASPs and it always seemed to me that converting, as an adult, to Catholicism adds a bit of spice to your already-existing privilege (which you hold on to, of course). It makes you slightly exotic and a little more interesting. It can also open up some interesting career opportunities.
BTW, the Al Pacino movie was "Bobby Deerfield". Sydney Pollack directed it. He's hung up on his social inferiority, plus he has to overcome CONFLICT with his FATHER ... it's pure 1950's cod Freud!
J.P.,
Untangling opportunism from genuine conviction can sometimes be difficult. In Douthat's case his Rightist views are probably genuine but, as I believe he himself has acknowledged, they were a career asset when he was starting out in journalism bc The Atlantic, e.g., wanted an articulate and (at least apparently) smart conservative to "balance out" their non-conservatives.
Btw I was raised in a (not particularly religious) Jewish household. After college, I worked for a year and then went to Catholic Univ Law School, which was not in those days (some four decades ago) the bastion of Rightism it seems to be today although it was moving in that direction. Accordingly I can tell some Catholic-related anecdotes too, but I've decided to exercise some restraint and not go into them.
If believing in God had any chance of paying off for me even half as well as it has for Douthat, then I would certainly believe in Him ... with all my heart!
In law school I I said to myself, "if you had any brains at all (ANY! ... AT! ... ALL!) you'd join the Federalist Society". They had all the money, they were obviously the coming thing ... I even already owned more than one bow tie (yes, the real kind) ... but I just couldn't do it! Just ... just not my people. I've kicked myself ever since.
Raymond Geuss in his book On Not Thinking like a Liberal describes how he owes his iconoclastic, questioning style of thinking to being educated in a Catholic prep school run by Hungarian refugee Catholics.
So there are Catholics and Catholics. In her Memories of a Dutiful Daughter Simone de Beauvoir describes her very strict and very devout Catholic education.
Hah! I remember Geuss's vivid description of his prep school, and I will wager any amount of money that Deneen's and Douthat's education was nothing--NOTHING--like that. Deneen and Douthat remind me of all of the "Great Books"-style authoritarian nerds who pick up their "faith" halfway through undergrad. They get their "ideas" from a mail order encyclopedia and a set of Cliffs Notes and thereafter lecture everyone on why "Western Civilization"(Ahem, Plato! Also: Aristotle! What's more: Acquinas! And so on) means we can't raise taxes.
I don't know offhand where Douthat went to high school but he wrote a memoir about his college education - which I haven't read. He's in the category of conservative pundits w an Ivy League pedigree -- like, say, Dinesh D'Souza, except D'Souza is nuttier and more extreme. D'Souza went to Dartmouth, iirc, and Douthat went to Harvard. If Douthat's read the Great Books, he likely did at least some of that on his own.
Douthat went to Hamden Hall Country Day School (Class of 1997). Like I said, NOTHING like Geuss’s education.
So w/r/t Douthat and all the others of his ilk, I submit that there is NOTHING genuine about them … not their Rightist views, not anything! (Why WHY OH WHY this liberal desire to believe that these tedious gasbags, these obvious frauds, are somehow sincere and should be taken seriously?!?)
And like I said, Douthat only became a Catholic later on, halfway through undergrad. Douthat’s approach to his “faith” duplicates his earlier approach to Dungeons & Dragons: you nerdishly absorb the rules and then you LARP your way through, blathering on about what “the Church” really means. The readership of the NYT has fewer and fewer persons who were actually baptized Catholic, so they don’t know any better.
Deneen, Douthat, D’Souza, Andrew Sullivan, Sohrab Ahmari, and so on and on … why do these people exist? It’s not so much to murder thought but to suffocate it in its crib. They occupy the space where thinking otherwise might exist.
The original model for this is William F Buckley, Jr; not an “intellectual” but rather an anti-intellectual, whose model for education (straight-up indoctrination by and for the monied interests, who after all, “own” the institutions) is gaining everywhere.
"(Why WHY OH WHY this liberal desire to believe that these tedious gasbags, these obvious frauds, are somehow sincere and should be taken seriously?!?)"
Because they are sincere and failing to take them seriously will likely lead to a free ride in a boxcar. Of course, by "seriously" I don't mean the "ideas" but the inevitable results - post-Dobbs is a perfect example. It's safer to assume they actually believe.
The trad model does cross lines - Orthodox (Dreher) and Jewish (Prager).
aaall,
Your last sentence is rather cryptic. (I'll have to look up Prager later since the name is not ringing a bell.)
Dennis Prager.... the wretched right wing radio guy, and "president" of "Prager U," a website for rightwing propaganda.
David Z.,
Thanks. I'm pretty sure I hadn't heard of him.
To LFC:
You are most welcome.
