Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Myles Dworkin, FBA was an American philosopher and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to renowned philosopher H. L. A. Hart. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact." According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century. After his death, the Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein said Dworkin was "one of the most important legal philosophers of the last 100 years, he may well head the list."His theory of law as integrity as presented in his book titled Law's Empire, in which judges interpret the law in terms of consistent moral principles justice and fairness, is among the most influential contemporary theories about the nature of law.
Dworkin advocated a "moral reading" of the United States Constitution, an interpretivist approach to law and morality. He was a frequent commentator on contemporary political and legal issues those concerning the Supreme Court of the United States in the pages of The New York Review of Books. Ronald Dworkin was born in 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island, United States, the son of Madeline and David Dworkin, his family was Jewish. He graduated from Harvard University in 1953 with an A. B. summa cum laude attended Magdalen College, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a student of Sir Rupert Cross and J. H. C. Morris. After he completed his final year's exams at Oxford, the examiners were so impressed with his script that the Professor of Jurisprudence was summoned to read it, he was awarded a B. A. with a Congratulatory first. Dworkin attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1957 with an LL. B magna cum laude, he clerked for Judge Learned Hand of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Judge Hand would call Dworkin "the law clerk to beat all law clerks"—and Dworkin would recall Judge Hand as an enormously influential mentor. After clerking for Judge Learned Hand, Dworkin was offered the opportunity to clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurter, he joined Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent law firm in New York City. After working at the firm, Dworkin became a Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he became the holder of the Wesley N. Hohfeld Chair of Jurisprudence. In 1969, Dworkin was appointed to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, a position in which he succeeded H. L. A. Hart and was elected Fellow of University College, Oxford. After retiring from Oxford, Dworkin became the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, where he subsequently became the Bentham Professor of Jurisprudence, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and professor of Philosophy at New York University, where he taught since the late 1970s. He co-taught a colloquium in legal and social philosophy with Thomas Nagel.
Dworkin had contributed, for several decades, to The New York Review of Books. He delivered the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture at Harvard, the Storrs Lectures at Yale, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, the Scribner Lectures at Princeton. In June 2011, he joined the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London. Dworkin as a critic of HLA Hart's legal positivism has been summarized by the Stanford Encyclopedia which has stated that: Dworkin, as positivism's most significant critic, rejects the positivist theory on every conceivable level. Dworkin denies that there can be any general theory of the content of law. A theory of law is for Dworkin a theory of how cases ought to be decided and it begins, not with an account of the political organization of a legal system, but with an abstract ideal regulating the conditions under which governments may use coercive force over their subjects. Dworkin is most famous for his critique of Hart's legal positivism.
Dworkin's theory is'interpretive': the law is whatever follows from a constructive interpretation of the institutional history of the legal system. Dworkin argues that moral principles that people hold dear are wrong to the extent that certain crimes are acceptable if one's principles are skewed enough. To discover and apply these principles, courts interpret the legal data with a view to articulating an interpretation that best explains and justifies past legal practice. All interpretation must follow, Dworkin argues, from the notion of "law as integrity" to make sense. Out of the idea that law is'interpretive' in this way, Dworkin argues that in every situation where people's legal rights are controversial, the best interpretation involves the right answer thesis, the thesis that there exists a right answer as a matter of law that the judge must discover. Dworkin opposes the notion. Dworkin's model of legal principles is connected with Hart's notion of the Rule of Recognition. Dworkin rejects Hart's conception of
Two Treatises of Government
Two Treatises of Government is a work of political philosophy published anonymously in 1689 by John Locke. The First Treatise attacks patriarchalism in the form of sentence-by-sentence refutation of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, while the Second Treatise outlines Locke's ideas for a more civilized society based on natural rights and contract theory; this publication contrasts former political works by Locke himself. In Two Tracts on Government, written in 1660, Locke defends a conservative position. In 1669, Locke co-authored the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which endorses aristocracy and serfdom. Although some dispute the extent to which the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina portray Locke's own philosophy, vs. that of the Lord proprietors of the colony. The document was a legal document written for and signed and sealed by the eight Lord proprietors to whom Charles II had granted the colony, he wrote. King James II of England was overthrown in 1688 by a union of Parliamentarians and the stadtholder of the Dutch Republic William III of Oranje-Nassau, who as a result ascended the English throne as William III of England.
