Law prof Stephanos Bibas (Penn) is quoted in this opinion piece in The Washington Post, "Abandoned OJ Project Shows Shame Still Packs a Punishing Punch." Here is a bit:
The whole project was pure shamelessness. A controversial former football star, who many believe got off scot-free after killing two people, writes a book about how he might have committed the murders. It was an end zone dance in the worst possible taste. Everyone was outraged but had to concede that O.J. Simpson, once acquitted, was beyond the reach of the law.
But Simpson and his publisher, Judith Regan, were within reach of another powerful tool that is not much used in American society: shame. Facing growing outrage and scorn, News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch canceled the book project last week.
For Stephanos Bibas, a law professor and former prosecutor, the saga was grounds for celebration, because it showed that shame remains a powerful tool in America.
For nearly two centuries, using shame as a weapon against wrongdoing has steadily fallen into disfavor in the United States, even as it continues to be an essential part of social discourse in more traditional societies. After the rise of penitentiaries around 1800, the idea of shaming wrongdoers was replaced by more impersonal forms of punishment such as incarceration.
But in the past decade or two, a number of scholars have become interested in the uses of shame, especially in the criminal justice system. Bibas and others think the steady erosion of shame in U.S. courts and society has proved financially costly to the country, deprived victims of a sense of vindication and kept wrongdoers from feeling remorseful.
"I was very pleasantly surprised to see shame, and the shaming of Rupert Murdoch, triumph over O.J.'s shamelessness," Bibas said. "There are, apparently, some things that still go too far."
There's more; check it out. For an earlier MOJ post on this topic, click here.
Friday, December 1, 2006
Readers might be interested in this essay, "Law, Lawyers, the Court, and Catholicism," that I did for the American Catholic Studies Newsletter of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. (Among other things, it talks a bit about Mirror of Justice, about the good things happening at many of our Catholic law schools, about the new journals at Villanova and St. John's, and about the important "Christian lawyering" work being done by, among others, MOJ-ers Rob Vischer and Amy Uelmen.)
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Steve B. writes:
Most mutual fund investors are familiar with the concept of socially responsible investing (a.k.a. values-based investing). A small chunk of that industry sector is comprised of faith-based investment funds, such as the Ave Maria funds that base their investment decisions on the social justice teachings of the Catholic Church. . . .
As an investor, I'm skeptical. . . .
As for whether persons of faith ought to suck it up and accept a lower rate of return in order to invest according to their beliefs and values, that's a post for another day.
Here is a statement from the USCCB, joining Rep. Chris Smith (R) and Democrats for Life in urging Amnesty International not to squander its moral capital promoting an ersatz human right to abortion:
. . . The right to life itself is fundamental. It is the precondition of all other human rights, and its integrity depends on being acknowledged for every member of the human family regardless of race, age, gender, condition, or stage of development.
This principle is not particular to Catholic teaching. It is an insight of the natural law tradition of human rights, held in common by those of diverse religious backgrounds. Many of the great figures who advanced rights for the poor and marginalized also spoke out against abortion, including: Mohandas Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Archbishop Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Fannie Lou Hamer, and most recently, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. We find it incomprehensible that these prophets of progress would now have to be seen as enemies of a "basic" human right.
[E]ndorsing abortion would deeply divide human rights advocates, jeopardize the collaboration between Amnesty and the Catholic bishops, and impair work for social justice both at home and overseas. . . .
Here is a characteristically witty report, courtesy of Professor Tom Smith, on the recent "San Diego atheist fandango":
don't see why a biologist or astronomer has any more claim to speak about religion than any other reasonably intelligent person. It seems quite the same thing as the bad habit so many Americans have of turning to movie actors for their opinions about politics. Yet the ability to appear sad (or intelligent) when one really isn't, is hardly a qualification for opining about how to fight nuclear proliferation. What poor, deluded apes we are sometimes. I remember watching with growing horror some TV show years ago where Patick Stewart (a.k.a. Jean-Luc Picard) ran around outdoors and enjoyed the wilderness, or something like that. When choosing his own words, instead of saying "Make it so" with unquestionable authority, he appeared to be a man who had never had a deep thought, or unbanal sentiment, in his life. He was also wearing a hair piece. One more idol bit the dust.
As long as scientists are in the mood for educating people, perhaps they could start with themselves. Many of them appear to need a class in Philosophy 101. Or maybe Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. They would no doubt emerge with their atheism intact, but they might at least learn that most of the questions they impale themselves upon are philosophical questions, such as, Is there a God? Can we know if there is a God? Could the universe possibly be infinitely old? Or even, Is it a waste of time to even ask questions such as these? You don't see many philosophy PhD's blundering into conferences on the Higgs boson (which I think they are still looking for, but I for one have faith that it is there), because philosophers rightly think they would look like idiots if they did. Yet famous scientists can stand up and say that religion must be stamped out, replaced by science, and so on and on, and expect to be taken seriously. Then there are all the other questions, ones of culture and history I suppose, having to do with whether one would even want to live in a society from which religion had been eradicated by "education". While living under the Taliban or the Spanish Inquisition would have been a nightmare, living in a land where Science had finally taken Its throne does not sound like any bargain either.
