Neil Gorsuch? Originalism and the Ten Commandments

Current Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch claims that judges should “apply the law as it is, focusing backward, not forward, and looking to text, structure, and history to decide what a reasonable reader at the time of the events in question would have understood the law to be ....” On its face, this is at best an odd claim. Laws are generally forward looking in their desire to govern future behavior. And even if we could always focus back to determine legal meaning, why would we want to disconnect meaning from ongoing life in such a way? Why, for example, should the absence of email in George Washington’s day mean our modern use of email isn’t covered by our modern notions of “speech”? Excluding email from “speech” today would be silly and we have refined “speech” to include email in both law and in life. Of course, if we refine meaning for “speech” and “email,” why shouldn’t we do the same for other things in other contexts as they change with time? It’s hard to see how Originalism’s odd backwardness isn’t fatal from the outset.

Parsing Babble in North Carolina's HB-2 and Calling Out the Need for Immediate Repeal

Read here my parsing of ambiguous bathroom provisions in North Carolina's HB-2 and the immediate need to repeal the flawed statute in light of further imminent threatened boycotts of the state.

Rethinking The Elect

                            The Elect

Take that long-suffering slave:  if she instead

Were master, could descent dissent and shed

Vile arrogance slaves shirk and in its stead

Renounce the life that life inherited?

Take that starved, broken pauper:  if instead

Of life so harsh he often would be dead

He had a fuller purse, was fuller fed

Would he have known to offer paupers bread?

Take that queer soul who's “different”:  if instead

He'd turned out “normal” would he think a dead

Queer's better than a live one, too, and spread

Intolerance majorities have bred?

Is this not Grace?  Spared from such tests as these,

Has God not favored his minorities?

In a time of Trump when I fear many devalue diversity and many more do not see the frequent grace in minority, struggle, and lack of material wealth, I highlight this poem from Charms and Knots.  I also highlight the poem for a time when many no longer appreciate the endless powers of formalist verse.  Apart from the inherent power of sonnet form, twelve same-rhymed lines followed by two fresh rhymes actually participate in the grace and rarity of difference (indexical expression of the point to use Peirce's terminology).

Ekphrasis & Prose: Sonnet Translations of Poe & Hawthorne

I sometimes wonder whether a prose piece should have been verse from the outset.  Could the deep meaning have been more effectively captured and conveyed by poetic form than by prose?  I've wondered that, for example, in the case of Poe's "The Mask of the Red Death."  With no illusions that Poe's sonnet wouldn't have been much better, here's a concrete example of what I mean: 

Shadow After Poe 

We noticed there was pestilence about.

We played instead of passive victim an
Aggressive agent capable of plan
And execution.  In, we locked it out,

A simple action, really, which we sealed
With weighty velvet curtains drawn across
An iron door bolted tight.  “Our gain, Hell’s loss!”
We toasted with good bourbon and were steeled.

“God helps who helps himself,” we boasted till
We saw a shadow by a comrade still
And cold throughout the reverie.  It hid

As quick within the heavy draperies.  Did
Drink fool?  No.  Oh, no fancy has composed
Such vast lost voices in a single ghost.

I've also wondered the same about individual passages in longer works.  Here, for example, is a bit of Hawthorne's The House of The Seven Gables set to sonnet form: