Nuanced. - 71. Julen Etxabe: Religion, Philosophy, Indigenous Culture & Law

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

Aaron Pete and Julen Etxabe discuss how law interacts with religion, philosophy and Indigenous culture. Aaron asks Julen about his perspectives on western culture, belief systems, decolonization and meaning. Julen Etxabe is an Assistant Professor at Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia and the Canada Research Chair in Jurisprudence and Human Rights. Grounded on cultural and humanistic approaches to law, Etxabe is the author of The Experience of Tragic Judgment (Routledge, 2013) and has edited Cultural History of Law in Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2019). He is also the co-editor of Rancière and Law (Routledge, 2018) and Living in a Law Transformed: Encounters with the Works of James Boyd White (Michigan, 2014). From 2012 to 2017 he was editor-in-chief of No-Foundations: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Law and Justice and is a member of the editorial committee of Law & Humanities.Send us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Do you feel comfortable? No, I have goosebumps. Oh, is that a good thing? This is good. This is normally what happens when you go to a class too. Yeah. So you have to perform before an audience. But that, I think, keeps you grounded because it's not just doing routine,

but trying to get people engaged and trying to think. But what I feel when I teach is that sometimes you lose track of what it is that you're saying because you are lost in the moment. Do you think some people shy away from that? Like they shy away from the responsibility that you are performing? And they go, that's not my job. I didn't sign up for that because that's how I feel with some professors, they go, I'm just here to read off this PowerPoint and some people like you, like Nikos, you embrace kind of the performance and saying, hey, I want to keep your attention.

I think it's part of my responsibility to keep the audience. Students engaged. And I think that unless I am able to do that, the content that I have the obligation to transmit is not going to get across. So to me, it's part of my obligation, my duty, also my passion. as a teacher, I put myself on the shoes of my students and I think, okay, I wouldn't want to be in a class where I was bored, where I wasn't somewhat challenged. And that's what you tried to replicate. So I really enjoyed it. Yeah. The performative aspect of it. But after class, you're tired. You're like, oh, okay. That took a little bit of your brain away. And especially there's few things you must pay attention to, which is there's many, many different people. And so you're

trying to remember what everybody said, and then try to treat every opinion respectfully, but try to find a place in your class for that opinion to matter and to make connections.

And that takes a lot of skill because you have your plan, your structure for the class, but then there is always room for improvisation. What I think is that the more you prepare, the more able you are to improvise. It's not going to come up like that. You really have to have a structure. And the teachers that I had, the best teachers that I had, I realized that when I see the ropes behind their classes,

because when you're a student you don't see the ropes, I had this fantastic, fantastic super well-known professor who was he's Belgium, he spoke in French, perfect French, and I thought he was just lecturing from the bottom of his heart. And then I realized that he was rehearsing his lectures the day before. And in a way, I thought, wow, as I said, the veil lifted or fell. But what I felt at the moment is, wow, how responsible this professor is, because he might as well, with all his knowledge.

Just come to class and say whatever. But he wanted to be precise. He wanted to be, I suppose, fair to his students. And I thought, wow, if he has to do that, then I might as well catch up. That's incredible. I think that that really is inspirational because that's why you want to go to university. and that's what I think law students want to come to something like Peter A. Allard School of Law 4 is to be humbled by someone who's passionate, who knows what they're talking about, and who

shows that respect to the students. Yeah, we will hope that that's the experience that the students get. And I cannot speak for the entire experience, student experience, but I know my colleagues are very professional and they take their job quite seriously. And what what we are trying to pair as well is the passion and the interest of each professor for the feeling which they are teaching. So that you don't necessarily are teaching

in something in which you first don't feel competent or passionate enough to do it in a way that I think can entice the students to see, oh, there is something here. Something that it cannot be replicated by, say, reading

in a book or an article, That's a style that when I was studying back in Spain, some professors did, which was, okay, here's the manual, and I'm just going to read it. What's the point of going to the class, right? So you try to shy away from those models of teaching that you don't like or you didn't like, and you try to replicate those that you admire, but also that are suited to your personality because you might think, oh, this professor is. is great, but I could never do what he or she's doing because, I don't know, for instance, they show 200 pictures in the class and they have this ability with technology, and I would feel very clumsy to try to replicate that. So I think you need to constantly revisit what it is that best works for you and what you think it's good for the students. So I think it's sometimes

is good to challenge the students to do something they might not be very familiar with, or they might, let's give an example. So you mentioned a PowerPoint. I try to resist this method of teaching because for my own reasons, but I do think that PowerPoints are somewhat clear, but they simplify the information too much. And what I also find is when you deliver the lecture, or people pay attention to the PowerPoint as opposed to what is being said or what is being discussed.