This is known as the Glorious Revolution called the Revolution of 1688. Locke claims in the "Preface" to the Two Treatises that its purpose is to justify William III's ascension to the throne, though Peter Laslett suggests that the bulk of the writing was instead completed between 1679–1680. According to Laslett, Locke was writing his Two Treatises during the Exclusion Crisis, which attempted to prevent James II from taking the throne in the first place. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, Locke's mentor and friend, introduced the bill, but it was unsuccessful. Richard Ashcraft, following in Laslett's suggestion that the Two Treatises were written before the Revolution, objected that Shaftesbury's party did not advocate revolution during the Exclusion Crisis, he suggests that they are instead better associated with the revolutionary conspiracies that swirled around what would come to be known as the Rye House Plot. Locke and many others were forced into exile. Locke knew his work was dangerous—he never acknowledged his authorship within his lifetime.
Two Treatises was first published, anonymously, in December 1689. Locke was unhappy with this edition, complaining to the publisher about its many errors. For the rest of his life, he was intent on republishing the Two Treatises in a form that better reflected his meaning. Peter Laslett, one of the foremost Locke scholars, has suggested that Locke held the printers to a higher "standard of perfection" than the technology of the time would permit. Be that as it may, the first edition was indeed replete with errors; the second edition was worse, printed on cheap paper and sold to the poor. The third edition was much improved, he made corrections to the third edition by hand and entrusted the publication of the fourth to his friends, as he died before it could be brought out. The Two Treatises begin with a Preface announcing what Locke hopes to achieve, but he mentions that more than half of his original draft, occupying a space between the First and Second Treatises, has been irretrievably lost.
Peter Laslett maintains that, while Locke may have added or altered some portions in 1689, he did not make any revisions to accommodate for the missing section. In 1691 Two Treatises was translated into French by David Mazzel, a French Huguenot living in the Netherlands; this translation left out Locke's "Preface," all of the First Treatise, the first chapter of the Second Treatise. It was in this form that Locke's work was reprinted during the 18th century in France and in this form that Montesquieu and Rousseau were exposed to it; the only American edition from the 18th century was printed in 1773 in Boston. There were no other American editions until the 20th century. Two Treatises is divided into the Second Treatise; the original title of the Second Treatise appears to have been "Book II," corresponding to the title of the First Treatise, "Book I." Before publication, Locke gave it greater prominence by inserting a separate title page: "An Essay Concerning the True Original and End of Civil Government."
The First Treatise is focused on the refutation of Sir Robert Filmer, in particular his Patriarcha, which argued that civil society was founded on a divinely sanctioned patriarchalism. Locke proceeds through Filmer's arguments, contesting his proofs from Scripture and ridiculing them as senseless, until concluding that no government can be justified by an appeal to the divine right of kings; the Second Treatise outlines a theory of civil society. Locke begins by describing the state of nature, a picture much more stable than Thomas Hobbes' state of "war of every man against every man," and argues that all men are created equal in the state of nature by God. From this, he goes on to explain the hypothetical rise of property and civilization, in the process explaini
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and—with W. E. B. Du Bois, Karl Marx and Max Weber—is cited as the principal architect of modern social science. Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, in which new social institutions have come into being, his first major sociological work was The Division of Labour in Society. In 1895, he published The Rules of Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide, a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy; the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.
Durkheim was deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions, if this term is understood in its broader meaning as "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity" and its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic, he remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, social stratification, law and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.
Emile Durkheim was born in Épinal in the son of Mélanie and Moïse Durkheim. He came from a long line of devout French Jews, he began his education in a rabbinical school, but at an early age, he decided not to follow in his family's footsteps and switched schools. Durkheim led a secular life. Much of his work was dedicated to demonstrating that religious phenomena stemmed from social rather than divine factors. While Durkheim chose not to follow in the family tradition, he did not sever ties with his family or with the Jewish community. Many of his most prominent collaborators and students were Jewish, some were blood relations. Marcel Mauss, a notable social anthropologist of the pre-war era, was his nephew. One of his nieces was Claudette Bloch, a marine biologist and mother of Maurice Bloch, who became a noted anthropologist. A precocious student, Durkheim entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1879, at his third attempt; the entering class that year was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century and many of his classmates, such as Jean Jaurès and Henri Bergson, would go on to become major figures in France's intellectual history.
