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Genuinely disappointing in the way that only a favorite childhood author could be. The themes of the racial and cultural superiority of Europeans over other peoples made my stomach churn. The revelation that Mijak's God was inherently evil and misleading the people of Mijak whereas the God of the rest of the world was righteous even as it came in many forms was incoherent. Hekat, Vortka, and Dimitrak were simply flanderized to single character traits and wasted through the second and third books. Virtually no characters had any arc to speak of in this last part. The idea that they needed the help of a European who had never even been to Mijak to tell that people about how to worship God properly even as he spent the last two books literally calling them barbaric. Just disgusting.

Also, just a fundamental worldbuilding sin: after the first book, she started referring to Mijak's God by a different name when Zandakar was speaking to people with a different native language. But the Ethreans are basically described as speaking English, so we never learn a different word for Ethrea's God, let alone the gods of the other nations. Once again, Mijak is separated not just as an antagonist but as a conceptual inferior. Bah.

"Empress" on its own was an OK thought experiment and tragedy, although the Point of it is kind of up in the air. After that, the story of the second and third books was a plodding political drama that only got more offensive as it continued and centered faux-Europeans.

Really hope Karen Miller comes back to finish "Tarnished Crown" in some form, because I do really like her writing generally. But I hope she knows in her bones that doing this as a trilogy was a mistake.

This is a book written by a dying man who was evidently not in a position to evaluate where his ideas were leading him. It has since been used as a pipelining document by right-wing Chicago School economist types to get people who don't know any better to align with their self-serving ideas about rugged individualism and "small" government.

The trouble is that, despite Bastiat's conservatism and bullheadedness, he has a lot of good points to say about what John C. Scott later called "High Modernism." That is, he's really upset about people coming into power through the law and directing others on how to live. And he is correct that that is bad, although he really should not have doubled down so hard on the idea that socialism is the only source of that. But Bastiat argument basically boils down to a "nuh-uh" that is puddle deep. I mean, this guy all but says giving women the right to vote was bad because it diluted the ability of men to a select group of people to guide society by using law the right way. This is exactly what he accuses the high modernist of doing. And Bastiat only justifies it to himself by handwaving at the idea that it's a compromise towards his ideal world, which is an underdeveloped Lockean property fetishism that goes absolutely nowhere.

I mean, you can only nod along with "we should be able to do what we want with our property" for so long before you look around and realize that there are kinds of property that confer power upon you in this society... And you don't have any of that. And a small group of people has pretty much all of that. Lockean "liberty" and "individualism" are not the path to freedom because they separate us. Freedom is a gift we give each other.

It also gets very repetitive towards the end.

But, equally, Bastiat was dying when he wrote this, so he was probably not in a position to be thinking super long-term about it.

Just read "Seeing Like a State". I know it's longer, but it's a big subject that requires more care than this.

I read this short book in a day after seeing it on the SU Law Library shelf. I've been really into sociological jurisprudence of the early 20th century lately, so I've been glossing over a bunch of old legal scholarship. I was actually expecting to not care for this based on the name, but it is a CRITIQUE of the Case Method, AND one based in sociological jurisprudence!! What a surprise!

The description of how and why the Case Method developed was interesting and useful. It was an outgrowth of a movement in the 1800s to apply scientific reasoning to cases... and then it fucked it up because the law is not science. It substituted the reading of cases for teaching people to understand law as a dispute resolution process built entirely on precedential decisions rather than a system that responds to facts and comes to outcomes that may or may not be in line with prior decisions. In other words, it leads directly to the world we live in now where the Supreme Court can just say "all homeless people deserve to die" and lower court judges feel obliged to use that holding in all of their cases regardless of the specifics of their cases.

More particularly, the book goes pretty deep on the differences between inductive and deductive reasoning in the law in a way I found neat. The Case Method tells us that it is scientific, but it only claims to use inductive reasoning. Scientific reasoning, when done correctly, uses both inductive AND deductive reasoning. In practice, the Case Method is basically only deductive reasoning from case opinions with statements of facts literally designed to suggest the outcome of the case as the jurist wanted it. Imagine if we just continued saying the Sun revolves around the Earth because other people said it and we only used their articulations of the facts to justify it.

Instead, the book suggests the Problem Method. He would give the student some facts and a list of readings and have them come to class prepared to discuss their thought process of how to resolve the case. As basic as this sounds, this is SO FAR REMOVED from what happens in law school, where we still primarily use the Case Method almost 100 years later.

Certainly, not all of the book is great. One of the examples of the problem method is rape for no reason. It gets some details wrong in places, like saying Johns Hopkins had a law school. (They still do not.) The descriptions of the reasoning also would have benefitted from modern typographical/visualization techniques.

But, on the whole, this was a fresh perspective to me. Would things be different if we taught law students to study the law by actually teaching them to research the law and come to their own conclusions? Would things be better?