Entry 9

Criminal Law was back on the agenda today, and it tied in Tort Law quite well as the main topic of the lecture was omission and commission regarding the duty of care. With this in mind, I am not going to bore you with more details about the duty to care, and it’s Friday night. The main difference is the cases explored and the criminal law going through the various exceptions of when there is an omission, much faster.

While I was due to have a contract tutorial, it was postponed until further notice, and that just leaves us with the tutorial in public law which I shall flesh out. This week we had a kind introductory look into the constitution ideas and what determines them. We didn’t go through a point that is made in political theory about the social contract. The gist of the social contract is the normative rules of a society that members of the community endorse. The conventional view of the social contract (though it can be traced further back) is one of consent. This is leaving the State of Nature (associated with Hobbes in Western Philosophy), and in part of moving from the chaos (Hobbesian), we consent to the joining the rules of the polity. This view is also discussed by Locke and Rousseau and is the mainstream view in political theory until Kant (and more recently Rawls) brought some validity to contractualist view. In class, we only glossed over the consent view as being the prevailing view; which it is not. The Rawlsian view is currently very popular with his theory of justice being derived from the veil of ignorance in the original position. The contractualist view is the idea of using thought experiments and practical reasoning to form an agreement via deliberation. While this sounds really similar to consent, there is a big difference, which is regarding duties. If one consent (and essentially forced to obey) it creates a duty, the contractualist viewpoint of the agreement does not create a duty allowing for more alterations.

We also talked about electing judges, like some US states (and I think Bolivia citation needed). Just to some up the conclusion: no, don’t elect judges. Keep them above politics to help ensure an independent judiciary within democratic societies. (this is not saying that the appointed system is perfect).

Otherwise, have a good weekend. And thanks for the continuous support.