Just A Thought

[debka_notion]

I'm running off to mincha and class, but here's a cool thought. I was just reading about philosophy and law and their difference over the value of the idea of precedent. One of the theories brought is that precedent allows law to create an equality between people, because it would be unfair to give different responses to different people just because they happen to live at different times, and thus precedent creates a standing response to the same situation, so that time does not cause two otherwise parallel cases to be judged differently. Well, presuming that Torah is divine law, this fits beautifully with a view of G-d as being able to deal with time as a dimension like any other, i.e. for G-d to potentially be "outside" of time as we experience it, which is an idea that has always made a lot of sense to me.

Comments

[spazerrific.livejournal.com]

heh... clearly you haven't been to law school :-p Somehow - and granted, I don't understand how sometimes - someone will ALWAYS be able to find a distinction. It's one of the skills we learn... how to make cases that are a stretch apply, and how to make cases all-to-on-point not apply. It's a fun game (though some of the ideas on both ends seem coming from way out of left field...) but, as an exercise to get an idea of it, try taking two cases or what have you, and make the second one apply to the first, and then see if you can differentiate the second from the first. You'll probably be able to do both b/c it's really rare that you find something exactly on point.