At the ENS, Durkheim studied under the direction of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook, wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu. At the same time, he read Herbert Spencer, thus Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society early on in his career. This meant the first of many conflicts with the French academic system, which had no social science curriculum at the time. Durkheim found humanistic studies uninteresting, turning his attention from psychology and philosophy to ethics and sociology, he obtained his agrégation in philosophy in 1882, though finishing next to last in his graduating class owing to serious illness the year before. The opportunity for Durkheim to receive a major academic appointment in Paris was inhibited by his approach to society. From 1882 to 1887 he taught philosophy at several provincial schools. In 1885 he decided to leave for Germany, where for two years he studied sociology at the universities of Marburg and Leipzig.
As Durkheim indicated in several essays, it was in Leipzig that he learned to appreciate the value of empiricism and its language of concrete, complex things, in sharp contrast to the more abstract and simple ideas of the Cartesian method. By 1886, as part of his doctoral dissertation, he had completed the draft of his The Division of Labour in Society, was working towards establishing the new science of sociology. Durkheim's period in Germany resulted in the publication of numerous articles on German social science and philosophy. Durkheim's articles gained recognition in France, he received a teaching appointment in the University of Bordeaux in 1887, where he was to teach the university's first social science course, his official title was Chargé d'un Cours de Science Sociale et de Pédagogie and thus he taught both pedagogy and sociology. The appointment of the social scientist to the humanistic faculty was an important sign of the change of times, the growing importance and recognition of the social sciences.
From this position Durkheim helped reform th
Comparative law
Comparative law is the study of differences and similarities between the law of different countries. More it involves the study of the different legal "systems" in existence in the world, including the common law, the civil law, socialist law, Canon law, Jewish Law, Islamic law, Hindu law, Chinese law, it includes the description and analysis of foreign legal systems where no explicit comparison is undertaken. The importance of comparative law has increased enormously in the present age of internationalism, economic globalization, democratization; the origins of modern Comparative Law can be traced back to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1667 in his Latin-language book Nova Methodus Discendae Docendaeque Iurisprudentiae. Chapter 7 introduces the idea of classifying Legal Systems into several families. Notably, a few years earlier, Leibnitz introduced an idea of Language families. Although every Legal System is unique, Comparative Law through studies of their similarities and differences allows for classification of Legal Systems, wherein Law Families is the basic level of the classification.
The main differences between Law Families are found in the source of Law, the role of court precedents, the origin and development of the Legal System. Montesquieu is regarded as an early founding figure of comparative law, his comparative approach is obvious in the following excerpt from Chapter III of Book I of his masterpiece, De l'esprit des lois:he political and civil laws of each nation... should be adapted in such a manner to the people for whom they are framed that it should be a great chance if those of one nation suit another. They should be in relation to the nature and principle of each government: whether they form it, as may be said of politic laws, they should be in relation to the climate of each country, to the quality of its soil, to its situation and extent, to the principal occupation of the natives, whether husbandmen, huntsmen, or shepherds: they should have relation to the degree of liberty which the constitution will bear. In Chapter XI of Book XXIX, discussing the French and English systems for punishment of false witnesses, he advises that "to determine which of those systems is most agreeable to reason, we must take them each as a whole and compare them in their entirety."
Yet another place where Montesquieu's comparative approach is evident is the following, from Chapter XIII of Book XXIX: As the civil laws depend on the political institutions, because they are made for the same society, whenever there is a design of adopting the civil law of another nation, it would be proper to examine beforehand whether they have both the same institutions and the same political law. The modern founding figure of comparative and anthropological jurisprudence was Sir Henry Maine, a British jurist and legal historian. In his 1861 work Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, Its Relation to Modern Ideas, he set out his views on the development of legal institutions in primitive societies and engaged in a comparative discussion of Eastern and Western legal traditions; this work placed comparative law in its historical context and was read and influential. The first university course on the subject was established at the University of Oxford in 1869, with Maine taking up the position of professor.
