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“More Light!” Lying, Police Work, and the Exclusionary Rule
In the 1961 case Mapp v. Ohio, the Supreme Court declined to protect the the possession of pornographic material, but instead decided to exclude all evidence gained through unconstitutional searches. Last month, the Supreme Court revisited that decision in Herring v. United States, where they reconsidered the rule of evidence that excludes evidence gained unconstitutionally. Exclusion,…
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Getting Prison Reform Right
There’s a great little article about prison growth and reform over at Slate. Fordham Law Professor John Pfaff notes that prison populations in the United States have grown unsustainably large, and suggests that this recession is a good time to reconsider our illusions about the causes of that growth. He then goes on to debunk…
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Democracy and Coffee
Jakob Norberg synthesizes some of the thinking on coffeehouses that hangs at the edges of contemporary democratic theory. Without reifying it as a miraculous commodity, he works through some of the ways that Habermas and Carl Schmitt used the figure of the coffeehouse to represent the pretensions and triumphs of the middle-class after the industrial…
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Social Capital and Diversity
I’ve written about Robert Putnam before in this space, but I’ve been holding off on commenting on his most recent ‘discovery’ that ethnic diversity leads to significant losses of public trust. Apparently the full Skytte lecture will be published sometime soon in Scandinavian Political Studies. Still no sign of it, though the Financial Times published…
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Robert Putnam on Commuting
Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can…