So I try to avoid having a PowerPoint. But some students write to me and say, could you please have a PowerPoint? And so I have to justify why it is that I'm doing it. But sometimes it is difficult because the expectations of students is, okay, I need to have my PowerPoint because this goes in the exam. And I'm always trying to say, okay, be mindful about that, but at the same time, try to explain why is it that I think a PowerPoint might not be the best way of learning in the particular context of this class. That's really interesting. Would you mind introducing yourself for people who might not know who you are or your research interests? Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. Our own this is wonderful. My name is Yulinette Chavez, and that's an important probably for people to know how my name is pronounced.

It's a Basque name. And I am an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Jurisputence and Human Rights at Peter Alar School of Law. Fascinating. Why philosophy? What made you interested? I think it's a topic that is so misunderstood right now. We have such a disconnect from it. It's, even when you talk about theories to people, it's for some reason, it's like where we drop off, yet we brag about being critical thinkers.

And part of critically thinking is understanding the underlying mechanisms that allow us to kind of live in a community. When did philosophy come onto your radar and say, this is something that fascinates me? There are many questions in that questions, but those are really extremely important questions. to ask, I never really wanted or thought I would be a practicing lawyer even while I was a starting law school. So I think my passion for philosophy had started a bit earlier. I had a very, very good philosophy professor in high school. And in high school, I read the work of Nietzsche, and I thought I consider myself, oh, this is down my alley. I was a person who loved reading books and, but we thought, okay, but philosophy as a degree is somewhat not very practical

and I might as well do law. But as soon as I started doing law, I realized that the subjects, the topics that interested me were always philosophically oriented, having not to do with the black letter law, with the precise rules, the procedures, but mostly about the ways of thinking and what it is that law does in the world and how to think about all those things, so questions about where does law come from, questions about history, about political morality, and I realize, oh, unfortunately, I'm a philosopher at heart.

And so in my law degree, we had legal theory or jurisprudence in the first year of law school, and it was five years program. And then during the next three or four years, you will do black letter law or contracts and all towards and all administrative law and so forth. In the final year, we took back a full entire year of legal theory,

philosophy and sociology. And so I came back to this after having a study the law degree and realizing, oh, this is what I really am passionate about. And so the choice there for me was, And as I was venturing into the unknown, that it's probably some of these you have experienced now that you've graduated, which is to say, what is that I'm going to do with the rest of my life? I had this bifurcated path between should I become a civil servant, try to be a civil servant for the status.

you know, my dad had been and my mom most heartily wanted for me, or should I try to do something else, which had to do with my passion for legal theory, and I had no clear idea of what the path will be. But I had a person who was quite instrumental in making the choice and telling me, yes, I think you should do what you feel about. And that's where I went. In terms of a question about why, I guess, philosophy matters

or perhaps the conception that most people might have about philosophy as a living in the clouds and having an absolute disconnect with reality, my experience is completely the opposite. To me, those questions that we are dealing with in philosophy are the most real, the most practical, the ones that make practice actually livable. And so rather than thinking that there is a deep disconnect

between theory and practice, I think what theory, philosophy does for me is to allow me to interrogate, to question, to reflect about what we sometimes call the real world, the practices of everyday life. And allow me to go about my life in a way that I find more reflective. and more attuned to how it is that I want to lead a life.

Why do we think that philosophers historically have their head up in the clouds? Why do we have almost this negative connotation to the idea of thinking about thinking? Like, it seems so abstract for so many people that it seems like they're just not contributing. Yet, to your point, they are developing our understanding. so deeply that we take what they have to say for granted, that it just becomes so much a part of how we operate, that we totally forget that somebody once thought of that. The one I always think of is Sigmund Freud and the idea of the id, the ego, and the super ego. That is so mainstream, it's so most people know what that is, that we don't even question it, but he had to

think of that, and now we go, oh, there's an unconscious, that just makes sense. Yet, at a certain point of time, we didn't have that. And so so many brilliant ideas just kind of percolate through our society, and then we get to forget about it, and we don't have to think about why. I think another example is freedom of speech, and the people who developed that, I want to say John Stuart Mills, develops this brilliant idea on why freedom of speech matters, how it functions, writes things, and then gives it out to the public to think about. We sort of forget about him maybe in Canada or Australia, yet in the US,

I think they take pride in that understanding and they're proud that he was an American. And so the brilliant ideas, I think philosophers contribute, sort of get forgotten that it was once a philosopher that kind of helped develop that. So why do we have that misunderstanding about the effects philosophy can have on our society?

