Clinton,the courts,and social policy

He is author of numerous articles and Enforcing the Fourth Amendment: A Jurisprudential History;and coeditor (with Peter W. Schramm) of American Political Parties and Constitutional Government;and the forthcoming Separation of Powers and Good Government.     

Zionism, Translation and the Politics of Erasure

This paper examines the translation of classic political philosophy into Hebrew, arguing that a variety of ideological positions can be disclosed simply by examining the erasure process employed during translation. Exploring the connection between translation and nation-building, I claim that segments from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty , John Locke's Two Treaties of Government and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan were excised in the service of a Zionist identity politics. Insofar as Zionism is a discursive formation, its production and maintenance involves the expulsion of components that may hinder the fabrication of a unified identity. Counter-narratives of the nation that disrupt its totalizing boundaries may disturb, in Homi Bhabha's words, 'those ideological maneuvers through which "imagined communities" are given essentialist identities'. By way of conclusion, I argue that the altered texts are in effect a sign that one ideology overpowered another and led, as it were, to the corruption of the spirit underlying the original project of translating classics into Hebrew, a project that was initiated by Leon Roth for different ideological reasons.     

On the desirable degree of detail in the law

The desirable degree of detail in the law has not been previously discussed. The point of this article is to begin the discussion by raising a number of problems. The first deals with the fact that a highly detailed law cannot, of course, be remembered and, in fact, may be very hard even to discover. Second, if the law is not highly detailed, it is apt to be uncertain in marginal cases, of which there should be many. Detail can be added to the law either by judicial decision or legislation or by some kind of special body as in France. In any event, however, there will certainly be cases in which it is not clear what the law is and there will be at least some obscurities in the law. These problems are discussed and not solved in this paper. It is intended to start the discussion, not finish it.