Unfortunately, the vile Prager has become a real presence in the right wing propaganda factory. "Prager U" puts out astounding videos, aimed at children, which (inter alia) defend slavery, the treatment of indigenous peoples, transphobia... and every other right wing hobby horse you can imagine. And Ron DeSantis has now injected this filth into Florida schools.
Marc Susselman has just sent me a series of stern emails in which he takes me to task for "libelling" Dennis Prager by saying that one of hil "Prager U" videos defends slavery.
Ok... I exaggerated. The video fell short of actually defending slavery, but it sure makes it sound a lot better than it was..... it whitewashed the hideous institution.... makes it sound much better than it was.... condemns it in very mild terms....
Moreover, "Prager U" completely misrepresents the views of Black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, and (in a hilarious video, but for the seriousness of the subject) makes Christopher Columbus sound (in a cheesy Italian accent) like a benevolent protector of the indigenous peoples his men (and their successors) slaughtered and infected.
No, Marc, I do not take back my characterization of Dennis Prager as "vile." Watch his videos and listen to his radio show. He and his ilk, the Ben Shapiros and other such grifters, are a danger to all marginalized people in America
A satiric take on" Prager U" from the ever spot-on "The Onion":
https://www.theonion.com/what-to-know-about-prageru-1850861871
See especially, the listing on slavery.
Satire is never very far from reality, especially in the era of Trump.
More on "Prager U" from "The Onion":
https://www.theonion.com/could-you-pass-a-prageru-class-in-a-florida-school-1850714679
Last night I watched on YouTube a recent talk about free speech in the academic setting by a Harvard philosophy professor, Edward (Ned) Hall, with a response by another Harvard prof, Danielle Allen. Hall's talk is, I think, very good. I have to finish watching the Q&A session and then I will return here later and post the link. (It's hard to find just by searching on some obvious keywords on YouTube so don't waste time doing that. I'll post the link by late morning or early afternoon; have a couple of other things to do first.)
ok here's the link -- it starts about 4 minutes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSxT0tGh3v8
David Zimmerman getting a series of stern e-mails from Marc Susselman made me realize that there's a trickle of internet gold that has not yet been tapped: a Susselman insult generator. Supplement that meager social security check by setting it up so that for a modest fee one receives a daily e-mail insult for a real or imagined opinion expressed on the internet. Offer limited to ages 70-90. A subscription would be the perfect gift for your favorite anti-Semitic sophist or Putin-apologist.
Susselman invites me to post a "Prager U" video on slavery, so that folks can judge for themselves whether it tries to make slavery in the southern US look like a more acceptable institution than it was.
Well, here's one video, narrated by the Black right wing troll, Candace Owens:
https://www.prageru.com/video/a-short-history-of-slavery
I invite habitues of The Philosophers Stone to note some tropes:
"Everyone did it--- American slavery was not unique"
"People of colour, including Black people, were enslavers too"
A corollary: "The white people who transported slaves to America did not go into the bush to capture them... Black people did"
"The first indigenous people Columbus encountered asked him to protect them from warring indigenous gtribes that threatened them"
And so on for about 5 minutes... Lots of strawmanning, whataboutism, and just plain whitewashing---
The dominant message:
"Stop making such a big deal about slavery in the US"....
"After all, White people passed the amendment that brought an end to slavery in the US"....
"If only Black people would give up their victim complex" (The video just comes out and says this towards the end!)
Pathetic... if it were not being fed to kids in states like Florida.
And here is another doozy from "Prager U," which I offer without much comment:
https://www.prageru.com/video/the-plantation-then-and-now
The message: "Blame the Democrats for the entrapment of today's Black people in the modern version of 'the plantation'"....
You know... Like social welfare programs.... free school lunches, aid to dependant children.... you know, modern slavery.
Oy and f___cking Vey.
To John Rapko:
I certainly hope that you are not suggesting that I am "an anti-Semitic sophist or Putin-apologist."
To John Rapko:
Or was it Marc Susselman?
I could not really follow your post on the new income generator.
There is an enormous scholarly literature on slavery in the U.S. and the Atlantic slave trade, and on slavery in comparative-historical perspective, and one hopes that somewhere in Florida there is a high-school student discovering, say, the work of David Brion Davis or Orlando Patterson (Slavery and Social Death) rather than watching the PragerU videos (which sound bad).
It's all aaall's fault ;) -- he mentioned Prager, I asked who Prager was, and then we were off...
The ghost of Marc Susselman continues to haunt The Philosophers Stone.
This one is on me.... It is my fault this happened.
My apologies to all.
I recall, as an undergrad (so in 1987 or so), sitting around drinking beer and cracking ourselves up by devising the most outrageous yet ideologically consistent “conservative” things we could say. One of them was, “In point of fact, blacks should be assessed a fee to cover the valuable benefit of their ancestors’ transportation from the Dark Continent and their subsequent integration into Western Civilization”.