Comparative law in the US was brought by a legal scholar fleeing persecution in Germany, Rudolf Schlesinger. Schlesinger became professor of comparative law at Cornell Law School helping to spread the discipline throughout the US. Comparative law is an academic discipline that involves the study of legal systems, including their constitutive elements and how they differ, how their elements combine into a system. Several disciplines have developed as separate branches of comparative law, including comparative constitutional law, comparative administrative law, comparative civil law, comparative commercial law, comparative criminal law. Studies of these specific areas may be viewed as micro- or macro-comparative legal analysis, i.e. detailed comparisons of two countries, or broad-ranging studies of several countries. Comparative civil law studies, for instance, show how the law of private relations is organised and used in different systems or countries; the purposes of comparative law are: To attain a deeper knowledge of the legal systems in effect To perfect the legal systems in effect Possibly, to contribute to a unification of legal systems, of a smaller or larger scale Comparative law is different from the fields of general jurisprudence, international law, including both public international law and private international law.
Despite the differences between comparative law and these other legal fields, comparative law helps inform all of these areas of normativity. For example, comparative law can help international legal institutions, such as those of the United Nations System, in analyzing the laws of different countries regarding their treaty obligations. Comparative law would be applicable to private international law when developing an approach to interpretation in a conflicts analysis. Comparative law may contribute to legal theory by creat
Aristotle
Aristotle was a philosopher during the Classical period in Ancient Greece, the founder of the Lyceum and the Peripatetic school of philosophy and Aristotelian tradition. Along with his teacher Plato, he is considered the "Father of Western Philosophy", his writings cover many subjects – including physics, zoology, logic, aesthetics, theatre, rhetoric, linguistics, economics and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him, it was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry; as a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be a subject of contemporary philosophical discussion. Little is known about his life. Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Northern Greece, his father, died when Aristotle was a child, he was brought up by a guardian. At seventeen or eighteen years of age, he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty-seven.
Shortly after Plato died, Aristotle left Athens and, at the request of Philip II of Macedon, tutored Alexander the Great beginning in 343 BC. He established a library in the Lyceum which helped him to produce many of his hundreds of books on papyrus scrolls. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues for publication, only around a third of his original output has survived, none of it intended for publication; the fact that Aristotle was a pupil of Plato contributed to his former views of Platonism, following Plato's death, Aristotle developed an increased interest in natural sciences and adopted the position of immanent realism. Aristotle's views on physical science profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, their influence extended from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages into the Renaissance, were not replaced systematically until the Enlightenment and theories such as classical mechanics. Some of Aristotle's zoological observations found in his biology, such as on the hectocotyl arm of the octopus, were disbelieved until the 19th century.
His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, studied by medieval scholars such as Peter Abelard and John Buridan. Aristotle's influence on logic continued well into the 19th century He influenced Islamic thought during the Middle Ages, as well as Christian theology the Neoplatonism of the Early Church and the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. Aristotle was revered among medieval Muslim scholars as "The First Teacher" and among medieval Christians like Thomas Aquinas as "The Philosopher", his ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics, such as in the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre and Philippa Foot. In general, the details of Aristotle's life are not well-established; the biographies written in ancient times are speculative and historians only agree on a few salient points. Aristotle, whose name means "the best purpose" in Ancient Greek, was born in 384 BC in Stagira, about 55 km east of modern-day Thessaloniki.
His father Nicomachus was the personal physician to King Amyntas of Macedon. Both of Aristotle's parents died when he was about thirteen, Proxenus of Atarneus became his guardian. Although little information about Aristotle's childhood has survived, he spent some time within the Macedonian palace, making his first connections with the Macedonian monarchy. At the age of seventeen or eighteen, Aristotle moved to Athens to continue his education at Plato's Academy, he remained there for nearly twenty years before leaving Athens in 348/47 BC. The traditional story about his departure records that he was disappointed with the Academy's direction after control passed to Plato's nephew Speusippus, although it is possible that he feared the anti-Macedonian sentiments in Athens at that time and left before Plato died. Aristotle accompanied Xenocrates to the court of his friend Hermias of Atarneus in Asia Minor. After the death of Hermias, Aristotle travelled with his pupil Theophrastus to the island of Lesbos, where together they researched the botany and zoology of the island and its sheltered lagoon.
While in Lesbos, Aristotle married Hermias's adoptive daughter or niece. She bore him a daughter, whom they named Pythias. In 343 BC, Aristotle was invited by Philip II of Macedon to become the tutor to his son Alexander. Aristotle was appointed as the head of the royal academy of Macedon. During Aristotle's time in the Macedonian court, he gave lessons not only to Alexander, but to two other future kings: Ptolemy and Cassander. Aristotle encouraged Alexander toward eastern conquest and Aristotle's own attitude towards Persia was unabashedly ethnocentric. In one famous example, he counsels Alexander to be "a leader to the Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants". By 335 BC, Aristotle had returned to Athens. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years. While in Athens, his wife Pythias died and Aristotle became involved with Herpyllis of Stagira, who bore him a son whom he named after his father, Nicomachus.