Why are we cutting funding? I know UFE, their department is getting smaller in their philosophy department. Why aren't we investing in it? that's a great question and I might just go a little bit in parts but because part of why there is this disconnect or there is that perception of philosophers

it might be also self-imposed to the extent that some philosophers may deserve that and so I don't necessarily to justify all philosophers or all philosophy or philosophy as a discipline or as a field But I think your second point about the contributions that some philosophers, and I think you are using a very wide understanding of what philosophy is with which I agree, so you include Sigmund Freud, for instance, as a philosopher, with which I agree,

is a contribution that contributes to our understanding of certain phenomenon, either in a culture context or about human beings in general. And yes, they require certain language, certain vocabulary, certain metaphors to talk about things that we might not have been able to talk in such a manner before, right? So in that sense, there is some progress when Sigmund Freud distinguishes between the ego and the superego. And I also think that once those have been internalized by a culture, then we tend to be. forget their progeny and oh wow actually there was this person and and in fact it might be that then Freud had a reputation because he was not a scientist and he despite the fact that he was a medical doctor but he's not a scientist when he starts talking about the subconscious uh nevertheless

culturally I think his influence cannot be overstated and so you've mentioned also John and Steward Meal, but you can think of other people whose contribution to our ways on thinking about reality has matter very much. And in the law as well, we have instances of philosophical insight from judges, for instance, I don't know if you think of the clear and present danger about these. And so this comes now at the moment of, okay, are we talking about an incitement or not. And we might, I guess, some people might want to look at what are the rules and the statutes that apply in this case.

But actually, it is a philosophical concept that we're trying to elucidate. And so, I guess, going back to the roots for me has been always important to see, okay, how can we understand these terms? How can we employ them in a way that makes most sense for us? that is culturally responsible and I think what philosophy does for me This is going to be a tough question Do you think that it is a higher level of abstraction

To go the route that you've taken That it's easier to read a judgment See rule A, B, C, and go okay Apply it to the next thing A, B, C And just kind of move forward Right now from what I've heard Specifically in regards to law There's a lot of people who are like

oh, robots are basically going to take over, AI is going to take over our jobs, but they can't take over your job. The sub-not. Yeah, the ideas that allow us to get to something like beyond a reasonable doubt, the concept behind that that makes it kind of come to life is hard for people to understand.

Do you find that philosophy is particularly hard for students to kind of grasp because it isn't like, oh, what are the rules of sentencing? And then you list the rules of sentencing, and you get a B on your test. It's much more, how does this philosophy impact the world? Like, it's much more grandiose and harder to simplify, that it's harder for people to do,

and that's why we underestimate it at times. So you use the word abstraction, and I was trying to think of whether abstraction is the right way of putting it, because there is a usual or conventional way of thinking of abstraction in terms of going, I guess, to the clouds, going beyond the world and trying to devise these systems in which that abstraction works. And philosophers sometimes talk in propositional terms and P and error and Q's and that is not the kind of philosophy I will, I personally enjoy the most or think is the most

useful or makes at least the most sense to me. So I will not understand abstraction in that sense. What I will perhaps use the term for is to kind of arrest time a little bit. So force ourselves to stop, to pay close attention to the phenomenon that we have in face of us, and try to kind of penetrate or think through that phenomenon, right? I think it puts us in touch with the concrete, right? That's why I'm trying to resist the idea of abstraction as trying to kind of move away from reality. But the move that I think it's important is for us to kind of detain the time

and take the time to slow down things. which sometimes goes against the grain of our practical needs of every day and students need to get a list about what are the requirements of these rules and just tell me what I need to know. Give me the five characteristics of this philosophy. And I always try to resist that type of shortcuts because I think part of learning is also trying to find those answers for yourself. And so I think this resisting the tide is what makes philosophy for me hard, and I agree with you.

