1999-07-21
SPEECH LOG
Marty Stein spoke on "Planning Your Life For Doing Well And Doing Good" at a breakfast presented by The Peter Favre Forum at The University Club.
SPEECH LOG
Prof. Steven G. Calabresi, the George C. Dix Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern University Law School, spoke on "Federalism and the Role of the Supreme Court" at a luncheon presented by the Milwaukee Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society at the Milwaukee Athletic Club.
Ms. [Elizabeth] Semil [of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, who with the author had participated in a panel discussion on NPR] belongs to the sanguine camp that believes people can be persuaded to conduct themselves in a virtuous manner by allowing their natural goodness to unfold, a process that can be set in motion by praising them when they do well and responding non-judgmentally when they do not. For those who share this view, shaming in not merely cruel but also unnecessary punishment; indeed, punishment in general is anti-social. Many of those who hold this view of human nature tend also to believe that people are innately virtuous--and that if they misbehave, either the demands imposed on them are unjust or their behavior reflects distorting forces that they neither caused nor can control (for example, a history of abuse by their own parents).
--Amitai Etzioni, "Back to the Pillory?" The American Scholar, Summer 1999, p. 46
The law protects art from censorship on the ground that it contains ideas, and according to the legal scholar Daniel S. Moretti, "All ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance--unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion--have the full protection of the guarantees." It is good that the law can save art from censorship, but unfortunate that this rescue undermines the conception of art that has permitted it to be studied within a discipline. From a formalist perspective, the treatment of art as idea renders it indistinguishable from non-artistic representation. Novels become interchangeable with political tracts, art photos with billboards. And as a natural corollary, the authority of the expert to construe artistic meaning is no greater than that of the historian, sociologist, politician, TV commentator, or, indeed, any
construer of meaning.
--Wendy Steiner, "Practice Without Principle: The Two Cultures, Out of Step," The American Scholar, Summer 1999, p. 86-87
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