I won that evening’s contest by delivering this *pensée* in my (actually pretty good) William F Buckley, Jr. impersonation. How we all laughed and laughed at the pure absurdity of it! I’m pretty sure that students at the New College of Florida (the U of Fla’s Liberal Arts honors college) doing EXACTLY the same thing at the same time … and now look what’s happened.
In much the same vein, I can picture a 4” tall Bluetooth-connected Susselman Bobblehead … press a button on its base and it spouts 10 seconds of nonsense.
Susselman insists that the following "Prager U" video vindicates his insistence that PU does not whitewash slavery in the US:
https://www.prageru.com/video/was-the-civil-war-about-slavery
True enough... this one on its own does not.
However, I invite inmates of the Philosophers Stone to view it in conjunction with the other two that I have referenced in earlier posts.
Come on, people!!
It's not fair to be dumping on and insulting someone who does not have the right to reply, Marc, since he's banned here.
To SW:
I plead innocent to any dumping on or insulting Marc Susselman.
You want "dumping on and insulting"? You should see his endless stream of vitriolic emails to me this morning, the juiciest bits of which I shall spare you, brothers and sisters.
I have been one of Marc's few allies on this site, before and after his banishment.... but even I have run out of patience.
It's personally a regular cause of chagrin, although intellectually interesting, that humor never 'works' on the internet. My facetious proposal for an RPW-blog-commentator-specific insult-generator (there are some great ones for Shakespeare and especially Martin Luther) was meant to raise a collective knowing chuckle that in its inducement of general bonhomie would be the internet equivalent of a round of Kumbaya. It was not meant to make anyone the 'butt', including my future lawyer MS. I chose the epithets 'anti-Semitic sophist' and 'Putin-apologist' because they had more or less been directed at me in the past. As Martin Luther once said about me, I have been justly condemned to Hell as one of the most odious and vile people who ever lived: https://ergofabulous.org/luther/?
You people are more stupid than a block of wood.
From Against Latomus, pg. 242 of Luther's Works, Vol. 32
Incredibly, there is no Schopenhauer or Menckian Insulter … yet!
(Am I going to have to learn computer nerdery just for this? At my age? Possibly …)
To some users Professor Wolff's blog feels more like a community of likeminded people, otherwise known as a backstage (as in Goffman's idea) that comes with expectations of more than civility but of comradery and at least attunement- the internet often fails that billing.
Lower your expectations and you will enjoy and benefit from the experience as much as is possible
But we like attunement.... It's a reasonable expectation.
Apologies to LFC but there are a number of non-RC trads who are part of the Herrenvolk International and they all talk amongst themselves.
There are different categories and lots of material at PU. Marc's example is from "Five Minute Videos" while the slavery cartoon is from the "Kids" section. It's the "Kids" vids that are to be used in FL, etc. The excerpt below is from the "Magazine" section and covers FDR (one marvels at the Andrew Mellon mag).
"Unfortunately, FDR’s policies were very expensive, and the country had to raise taxes to pay for them. This meant that the government took more of people’s hard-earned money. Even with all of these programs, the New Deal didn’t end the Depression. In some ways, it got
worse. The government told business owners how much they could pay their employees and at what prices they could sell their goods—even
if the owners couldn’t afford it. This made it harder for businesses to hire new workers. Unemployment remained over ten percent throughout the 1930s."
Is from this:
https://downloads.ctfassets.net/qnesrjodfi80/mawO2EHOvJIxLFH9ECDPd/341fe10c28f50bbb4c3712af97ea4f26/PREP_PUSA_Franklin_D_Roosevelt_2023.pdf
I have no idea why anyone not on the far right would defend Prager. The wonder is how the CW video got on PU. PU is yet another wealthy man's contribution to making the U.S. fascist.
aaall,
No need to apologize. When I said it was your fault I was joking (hence my use of a wink emoji).
Marc Susselman humanely defends himself (& his viewpoints) and everyone believes he has pickled the coffee, but he's really just giving it to us plain & straight--that's what lawyers do. No bull-sweat. Sounds a lot like Socrates. Let's not poison (or cancel off) another gadfly of Athens. And, yes, lawyers can be gadflies too. Some of the best.
BTW, not trying to sound condescending nor patronizing about lawyers or their mysterious craft. Their craft is a grand mystery. I don't understand anything about it. I'm too stupid & slow & not educated enough. People like MS impress me.
Michael Llenos
What you've written above is absurd. You are not "too stupid" to understand the law and it's not a "grand mystery."
Many (though not all) judicial opinions, for instance, can be understood by anyone with a grasp of English. To take a famous example, read the Sup Ct opinion in Brown v. Bd of Ed and then tell me what you found "mysterious" or incomprehensible about it.