It is something that it's not immediately evident and that is quite personal. So some students might find more attuned to it or that the language that is spoken in the class makes more sense to Whereas for some students, it might not, despite that's what you're trying to do, that what you're making them do in the class, the activity you're trying to do, connects with them at some deeper level. Yeah, you've made this comment that it's like there's a plant and then you're trying to understand the roots of it. And I think that that's fascinating. in, do you feel like there was a golden age of philosophy, where we really cared maybe more about the roots than we did about just the plant? It seems like right now, everything is very surface level. Social media, how we communicate. Oftentimes it feels like when you're in a

conversation, they're trying to figure out what you said wrong, rather than trying to understand what you're trying to say and kind of removing their bias of like, I know you're, you're not educated on this, so I'm going to point out where you're wrong. It seems like right now we're at an all-time low of our interest in the roots of where we come from. I've spoken to military experts who've talked about indigenous people's involvement in World War II, and he talked about how talking about our relationship to World War II or World War I is very unpopular. People don't want to hear about that anymore. We don't even want to think of ourselves as peacekeepers.

We want to think of ourselves as just, we're all. all just here hanging out, living life. It seems like we're not as interested in kind of maintaining those roots as maybe our parents or our grandparents who kind of go, it's important that you attend to remember and stay. Why? So you understand what people sacrificed in order for us to have these freedoms. It seems like there might be a sense of lacking in that regard. Do you feel that, or do you think that philosophy's on the rise? Where are we in regards to our relationship with philosophy, kind of as a culture?

in a way, I'm, I'm tempted to agree with you because I think there is some truth in what you're saying about the speed and the velocity with which we are living our lives in the contemporary world, and which is attached to some sense of a surface level, superficial going by that I find is not conducive to, fulfilling, a fulfilling life, or fulfilling relationships or meaningful relationships. At the same time, when you ask about whether there was a golden age of philosophy, so from the get-go, from the origins, if we go back to ancient Greek, Socrates himself was not very popular in his society, right? and he was invited to commit suicide eventually after a trial. So I think it's cons substantial with philosophy well done

that it's somewhat unpopular or somewhat in tension with society and the interest of society in a sense. I think it doesn't need to go that far. I will hope that perhaps going up back to your former question about important questions about funding, about what it is that it gets taught in schools, if we take philosophy away from mandatory education. And I think that's a mistake because it provides it something, a kind of education which is not necessarily quantifiable. It is not visible in the same way that others can be, or. can be quantified. But nevertheless, I find it very important, very crucial for an individual

to be exposed to that kind of education. And I do think that, for me, at least, history has become more and more important, which has become more important as I grow a bit older as well. And so I link this with your question about the roots, about what it is that we are coming from, Trying to understand trajectories in a long run, as opposed to thinking that we have invented, by we, I mean, people of our generation or people of the present, that we have invented almost everything and that it's there to know. And there is a dismissal about the past and about where we are coming from that I find is not just unfair, but it's, it. kind of cuts us off from a source of knowledge, from a source of meaning that I find that it might be impoverishing, in fact. Whereas when I was younger, I remember when my professor will tell me something about history, I would say, oh, okay, but that's all news. And now I

realize that I'm becoming my former professors and trying to explain the importance of understanding what it is that we're coming from, because that's the only way of understanding what is that we might be headed, right? Yeah. So how does taking a philosophical perspective change your way of seeing things? The one thing I can think of is so many people read a book to complete the book, to close the book and say, technically, I read this book. Yet don't take the time to pull out maybe one sentence that was incredibly profound.

found maybe there's only one sentence per book that is really changing how you see the world it seems like you're more likely to sit and think about that sentence to really give that sentence space rather than concerning yourself with whether or not you've read the whole thing it's more about understanding something and in our class together you would often say slow to helm like do not read this to say you completed it read it to understand it and try and take a sentence and really try and digest it and think about how profound this thought is, rather than saying, well, technically I did the 30-page reading, and so I totally get it. It seems like that's one really good example of something we miss out on so often, which is we want to check the box

and say we want to post on social media, hey, I read the book. Yet really good thinkers will say this one sentence, that's fascinating. And then they'll just think about it and try and understand it deeper. Is that common? Is there a different way you see the world when you're bringing that mindset that other people may miss out on? Yeah, it's a practice that I learn from my professor, James Boyd-White, who has this habit of a slow reading. And sometimes a literary theory, we talk about close reading, which is pay very close attention to a text and try to unpack whatever it's in the text. But he prefers the term slow reading.

