Two Oxford scholars point out how Foucault and Butler are overcited, how humanities publishing houses like Routledge don't publish books on human rights abuses by left-wing regimes. One of the oldest and most respected newspapers in the world publishes the article. Yet that is trollish for LI?

Credentials of the authors and the Times aside, does the moderator actually mean to say that elite academia is NOT dominated by the left? Has the moderator even seen an NLU/Jindal first-year syllabus these days?? Marx, Hobsbawm, Butler, Foucalt, Cornel West, Franz Fanon, Partha Chatterjee, Amartya Sen, Romila Thapar, even Kancha Ilaiah and Suraj Yengde... this is what is being fed to first years.

And what about Adam Smith, Burke, Locke, Nozick, Chesterton, Friedman, Hayek, Bhagwati, Palkhivala, Sowell, Shourie etc? ZERO coverage.

Moderators, you are unutterably, unbelievably stupid. Marking a comment with selected extracts of somebody else's writings quoted as 'trollish' - that too, extracts which represent the authors' opinion. To add insult to injury, you have marked quotes from the London Times as 'trollish'! The very same newspaper that V.K. Krishna Menon, whom people on the left love, once described (in that legend of a speech about Kashmir made at the UN) as the world's most trusted newspaper. The Times of London continues to be a high quality news source and you place a comment quoting from and citing it (without commentary) as 'trollish'? Anyone using LI after this will have to get their brains operated on to check for rot.

The post was an attempt to either troll or propagandise or both; it's on an overtly culture war / dog whistle issue about wokeness, which is not about LI's mission to help your lawyers in their career. No constructive interesting discussion is likely to flow (and this wokeness thing only such a disproportionately big deal because MAGA and the anti-woke activists have made it their main thing).

those are all just your opinions. do you think its fair to mark things trollish simply because you disagree with them? surely you arent pretending that there is anything close to RightOpinion TM on this stuff?

Wokeness is not only a thing because people you dislike/loathe/condemn think it is. Very liberal centrist people have problems with whats been happening in academia for a long long time. This conversation/debate goes back decades. its only on steroids now. And if you dont know what John Rawls has to do with this stuff, or what martha nussbaum has to say to judith butler you likely are just poorly educated.

Totally wrong.

1. There is a genuine problem with certain scholars' views being suppressed while others are cited too much. In British, U.S. and (as has been pointed out by another comment author) even Indian academia, that bias is totally in favour of the left. An equivalent article could (and should) be written if academia in any country goes in the opposite direction (as it did in Germany, 1933-45) and people like Butler are suppressed/almost never cited.

2. Lawyers partly help shape, and are partly shaped by, the social context, as McCrudden has pointed out. Therefore, as Cotterrell says, viewing the law (and the world) through a "sociological imagination" is very important. This means requiring to think from an interdisciplinary perspective. Therefore, the precise opposite of what you said (that this is unlikely to be helpful) is true. People such as Jonathan Sumption, the former UK Supreme Court judge, who read history at Oxford (and even taught it there for a while before moving to law) already accuse lawyers (or at least those who took a law degree as their first degree at university after leaving school) of lacking awareness of the world in general and lacking culture, cultural knowledge and cultural sensitivities, leading to Graham Virgo (the former Cambridge VC and a trusts law scholar of formidable repute) responding with a funny (but ultimately ludicrous) defence of lawyers and their cultural engagement by talking about their engagement with the world of film. Therefore, the situation in terms of how our intellectual strength is viewed (even among our colleagues in other humanities and social science disciplines) is not fantastic. Why would you, of all people, want to make that situation worse?

You would have been aware of these perspectives and still could become aware of them if you read some of the books in the Cambridge University Press Law in Context series. The best advertisement for the series is what is written on the book covers/jackets for each book in the series:

The Law in Context Series Editors: William Twining (University College London), Maksymilian Del Mar (Queen Mary, University of London) and Bronwen Morgan (University of New South Wales). Since 1970 the Law in Context series has been at the forefront of the movement to broaden the study of law. It has been a vehicle for the publication of innovative scholarly books that treat law and legal phenomena critically in their social, political and economic contexts from a variety of perspectives. The series particularly aims to publish scholarly legal writing that brings fresh perspectives to bear on new and existing areas of law taught in universities. A contextual approach involves treating legal subjects broadly, using materials from other social sciences and from any other discipline that helps to explain the operation in practice of the subject under discussion. It is hoped that this orientation is at once more stimulating and more realistic than the bare exposition of legal rules. The series includes original books that have a different emphasis from traditional legal textbooks, while maintaining the same high standards of scholarship. They are written primarily for undergraduate and graduate students of law and of other disciplines, but will also appeal to a wider readership. In the past, most books in the series have focused on English law, but recent publications include books on European law, globalisation, transnational legal processes and comparative law.

