« No Penis, No Problem?? | Main | A.O. Scott on the Edge »
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Welcome, Jim Chen!
Just a quick note to welcome Jim Chen's Jurisdynamics blog to the 'sphere. Jim's an accomplished and witty prawf from UMinn, and his unusual take on things will be a superb addition to the conversation. Here's the description of the blog's ambitions:
Law can never fully insulate itself from the impact of societal and technological change. For instance, the United States Constitution was not only adopted "in Order to . . . secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity," but also was "intended to endure for ages to come, and, consequently, to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs. McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 415 (1819). Likewise, if law harbors any hope of sustaining "ideas and aspirations that must survive more ages than one," the law must respond to upheaval. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 901 (1992). Any stability in the law is episodic at best and prone to violent interruption. This blog openly embraces a dynamic model of legal change. Jurisdynamics describes the interplay between legal responses to exogenous change and the law's own endogenous capacity for adaptation. The world that law tries to govern has has become "so vast that fully to comprehend it would require an almost universal knowledge ranging from" economics and the natural sciences "to the niceties of the legislative, judicial and administrative processes of government." Queensboro Farms Prods., Inc. v. Wickard, 137 F.2d 969, 975 (2d Cir. 1943). Within the realm of legal scholarship, this blog aspires to the goal that historian David Christian set out for his discipline: "that the appropriate time scale for the study of history may be the whole of time." David Christian, The Case for "Big History," 2 J. World Hist. 223, 223 (1991). Jurisdynamics will present the case for "big law," for the proposition that the substantive scale on which law should be studied, taught, and learned is the entirety of human experience.
Whoo! Heady stuff.
Posted by Administrators on July 18, 2006 at 09:59 AM in Blogging | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c6a7953ef00d835304fee53ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Welcome, Jim Chen!:
Comments
The comments to this entry are closed.