A Little Thought on The Reading

Since I will not be in class to discuss I thought I would just put some input on here, even though my input in class is sometimes not that much and this article in Dewey was tougher than they have been lately, but I am going to refer to this question and expand upon it somewhat.

Dewey-On page 357 2/3rds of the way down the 1st column, Dewey said that “Justice Holmes has generalized the situation by saying that the whole outline of the law is the resultant of a conflict at every point between logic and good sense”. Do you agree? Why or why not?

I agree with this statement of Dewey, because when we talk about law and logic it is hard to draw that line between the two, what may seem logical in a situation may not be the correct law to follow. It is somewhat related to morals and ethics when you start speaking of logic, but if we keep going to page 359 where Dewey starts to talk about "Courts not only...until all the way until he says it will indicate a rule for dealing with similar cases in the future" (which is about in the middle of the 2nd column on that page). I agree that we do reach decisions in law based upon justifying reasons, even if we say somone commited murder, but cannot give enough reasons or evidence the person is most likely not convicted. I do like where he says we reach these decisions so that in other cases we have something to base it on. This relates back to the zero tolerance in a way because we don't give the children a basis or a reasoning, which Dewey suggest that we do need reasoning behind law, but even if we give a reasoning it may not always be logical. We know it would be logical to find a murder that says they killed someone guilty, but without enough reasoning we cannot find them truly guilty. I hope that makes sense. I did find this section a little difficult because it is hard to take logic, and law seperately, becuse they are so closely related. I do like how I now see where all our other class discussions are falling together with the teaching in the democracy because this article puts us more back to laws, and the fact that laws cannot be broken, but justifying even the law may not always be logical. Sorry I missed the discussion, but this was some of my input in it!

Hayley