Some lawyers may want you to think the law is a grand mystery, but it isn't. Of the traditionally required first-year law courses -- torts, contracts, criminal law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and property -- the only one with a claim to be mysterious is property law, which is full of archaic language and (to use a term of art) gobbledygook, all of which I forgot about ten seconds after the final exam. The other courses you could certainly pass, assuming you first rid yourself of your unfounded preconceptions about "the law."
LFC
It's still so complicated to me. But please explain something to me. All my understanding of court proceedings comes from shows like A Few Good Men. What they don't show in the movies or t.v. shows is a judge's ability to come to a decision based on a previous court precedent. But how is this done and when is this done?
[The first time I got aware of this procedure is when I was reading the Digest of Roman Law by the Emperor Justinian. Many times the different judges: Ulpian, Paulus, or Gaius etc came to different verdicts or different conclusions of any particular case. I believe this gave future judges the option of picking the verdict from the judge they constantly have sided with in the past. Their different opinions were also probably written down for a judge to see every angle of a case's possible final decision they were overseeing. Please explain since I still don't know how any of this court stuff really works.]
ML - I will be glad to offer a brief answer a bit later when my computer is on (I'm on phone right now). In the meantime maybe J. Pillette will want to chime in.
ML -- Ok. This will necessarily be bare-bones and very over-simplified. But since you're on good terms w/ M.S., he may give you his answer by email. (And I'll anticipate that it will perhaps be a better answer than mine.)
***
In common-law systems, of which the U.S. is one, precedent -- what judges have written in the past -- is important, but it's only one element that judges have to consider in making rulings or reaching decisions. Let's say, for example, you're a trial judge in the federal system (or a state trial judge), and you're presiding over a case by yourself (without a jury). First, you will pay close attention to the facts (or alleged facts) that the parties present to you -- this what the opposing sides do when they put on witnesses and offer documentary evidence.
Once the opposing sides have presented their cases, you have to decide, first, what the facts actually are. Did the kid on the tricycle have an accident because the sidewalk he was riding on was left in a condition of disrepair by the city, or was there nothing especially wrong w/ the sidewalk and was the kid just going too fast? Sometimes those factual questions are not hard for a judge (or jury) to answer; other times they might be. (But in this example, remember, there is no jury, which there sometimes is not.)
Once the trial judge has decided what the facts are -- what actually happened -- she/he has to consider what the relevant law is. At least in a common-law system, that is where precedent usually comes in. The judge will look at previous cases with similar facts and see how other judges have decided them. Sometimes that's fairly easy: say there were a bunch of similar cases in the past and 90 percent (say) of them came out in the same way. Then the judge's job is not hard: if the evidence is clear that the city failed to keep the sidewalk in good repair and if 90 percent of judges have held in the past that an injured tricyclist can recover damages, then your job is pretty easy. And you may not need to write a long opinion explaining your reasoning (although you probably will need to write something, even if it's short).
[cont. next box]
N.b. Before MS jumps all over me in the email, I don't know whether this case wd even be in a federal court at all. Probably not, for a couple of reasons. But for these purposes that doesn't matter.
---
Now (purely hypothetically - in this stylized and admittedly rather unrealistic example) what if, say, half of the similar cases in the past have come out one way and half have come out another way? Then you have to decide which line of precedent you find more persuasive, and you have to write an opinion explaining your reasoning.
So let's say you, the trial judge, have ruled for the kid who was riding the tricycle and his parents. The city appeals your ruling to an appeals court. The judges on *that* court have to decide whether, given the facts as you determined them to be, you applied the law (the precedents) correctly. And they may also have to decide whether you made some procedural or other mistakes that are serious enough to reverse your ruling.
***
So to take up directly your questions. When do judges look to precedents to decide cases? All the time. How do they do it? They read the precedents and/or the parties' written arguments and they decide which side is more persuasive. In difficult cases, where the answer isn't obvious, the judges' views about law in general, or what a "fair" result is, will often influence which precedents they decide to "go with." But they usually won't openly say that in such a "crude" way in their opinons.
***
I don't know whether this off-the-cuff answer has been helpful or not. If you search on "introduction to American law," you'll find some online courses that might be helpful. If you want a brief intro to law in a more comparative perspective, you might look at the Very Short Introduction to Law in the Oxford UP series of that name -- I haven't read that one, but it's a pretty good series of books.
typo correction: "opinions"
LFC
Marc Susselman did a terrific job of clearly explaining court precedents in the U.S. legal system. Especially through the legal example of Roe vs Wade. Anyone can read Marc's explanation in #5 of his correspondences at my website. Thank you for responding, LFC. I've been busy somewhat lately, so I haven't had time to get back to you and MS. Thank you both.
ML - welcome.
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