Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Alani Golanski

@alanigolanski.bsky.social

400 followers 190 following 720 posts

Philosophy @ Graduate Center CUNY, James Kent Scholar @ ColumbiaLaw, Ghanaian drumming @ CalArts -- Partner/Director @ Weitz & Luxenberg

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · Dec 29

By valuing capabilities to assert rights and defenses, coordinate opposition to arbitrary authority, and participate in democratic governance, the rule of law unexpectedly & subversively demands social & economic conditions that foster those capabilities.

www.capitallawreview.org/article/1278...

WHY THE RULE OF LAW PROJECT DEMANDS EXTRALEGAL CHANGE | Published in Capital University Law Review

By Alani Golanski. This article explores whether the rule of law project can evaluate conditions in society distinct from attributes of the legal system or sources rooted in power.

www.capitallawreview.org

1 2

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 4h

Intent or merely impact?

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 1d

Judith Shklar (1964) observed a huge gap between jurisprudence and other forms of social theory, and opined that historians and political scientists interested in law found lawyer's approaches to be irrelevant.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 1d

Representative John Lewis expressed grave doubts about the commitments and suitability of John Roberts to serve as Chief Justice, during the 2005 confirmation hearing.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 1d

Eugene Gendlin became a sort of philosophical guru when he inverted the traditional philosophic procedure by which human or nature's rules & principles control our experiencing, holding instead that direct experience and felt meaning take center stage in the creation of concepts.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 1d

Judith Shklar wrote that citizens in a constitutional democracy have heightened responsibilities to avoid passive injustice: "It should not be enough for them to wait until the agencies of government act when a public wrong has been obviously committed."

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 1d

Upon Amartya Sen's 1999 visit as a Nobel winner to his first childhood school in Dhaka, Bangladesh, prestigious but pedagogically stiffly conservative, the headmaster, having pulled AS's 1940 records to show off as exemplary, was disappointed to discover he'd ranked 33/37.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 2d

The Nobel Museum borrowed Amartya Sen's bicycle, upon which he'd ridden from 1945 to 1998 to collect data on local wages and prices, to transport a scale for weighing boys and girls in various villages to suss out gender-based deprivation, to run a night school, and so on.

1 4

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 2d

Not a tyrant! While Machado is no leftist liberationist, the message in this specific context is her anti-authoritarianism, effectively creating a parallel between antidemocratic Maduro and antidemocratic Trump. Her focus and struggle is within Venezuela, not alignment with US liberal circles.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 2d

Lon Fuller: Conceptually, rulers could abide by the rule of law yet be oppressively brutal, but in reality law is an achievement that overwhelmingly pulls toward justice.

HLA Hart: Conceptually, rulers could rule justly, but in reality legal regimes stand ready to oppress.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 3d

Kant's writings on perpetual peace and his transcendental philosophy aroused the belief that the realization of reason through factual transformation was unnecessary, since individuals could become rational and free within the established order.
-- Herbert Marcuse (1937)

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 3d

Maksymilian Del Mar's superb intellectual biography of Neil MacCormick (2025), political childhood, philosophy of law, contribution to European Constitution -- shortlisted for the Scotland Research Book of the Year.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 4d

There are defensive attitudes against painful perceptions. There is forgetting or misinterpreting of outer events to achieve wish fulfillment.
-- Otto Fenichel (1945)

1 1

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 4d

Recommended, the book and/or the movie, the latter directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, based on the life of a scientific prodigy whose talents and experiences took him from Newark to Yale and back.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 4d

David Roberts coined 'tribal epistemology' in 2017, information evaluated based not on conformity to common standards of evidence or a common understanding, but on whether it supports the tribe's values and goals, as espoused by the leader.

share.google/aHFfJNNHjHNu...

Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology

Journalism cannot be neutral toward a threat to the conditions that make it possible.

share.google

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 4d

Extraordinary letter from Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin (21 Nov 1962)

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 4d

Commentary from a season ago, before using US cities as a training ground for US military to combat "the enemy within," before trump's designation of a commitment labelled Antifa as "a domestic terrorist organization," before the indictment of Comey, and so on.

share.google/TLpFv8QhGJH6...

Trump Is Leading the US Into Fascism

Mainstreamcommentators acknowledge that the second Trump administration is authoritarian or right populist, but can’t bring themselves to use the term

share.google

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 5d

Hardly a single "fact" which Bayle's Dictionary culled with truly heroic labor is of real interest to us today; rather, what gives this work lasting value is its grasp of the pure concept of the factual as a profound problem.
-- Ernst Cassirer (1932)

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 5d

The Insurrection Act of 1807 responded to a conspiracy hatched by Aaron Burr - who'd killed Hamilton - to invade the Mississippi Valley and Spanish Mexico, detach the western U.S, seize New Orleans, build himself an empire. It's just like what's going on in Chicago and Portland.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 5d

At least by HLA Hart's lights, Ronald Dworkin and Hans Kelsen held oddly similar views on the position of judges, for RD legal rights being those held against judges to the correct legal decision, for HK laws being commands made on judges and directing that they impose sanctions.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 6d

Joseph Raz: The rule of law is designed to minimize the danger created by the law itself.

Jeremy Waldron: The RoL is an idea designed to correct dangers of abuse that arise in general when political power is exercised, not dangers of abuse that arise from law in particular.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 7d

Paradoxically, gaining facility in the use of a concept can be a bit like learning to ride a bike, a knowing how rather than a knowing that, repeated exposure to the concept allows one to use it correctly even without necessarily becoming capable of conceptualizing the concept.

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 8d

Compared, say, to most African, Asian, Middle Eastern universities, the American university constitutes a relatively utopian space where we can actually talk, rather than being part of the political system with academic appointments being outright political ones.
-- Edward Said (2000)

1 3

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 8d

The young sovereign Alexander of Macedonia set out to prove both his generosity and his love of philosophy by offering to grant the great cynic Diogenes any wish. His wish: "Stop blocking my sun!"

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 8d

1975

Alani Golanski @alanigolanski.bsky.social · 8d

Intriguing obit outlining the fascinating life and civil & human rights work of lawyer Ann Fagan Ginger, including Harvard's outrageous McCarthy era mistreatment of the Gingers.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Ann Fagan Ginger, Tireless Defender of Civil Liberties, Dies at 100