According to the Suda, he had an erômenos, Palaephatus of Abydus. This period in Athens, between 335 and 323 BC, is when Aristotle is believed to have composed many of his works, he wrote many dialogues. Those works that have survived are in treatise form and were not
William Blackstone
Sir William Blackstone was an English jurist and Tory politician of the eighteenth century. He is most noted for writing the Commentaries on the Laws of England. Born into a middle-class family in London, Blackstone was educated at Charterhouse School before matriculating at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1738. After switching to and completing a Bachelor of Civil Law degree, he was made a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford on 2 November 1743, admitted to Middle Temple, called to the Bar there in 1746. Following a slow start to his career as a barrister, Blackstone became involved in university administration, becoming accountant and bursar on 28 November 1746 and Senior Bursar in 1750. Blackstone is considered responsible for completing the Codrington Library and Warton Building, simplifying the complex accounting system used by the college. On 3 July 1753 he formally gave up his practice as a barrister and instead embarked on a series of lectures on English law, the first of their kind; these were massively successful, earning him a total of £453, led to the publication of An Analysis of the Laws of England in 1756, which sold out and was used to preface his works.
On 20 October 1758 Blackstone was confirmed as the first Vinerian Professor of English Law embarking on another series of lectures and publishing a successful second treatise, titled A Discourse on the Study of the Law. With his growing fame, Blackstone returned to the bar and maintained a good practice securing election as Tory Member of Parliament for the rotten borough of Hindon on 30 March 1761. In November 1765 he published the first of four volumes of Commentaries on the Laws of England, considered his magnum opus. After repeated failures, he gained appointment to the judiciary as a Justice of the Court of King's Bench on 16 February 1770, leaving to replace Edward Clive as a Justice of the Common Pleas on 25 June, he remained in this position until his death, on 14 February 1780. Blackstone's legacy and main work of note is his Commentaries. Designed to provide a complete overview of English law, the four-volume treatise was republished in 1770, 1773, 1774, 1775, 1778 and in a posthumous edition in 1783.
Reprints of the first edition, intended for practical use rather than antiquary interest, were published until the 1870s in England and Wales, a working version by Henry John Stephen, first published in 1841, was reprinted until after the Second World War. Legal education in England had stalled. William Searle Holdsworth, one of Blackstone's successors as Vinerian Professor, argued that "If the Commentaries had not been written when they were written, I think it doubtful that the United States, other English speaking countries would have so universally adopted the common law." In the United States, the Commentaries influenced Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, James Wilson, John Jay, John Adams, James Kent and Abraham Lincoln, remain cited in Supreme Court decisions. William's father, Charles Blackstone, was a silk mercer from Cheapside, the son of a wealthy apothecary, he became firm friends with Thomas Bigg, a surgeon and the son of Lovelace Bigg, a gentleman from Wiltshire. After Bigg's sister Mary came to London, Charles persuaded her to marry him in 1718.
This was not seen as a good match for her, but the couple lived and had four sons, three of whom lived into adulthood. Charles and Henry, both became fellows of New College and took holy orders, their last son, was born on 10 July 1723, five months after Charles' death in February. Although Charles and Mary Blackstone were members of the middle class rather than landed gentry, they were prosperous. Tax records show Charles Blackstone to have been the second most prosperous man in the parish in 1722, death registers show that the family had several servants. This, along with Thomas Bigg's assistance to the family following Charles' death, helps explain the educational upbringing of the children. William Blackstone was sent to Charterhouse School in 1730, nominated by Charles Wither, a relative of Mary Blackstone. William did well there, became head of the school by age 15. However, after Charles' death the family fortunes declined, after Mary died the family's resources went to meet unpaid bills.
