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Richard Weisberg will be in conversation with Stanley Fish at Cardozo Law School
Monday, June 23, 2014
Flexibility is usually seen as a virtue, and it’s almost always preferred to stubbornness, but constitutional law professor Richard H. Weisberg wants us to reexamine our collective cultural bias toward flexibility, open-mindedness, and compromise. In In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility he
argues that flexibility has not fared well over the course of history,
and that emergencies both real and imagined have led people to betray
their soundest traditions. He illustrates his argument with historical
examples from Vichy France and the occupation of the British Channel
Islands during World War II as well as post-9/11 betrayals of sound
American traditions against torture, eavesdropping, unlimited detention,
and drone killings.
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