Chad Flanders

Public Reason and Animal Rights

This book’s subject is animal politics, but we might do well to also consider two ways in which animals might be not part of politics but instead outside of politics, so that the very idea of an ‘animal politics’ is suspect, if not nonsensical. One way, a rather traditional way, is to see animals outside of politics because they really don’t have any interests that politics should properly be concerned with. Animals, on this view, belong to the private sphere and not the public sphere and what you do in the private sphere (and whom you to it to) is none of politics’ business. If animals are not part of politics in this way (they are private and not public matters of concern) then you can do whatever you want with animals: you can mistreat them, eat them, buy and sell them. Animals are private property, not subject to the state’s control.

Review of How Judges Think by Richard Posner

Richard Posner has written a book called How Judges Think, and it does purport, at least in part, to be a book about the behaviour of judges. In fact, given Posner’s emphasis on how judges are influenced not only by legal reasons but also by ideology and politics as well as market forces, How Judges Behave might well have been the better title. But it is also, if only subterranealy, a brief for Posner’s favoured normative theory, pragmatism, as well as a polemic against what he sees as pragmatism’s chief rival, ‘legalism’. Unfortunately, throughout the book, the relationship between Posner’s avowedly descriptive project and his more or less implicit normative aims is never entirely clarified. Nor is legalism ever given a fair or workable definition. Legalists are instead characterised early on as those (rubes?) who speak in ‘the loftiest Law Day rhetoric’ (p 1) and hold ‘unrealistic ... conceptions’ of what judges do (p 2). My short review focuses on these two points. Posner’s book is not terribly well organised. It has a tone rather than a method or a theme—and that tone is relentlessly dismissive of the legalistic take on judging. It also has the air of someone saying that the emperor has no clothes. Early on, Posner compares his approach in How Judges Think to his no-nonsense, demystifying approach to sex in Sex and Reason. There are frequent digressions, to allow Posner to chastise this group of starry-eyed law professors or that misguided judge. But despite this, it is a serious book, and deserves to be taken seriously. People, including judges, listen when Posner speaks. And Posner, despite his quasi-scientific aspirations in this book, is himself a brilliant and humanistic judge and man of letters—well and widely read (see especially his classic work Law and Literature), and madly prolific. Indeed, we may in the end wonder whether Posner’s own predictive theory of judging has a place for a judge so deep, careful and creative as Posner is.