William was able to remain at Charterhouse as a "poor scholar", having been named to that position in June 1735 after being nominated by Sir Robert Walpole. Blackstone revelled in Charterhouse's academic curriculum the Latin poetry of Ovid and Virgil, he began to attract note as a poet at school, writing a 30-line set of rhyming couplets to celebrate the wedding of James Hotchkis, the headmaster. He won a silver medal for his Latin verses on John Milton, gave the annual Latin oration in 1738, was noted as having been the favourite student of his masters. On 1 October 1738, taking advantage of a new scholarship available to Charterhouse students, Blackstone matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford. There are few surviving records of Blackstone's undergraduate term at Oxford, but the curriculum of Pembroke College had been set out in 1624, Prest notes that it was still followed in 1738, so Blackstone would have studied Greek, logic, philosophy, mathematics and poetry. Blackstone was good at Greek and poetry, with his notes on William Shakespeare being included in George Steevens' 1781 edition of Shakespeare's plays.
Many of B
Company town
A company town is a place where all stores and housing are owned by the one company, the main employer. Company towns are planned with a suite of amenities such as stores, schools and recreation facilities, they are bigger than a model village. Some company towns have had high ideals. Others developed more or less in unplanned fashion, such as Summit Hill, United States, one of the oldest, which began as a LC&N Co. mining camp and mine site nine miles from the nearest outside road. Traditional settings for company towns were where extractive industries — coal, metal mines, lumber — had established a monopoly franchise. Dam sites and war-industry camps founded other company towns. Since company stores had a monopoly in company towns, it was possible to pay in scrip through a truck system although not all company towns engaged in this particular practice. In the Soviet Union there were several cities of nuclear scientists known as atomgrad. A company town is isolated from neighbors and centered on a large production factory, such as a lumber or steel mill or an automobile plant.
The company may donate a church building to a local congregation, operate parks, host cultural events such as concerts, so on. If the owning company cuts back or goes out of business, the economic effect on the company town is devastating, as people move to jobs elsewhere. Company towns become regular public cities and towns as they grow and attract other settlement, business enterprises, public transportation and services infrastructure. Other times, a town may not be a company town, but it may be a town where the majority of citizens are employed by a single company, thus creating a similar situation to a company town. Further, such dependencies extend to regions of larger cities. In each case, if the primary company falls on lean times, fails outright or the industry fades in importance the communities contract and lose property value and population as people move to find work elsewhere, the youth of the community bears the children of their generation in another demographic region. Paternalism, a subtle form of social engineering, refers to the control of workers by their employers who sought to force middle-class ideals upon their working-class employees.
Paternalism was considered by many nineteenth-century businessmen as a moral responsibility, or a religious obligation, which would advance society whilst furthering their own business interests. Accordingly, the company town offered a unique opportunity to achieve such ends. Although many prominent examples of company towns portray their founders as "capitalists with a conscience", for example, George Cadbury's Bournville, if viewed cynically, the company town was an economically viable ploy to attract and retain workers. Additionally, for-profit shops within company towns were owned by the company, which were unavoidable to its isolated workers, thus resulting in a monopoly for the owners. Although economically successful, company towns sometimes failed politically due to a lack of elected officials and municipally owned services. Accordingly, workers had no say in local affairs and therefore, felt dictated to; this political climate caused resentment amongst workers and resulted in many residents losing long-term affection for their towns.
Although many small company towns existed in mining areas of Pennsylvania before the Civil War, one of the largest, most substantial early company towns in the United States was Pullman, developed in the 1880s just outside the Chicago city limits. The town company-owned, provided housing, markets, a library and entertainment for the 6,000 company employees and an equal number of dependents. Employees were required to live in Pullman, although cheaper rentals could be found in nearby communities; the town operated until the economic panic of 1893, when demand for the company's products declined, employee wages had to be lowered accordingly. Despite this, the company refused to lower rents in the town or the price of goods at its shops, thus resulting in the Pullman Strike of 1894. A national commission formed to investigate the causes of the strikes found that Pullman's paternalism was to blame and labelled it "un-American"; the report condemned Pullman for refusing to negotiate and for the economic hardships he created for workers in the town of Pullman.
"The aesthetic features are admired by visitors, but have little money value to employees when they lack bread." The State of Illinois filed suit, in 1898 the Supreme Court of Illinois forced the Pullman Company to divest ownership in the town, annexed to Chicago. However, government observers maintained that Pullman's principles were accurate, in that he provided his employees with a quality of life otherwise unattainable to them, but recognised that his excessive paternalism was inappropriate for a large-scale corporate economy and thus caused the town's downfall. Accordingly, government observers and social reformers alike saw the need for a balance between control and well-designed towns, concluding that a model company town would only succeed if indepe
