The Historicism of the Covenant with Death and the Second Am endment..

[Michael McConnell]

Of course, in this fallen world no one is perfectly objective, and Calvin
Johnson is right that some people who are confident of their own objectivity
are among the worst offenders. But the aspiration to understand people of
the past as they understood themselves is a worthy scholarly objective, more
likely to be achieved by those who try than by those who don't. To dismiss
this aspiration as "just cant" makes things worse.

Michael McConnell
University of Utah College of Law
332 South 1400 East Rm. 101
Salt Lake City, UT 84112


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Calvin Johnson [mailto:chjohnson at MAIL.LAW.UTEXAS.EDU]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 3:14 PM
> To: CONLAWPROF at listserv.ucla.edu
> Subject: Re: The Historicism of the Covenant with Death and the Second
> Am endment..
>
>
> Political objectives no, but there are six billion bits of
> information in
> any period of history and the bits you choose to display are
> not random.
> All history has a story or a point.  Given that reproducign
> the six billion
> would be unworkable and unusable, there at least has to be a
> filter, maybe
> even a point
>         We can see the filter when the last generation uses
> it, or when our
> political enemies use it.  Those historians who declaim that
> they are most
> objective are the ones who are least self aware of their
> biases, not hte
> least biased.   To deny that there is a filter hits me as
> just cant.   It
> is after all the meaning of history we are looking at, and
> meaning is not
> objectively measureable thing.
>         It is a meaningful question to ask why people have
> sometimes interpreted
> the Constitution as a perfect document, secular scripture,
> and sometimes
> interpreted it as a Covenant with Death.  Sandy seems not be
> in the perfect
> document school and very much down the Covenant with Death
> line.   Why?
>         I assume you do not share the Covenant with Death
> perspective, even though
> on this one issue you enjoy Sandy's making trouble.