Category Archives: Democracy

Favorite quotes about the law, part 1

Maybe it’s the frus­trat­ed nov­el­ist in me, but I’ve been think­ing about lit­er­a­ture and law.

This arti­cle is the start of a series where, once in a while and for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son, I will focus on thought pro­vok­ing and even pro­found state­ments (by oth­ers) about the law. Some­times the quo­ta­tions will be from lit­er­a­ture, and some­times they will be from legal writ­ings, philo­soph­i­cal works, and from darn near any­thing else that makes us think about the nature of law and its rela­tion­ship to society.

So let’s begin …

Con­tin­ue read­ing Favorite quotes about the law, part 1

Special Election for Senator Byrd’s Seat, and “Democracy in America” From Northern Exposure TV Series

Today is the Spe­cial Unit­ed States Sen­ate Pri­ma­ry Elec­tion for Sen­a­tor Byrd’s seat in West Vir­ginia.

With Democ­ra­cy on my mind: Below is a video seg­ment of the “Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca” episode of North­ern Expo­sure. When you click the play but­ton below, you might get a copy­right mes­sage so that you have to get redi­rect­ed to the actu­al YouTube site (on which this seg­ment is available).

This episode of North­ern Expo­sure was a won­der­ful (and mov­ing) glimpse of democ­ra­cy in small town Amer­i­cana, cen­ter­ing around the may­oral elec­tion for the fic­tion­al Cice­ly, Alas­ka. There are a num­ber of oth­er seg­ments from that episode on YouTube. If you have some free time, get on YouTube and type “North­ern Expo­sure democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca” to see some of the oth­er clips. Or buy the DVD of sea­son three of North­ern Expo­sure, which con­tains the Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca episode. While you’re at it, for anoth­er won­der­ful glimpse of small town Amer­i­cana, watch the always fan­tas­tic Robert Pre­ston in The Music Man.

Update (2015): It looks like the video linked above has been blocked on copy­right grounds, so here is the Ama­zon link to buy sea­son three of North­ern Expo­sure, which includ­ed the “Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca” episode.

Martin Luther King; His entire “I Have a Dream” speech

Today is the 47th Anniver­sary of Dr. Mar­tin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” giv­en on the steps of the Lin­coln Memo­r­i­al. We are now two gen­er­a­tions removed from that speech. Worse, we live in the age of MTV, Twit­ter, and 30-sec­ond sound­bites on the evening news. So all too often, we see only bite-sized snip­pets from Dr. King’s speech, so I want­ed to post the entire speech on this video from YouTube:

Click here for a site that has the tran­script, audio, and video of the speech.