Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

The collected works

Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Law's Empire

Taking Rights Seriously.

New democracies around the world have adopted constitutional courts to oversee the operation of democratic politics. Where does judicial power come from, how does it develop in the early stages of democratic liberalization, and what political conditions support its expansion? This book answers these questions through an examination of three constitutional courts in Asia: Taiwan, Korea, and Mongolia. In a region that has traditionally viewed law as a tool of authoritarian rulers, constitutional courts in these three societies are becoming a real constraint on government. In contrast with conventional culturalist accounts, this book argues that the design and functioning of constitutional review are largely a function of politics and interests. Judicial review - the power of judges to rule an act of a legislature or national leader unconstitutional - is a solution to the problem of uncertainty in constitutional design. By providing 'insurance' to prospective electoral losers, judicial review can facilitate democracy.

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Judicial Review in New Democracies: Constitutional Courts in Asian Cases

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics (Oxford University Press), edited by Keith E. Whittington (Princeton University), R. Daniel Kelemen (Rutgers University) and Gregory A. Caldeira (Ohio State University), is part of the multi-volume Oxford Handbooks of Political Science. The study of law and politics is one of the foundation stones of the discipline of political science, and it has been one of the productive areas of cross-fertilization between the various subfields of political science and between political science and other cognate disciplines. This Handbook provides a comprehensive survey of the field of law and politics in all its diversity, ranging from such traditional subjects as theories of jurisprudence, constitutionalism, judicial politics and law-and-society to such re-emerging subjects as comparative judicial politics, international law, and democratization. Featuring 50 scholars and 45 chapters, The Oxford Handbook of Law and Politics gathers together leading scholars in the field to critical appraisals of the key issues shaping the discipline today and to help set the direction of research in the decade ahead.

The Oxford handbook of law and politics

The exercise of constitutional review by an independent and active judiciary is commonly regarded as against the interest of current government officials, who presumably prefer to exercise power without interference. In this article, I advance an “overcoming obstructions” account of why judicial review might be supported by existing power holders. When current elected officials are obstructed from fully implementing their own policy agenda, they may favor the active exercise of constitutional review by a sympathetic judiciary to overcome those obstructions and disrupt the status quo. This provides an explanation for why current officeholders might tolerate an activist judiciary. This dynamic is illustrated with case studies from American constitutional history addressing obstructions associated with federalism, entrenched interests, and fragmented and cross-pressured political coalitions.

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“Interpose Your Friendly Hand”: Political Supports for the Exercise of Judicial Review by the United States Supreme Court

This text argues that the Constitution has a dual nature. The first aspect, on which legal scholars have focused, is the degree to which the Constitution acts as a binding set of rules that can be neutrally interpreted and externally enforced by the courts against government actors. This is the process of constitutional interpretation. But according to Keith Whittington, the Constitution also permeates politics itself, to guide and constrain political actors in the very process of making public policy. In so doing, it is also dependent on political actors, both to formulate authoritative constitutional requirements and to enforce those fundamental settlements in the future. Whittington characterizes this process, by which constitutional meaning is shaped within politics at the same time that politics is shaped by the Constitution, as one of construction as opposed to interpretation. Whittington goes on to argue that ambiguities in the constitutional text and changes in the political situation push political actors to construct their own constitutional understanding. The construction of constitutional meaning is a necessary part of the political process and a regular part of American history, how a democracy lives with a written constitution. The Constitution both binds and empowers government officials.

Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning

Constitutional scholarship has deteriorated into a set of armed camps, with defenders of different theories of judicial review too often talking to their own supporters but not engaging their opponents. This book breaks free of the stalemate and reinvigorates the debate over how the judiciary should interpret the Constitution. Keith Whittington reconsiders the implications of the fundamental legal commitment to faithfully interpret our written Constitution. Making use of arguments drawn from American history, political philosophy, and literary theory, he examines what it means to interpret a written constitution and how the courts should go about that task. He concludes that when interpreting the Constitution, the judiciary should adhere to the discoverable intentions of the Founders. Other originalists have also asserted that their approach is required by the Constitution but have neither defended that claim nor effectively responded to critics of their assumptions or their method. This book sympathetically examines the most sophisticated critiques of originalism based on postmodern, hermeneutic, and literary theory, as well as the most common legal arguments against originalists. Whittington explores these criticisms, their potential threat to originalism, and how originalist theory might be reconstructed to address their concerns. In a non-dogmatic and readily understandable way, he explains how originalist methods can be reconciled with an appropriate understanding of legal interpretation and why originalism has much to teach all constitutional theorists. He also shows how originalism helps realize the democratic promise of the Constitution without relying on assumptions of judicial restraint. This book carefully examines both the possibilities and the limitations of constitutional interpretation and judicial review. It shows us not only what the judiciary ought to do, but what the limits of appropriate judicial review are and how judicial review fits into a larger system of constitutional government. With its detailed and wide-ranging explorations in history, philosophy, and law, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in how the Constitution ought to be interpreted and what it means to live under a constitutional government.

Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review

The concept of social capital has revitalized the study of civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville's examination of 19th-century America is a major source of inspiration for much of this work. Tocqueville's analysis has been used to help support the idea that a strong civil society is crucial to democratic success. A reconsideration of Tocqueville's analysis, and, more important, of his American case, however, suggests that an active civil society is not an unalloyed good for democratic politics. A strong society can be not only a support but also a threat to democracy and liberal democratic ideals. One's evaluation of the health of democratic polities must depend on a study of the effects of political institutions and constitutional structures, as well as of civil society.

Revisiting Tocqueville's America : Society, Politics, and Association in the Nineteenth Century

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