Dec 23, 2010 1
In each small Seinfeld moment in which a bias is repudiated or a perceived prejudice rebuffed, our pushing forward, with all its pratfalls and inevitable errors, is both reiteratively bolstered and critically made fun of. Our missteps and mistakes are made festive. Stabs toward universality may end in the insanity of Festivus, but that the stabs continue is itself a sort of miracle.
Jun 19, 2009 0
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been roundly accused of judicial bias in matters of race. Comparative analyses of “judicial bias,” even ones that give somewhat reliable comparative measures of various jurists’ work, operate by postulating a spectral fixed point of neutrality against which the scrutinized is measured. But where is this point? What constitutes it? What allows us to say that the contingent result of Sotomayor’s intellectual collaborations with dozens of individuals, absent Sotomayor’s views as such, constitutes a universal norm? Why should we presume that the average of the biases of multiple others represents a default lack of bias?
