Inquiry Into The Statute Book

"This book offers students a comprehensive guide to conducting legal research in paralegal and law clerk programs."--

Most new law is statutory law; that is, law enacted by legislators. An important question, therefore, is how should this law be interpreted by courts and agencies, especially when the text of a statute is not entirely clear. There is a great deal of scholarly literature on the rules and legal materials courts should use in interpreting statutes. This book takes a fresh approach by focusing instead on what judges should do once the legal materials fail to resolve the interpretive question. It challenges the common assumption that in such cases judges should exercise interstitial lawmaking power. Instead, it argues that--wherever one believes the interpretive inquiry has failed to resolve the statutory meaning--judges can and should use statutory default rules that are designed to maximize the satisfaction of enactable political preferences; that is, the political preferences of the polity that are shared among enough elected officials that they could and would be enacted into law if the issue were on the legislative agenda. These default rules explain many recent high-profile cases, including the Guantanamo detainees case, the sentencing guidelines case, the decision denying the FDA authority to regulate cigarettes, and the case that refused to allow the attorney general to criminalize drugs used in physician-assisted suicide.

As the author-pay model spreads across academic publishing, what are the possible consequences? Will the current rage for open-source scholarship actually accomplish anything other than shifting the furniture around on the Titanic? Will not Open Source in combination with Digital Humanitiesfurther destroy the very idea of "slow" and "thoughtful" work in humanistic studies?...It would seem that the author-pay model (formerly attributed to predatory publishers) is just another way of extracting tribute for the "privilege" of being published-enforceable only because academia has ratcheted up the stakes by enforcing research metrics and citations, in the public universities a practice that is primarily enforced by external "industrial" connections. Almost all public and private universities are heading toward measuring output with metrics-many academics now tailoring their CVs to show why they are "important," mirroring the social-media campaigns of celebrities and politicians, and many universities now citing their own "corporate" rankings when promoting their product (the University, the Institute, the Department, the Professor). Where this is all going is toward increased precarity for anyone who does not play the game. Individual, solitary scholars will have few options. Gavin Keeney, "Symptom 'A': The End," Knowledge, Spirit, LawKnowledge, Spirit, Law - as project - is a de facto phenomenology of scholarship in the age of Cognitive Capitalism. The six essays (plus Appendices) presented here cover topics and circle themes related to the problems and crises specific to neo-liberal academia, while proposing creative paths around the various obstructions. The obstructions include metrics-obsessed academia, circular and incestuous peer review, digitalization of research as stalking horse for text- and data-mining, and violation by global corporate fiat of Intellectual Property Rights and the Moral Rights of Authors. These issues, while addressed obliquely in the main text, definitively inform the various implied proscriptive aspects of the essays and, via the Introduction and Appendices, underscore the necessity of developing new-old means to no obvious end in the production of knowledge - that is to say, a return to forms of non-instrumentalized intellectual inquiry. To be developed in two concurrent volumes, Knowledge, Spirit, Law will serve as a "moving and/or shifting anthology" of new forms of expression in humanistic studies.TABLE OF CONTENTS // Preface/Acknowledgments - Introduction: Radical Scholarship - Essay 1: Re-universalizing Knowledge - Essay 2: Estranged Dawns - Essay 3: The Film-essay - Essay 4: Film Mysticism and "The Haunted Wood" - Essay 5: Circular Discourses - Essay 6: Verb Tenses and Time-senses - Appendix A: Agence 'X' Publishing Advisory - Appendix B: Perpetual Petition for the Right of the Author to Have No Digital Rights - Appendix C: Symptom "A" The End - References

Using carefully selected case excerpts, the text demonstrates concepts, principles, and theory in a direct and accessible manner. Cases are presented with insightful author commentary, offering a compelling, cohesive introduction to the subject of public law.--