Your thinking, as evidenced by your response here, is the precise opposite of the "contextual approach" advocated for in that extract.

3.

(a) To the extent that the OP has used their own words, I agree the tone does seem rather on the rough-edged side. But considering how polarised this debate has become and your levels of complicity in making it even more so (see your response here, e.g.), isn't that something we can cut some slack for?

(b) The tone might sound jaded, but to accuse them of propagandising or trolling is a very, very big statement. I cannot see any evidence for that in the post. Therefore, unless you are maintaining observations on IP addresses of those using LI and see this as (in and of itself harmless) post as part of a pattern of (cumulatively) more harmful content with an agenda, you should so state.

4. Finally, your statement, "... and this wokeness thing only such a disproportionately big deal because MAGA and the anti-woke activists have made it their main thing", is very interesting, not because it is incorrect or untrue, but because it is an incomplete account of what's happening.

(a) MAGA/Reform UK and others are partly getting away with what they are doing because we, as liberals, have allowed them to do so. We have created the conditions for that to happen. We have pushed our philosophies to all sorts of new limits at breakneck speed which has been too much for the overwhelmingly centrist populations of most countries, who have, because of feeling left behind by that, have gravitated to the right. It's not just cost of living or other economic issues that's doing that, it's other stuff as well.

(b) It is also, in part, factually incorrect. Major liberals have sounded alarm bells about this for a while now. These have included Brian Leiter, the great legal realist at the University of Chicago. A very good (if very angry) example of him doing this is an article he wrote called "Mindless jurisprudence-bashing on Twitter". It was in response to a lot of criticism of a scholar called Stephen Sax, who, in a Harvard Law School jurisprudence class's syllabus, had included many very cannonical legal philosophers, such as Hart and Dworkin. The response by Leiter to all that criticism is available at:

https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2023/09/mindless-jurisprudence-bashing-on-twitter.html

And if you think people like him are soft liberals and at-heart conservatives, just read his blog properly. Always found the subcategory of posts called "Merciless rhetorical spankings of fanatics, villains and ignoramuses" to be quite entertaining reading and very revealing. Here's a sample:

https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/03/smear-merchants-at-campus-watch-object-to-being-correctly-described.html

You might also want to read his book, Naturalising Jurisprudence, where he is very critical of Hart.

And he is not one of a kind. He's one among many liberals who believe the world has gone too far. One other is Sir Kerr Starmer, the current British PM, who is pursuing a strategy based on that philosophy being correct (himself a Leads man as an undergraduate, and spent time at Oxford doing the BCL, while also being the author of a leading human rights law textbook). And yet, he is pursuing Palestinian recognition, which is not a traditionally conservative position, therefore showing that he hasn't, in his efforts to meet conservative folk where they are, "become rightist" himself.

For more about this philosophy of relaxing a bit on the woke front, taking it more slowly and meeting people of our societies who don't agree with our stances half way, look up the writings of Maurice Glasman (the founder of the so-called "Blue Labour" movement and of J.D. Vance - especially the profile interview of Glasman that the same newspaper the OP cited and quoted, The Times, did.

Thank you, this is a much more nuanced point than the OP's and in that vein it would be worth having a discussion (if anyone is interested). But if the OP was not a troll, they too could have done so, rather than selectively quoting the most flamebaity and whataboutery parts of an article, coupled with a polemical headline.

At the end of day, political trolling and bona fide debate are a bit like obscenity: you know it when you see it (and we regularly seen a lot of attempts at the former here).

I think the moderator doesn’t like the word “woke“ when conservatives use it. For example Meghan Markle said on her show that she is proud to be woke, but that usage isn’t seen as bad by liberals. But when conservatives use woke to mock performative SJW activism and virtue signalling, that annoys people like the moderator. I think that is the root cause of the flagging of topics here.