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What the presence of law tells us about our beliefs, our language, and the world around usIn a strikingly original work intended not only for practicing lawyers but for anyone interested in the modern dilemma of the loss of meaning, Joseph Vining invites us to reconsider law as a unique form of thought, inseparably connected to everything in the world that makes up human identity. Oliver Wendell Holmes asserted at the end of the nineteenth century that human law is ultimately a phenomenon in quantitative relations to its causes and effects, and many have been left with an impression of law as a set of processes and rules. Vining takes issue with this and with various reductionist attempts in scientific thought today to express the universe in a single mathematical description of forces, as well as with post-structuralist speculation that there are no valid truth claims, and that human inter-action can be reduced to analysis of power relationships. Law, he argues, is an independent discourse, not reducible to any other, that exists only in human interaction and reflects continuing human worth. Vining's search to reinstate the spiritual dimension in public discourse brings him head-on with a wide array of powerful academic forces: linguistics theory, political science, the new historicism, and the traditional teaching of law.This book consists of a collection of what Vining calls ";amplifications"; of the implied text of the law-impressions, commentaries, vignettes, poems, and dialogues-which illustrate aspects of conventional legal language and logic, and the subjects legal practice regularly deals with, such as promises, death, and crime. Throughout we see that law reaches deeply into the way we know ourselves and other persons, all of whom speak through law as law connects language to person and person to action. The texts generated by legal method constitute the living record of social acquaintance and contest, speaking across cultures and across centuries. It is the close reading of legal texts and contexts, Vining argues, that provides the present source of the transcendental in modern secular life. But unlike the other academic arts of interpretation, law alone is directly connected with the most real, the most particular and, at the same time, the most universal facts of social life.From Newton's Sleep casts doubt on the certainties past and present and creates new grounds for skepticism and conviction. The fragmentary form of the book mirrors its subject. It is intended to be picked up and read as occasion allows by lawyers and anyone interested in law

From Newton's Sleep poses ultimate questions for a century that now approaches its end, looks forward to the one that will follow, casts doubt on certainties both ancient and modern, and creates new grounds for skepticism and conviction. It is intended to be read in pieces, as time and occasion allow, especially at evening, by lawyers and all their fellow nonlawyers

Public agency strategic analysis (PASA) is different from public policy analysis because public agency executives face numerous constraints that those performing "unconstrained" policy analysis do not. It is also different from private sector strategic analysis. But because of similar constraints and realities, some generic and private sector strategic analysis techniques can be useful to those carrying out PASA, if appropriately modified. Analysis of the external agency environment (external forces) and internal value creation processes ("value chains", "modular assembly" processes or "multi-sided intermediation platforms") are the most important components of PASA. Also, agency executives must focus on feasible alternatives. In sum, PASA must be practical. But public executives need to take seriously public value, and specifically social efficiency, when engaging in PASA. Unless they do so, their strategic analyses will not have normative legitimacy because enhancing public value is not the same as in some versions of public value or in agency "profit maximization". Although similarly constrained, normatively appropriate public agency strategic analysis is not "giving clients what they want" or "making the public sector business case". PASA must be both practical and principled.

Prosecution of corporations, for common law offenses such as homicide as well as for specially tailored statutory offenses, is now an established part of the administration of criminal law in the United States. Conviction is explicitly guided and justified by the retributive purposes of criminal law as much as the deterrent. Evidence of corporate mens rea generally focuses on calculated indifference to value in itself - of the kind contemplated in the theory of profit maximization - and corporate culpability and remorse are operative terms in sentencing. The ontology of a responsible person here, irreducible to human individuals or to a system, may connect this area of criminal law to religious thought in a special way. This area may also be where the retributive, with its recognition of responsibility and its opening to remorse, atonement and forgiveness, is most clearly articulated and justified. Positive duties are implied and creativity looked for in analysis. These developments are more congenial to a religious sensibility than to one that is purely secular. Their broad acceptance may be made possible by the breadth of religious practice in the United States, and be evidence of contemporary influence of religious thought on legal thought, evidence indeed of basic connections between the two.