George David Miller - Böcker

In Reinventing American Jurisprudence: Law through the Lens of Value, George David Miller and Laura Brown unfurl an original approach to value and an imaginative landscape in philosophy of law. Value essentialism identifies value formations such as a sacred cow and scapegoat tandem and the intensification of “oughtness” as it approaches sacred zenith values. Readers learn how Occam’s razor has been responsible for the death of many ideas; how the celebrated Other gains nuance as near and remote; and where a spectral assessment of probability and necessity leads. Analyses of Supreme Court cases grow out in different and exciting directions. Buck was not about eugenics, but another iteration of the value of efficiency and Yo Wick was decided less on law and more on a justice’s finding humanity in Chinese laundry mat proprietors. Lochner involved not an ideological binary but three distinct value schemes. “Separate but equal” was refined as parallelism and exploitative tangents. In Brown, the Fourteenth Amendment took a significant subjective turn. In Heller, the communitarian position of stopping violence before it began could be contrasted with the individualistic position of waiting until you see the whites of their eyes in your bedroom. Citizens United was distilled into the question: was the First Amendment designed to maximize participation or maximize democracy?

For far too many people for far too many years, schooling has been a debilitating, demoralizing, and ultimately dehumanizing experience. Make-shift, half-hearted, and watered-down reform measures have proved ineffective. Reform throws out the bath water, but keeps the baby. Radicalism recognizes not a baby but a beast lurks in the bath water and throws both out. This dramatic redefinition of schooling examines four models of dynamism as provided by Nietzsche, Whitehead, Dewey, and Freire. Nietzsche's af-firmation of dynamism is marred by his elitism. Whitehead understands that inert cripple schooling. Without dialogue, ideas remain inert. Dewey misunderstands thinking and does not grasp its inherent double movement: toward order and disorder. Freire's pedagogy is transcended, with emphasis on negotiation between prime values. The final chapter expounds a radical pedagogy of dynamism. Miller argues that teaching and learning are not separate acts, but form a continuum. Within the teaching-learning continuum, all participants are spontaneous and receptive and seek to overcome fear of process, ambiguity, and doubt. The key to radical schooling is a pro-active stance toward creativity that allows for a dynamic integration of difference in dialogue. Negotiating Toward Truth is a call to arms for all educators. The book asks us to look closely what is in the bath water and to have the courage to throw the beast out with the bath water.