And we can talk about the phenomenon of slow food and make a comparison there between slow reading and slow food. To make the experience meaningful. Not to eat food just to digest or to get by and get the calories that we need for the day, but to feel that what we are doing is a social experience and that connects us with the food and with where the food comes from and the partners that we're having food with.

And so similar, I think that some books require patience and require slowing down. And he will do that in class, just make us read very carefully certain passages. And by doing that, sometimes you'll start discovering things you had not realized before. And you realize that, oh, actually, this has more meanings that I was seeing in this text. And so the author goes in this direction, and then it goes in this other direction. And when I was a law student, the skill that we learn as lawyers,

as practitioners of law was to read very fast and try to abstract. That's why I was trying to distinguish the sense of abstraction, to abstract the content from a text very, very fast, and somewhat be able then to regurgitate that fact that we had abstracted in an exam. But by doing so, we are somewhat killing the life of the text. And by text here, I mean also the person and the community, is the cultures that wrote that text,

not the text as the physical text only, but the people that inhabit that text. So the practice of slowing down, of reading slowly is to make that come alive again and try to understand the people who made that text, the people who are living in that text, what kind of society they live, what kind of vision of the individual or the self they have,

and how does this relate to our context, how does it impact us and I realize that this requires a practice this requires doing it which sometimes you are resistant because you have one hour to do and you are in the bus

and you are reading quite quickly before the class but if we are honest with ourselves I think that the experience that will change your life as a reader will be the one that it's done qualitatively

as opposed to the one which is done very fast and to check the books that you've read the book as you were mentioning or you've read the article or technically yes I did the reading but have you understood it? Can you put it in your own words? What is the text about? Who is speaking to you?

Is there someone here speaking to you? So my professor will ask me that kind of questions to which I was entrained in the law school and then I realized, wow, this forces me to change my habits he has this very beautiful sentence. I think it's by William James a pragmatist who says what we call experience. It's normally, or I'm paraphrasing, what we call experience is a question of our habits of perception.

And what I take from that sentence is that the habits of perceiving things that we might have, which of course we can train and we can train ourselves to perceive more and more is what eventually will become what we are able to experience and if we have habits of experience

or habit of perceptions which are very fast and we digest the food so quickly we will miss out on a whole range of experiences that make the whole event much more meaningful context

context is something we're struggling with right now. We are removing certain people from history. The argument often is that these were terrible people in the United States, often slave owners, people who have done things that today we would describe as reprehensible. Yet there is information that they have about the time they were in. It seems like we're less interested in context. It seems like that's a tougher thing to swallow because it's very easy to point at different, our first prime minister and say, well, he abused and he started Indian residential schools.

So we should remove his name from history. We don't need that anymore. Yet, it's important to understand how this country came about. And it seems to me, as an indigenous person, on the one hand, we tell people they need to remember and understand. And at the same time, we're removing, the things that help us remember and understand. I don't think necessarily when you have a statue of a person, it's a compliment. Sometimes it's an example of what not to do or of our country's failings. It doesn't necessarily mean statue good. In Chilliwack here, we have Joseph Trutch. He's pretty infamous in B.C. for downsizing Indian Reserves in B.C. Originally, the Douglas family had pretty big sized reserves, and then Joseph Trutch downsized them 90%.

So we're on much smaller land bases than we were on previously, and when you look at the U.S., they have far larger reservations for indigenous people than here in Canada. There's talks of removing his name from street signs. I don't think street signs are an effective way to teach people about who a person was, but I think people understanding that we did once have. have a more agreed upon land space that we were going to be on. And then that was downsized. I think it's important to understand this person was a bad actor in our history. But it seems like we don't want the context always, that we want to sort of forget about these people.

And I'm just from someone who has to look back on philosophers and on a perspective and put yourself in their shoes, you sort of have to suspend today's understanding of the world and saying, well, today we would never have slaves. We know that. But back then, it was much more contentious, and people were sort of living in their time and making mistakes and being flawed. I sometimes wonder, with our iPhones,

they have precious metals, where children in other countries have to dig them with their small hands. Is one day, are we going to have statues of us that we were allowing that abuse to take place in another country? And we didn't have to take responsibility for that, because it's somewhere else. It's someone else. And so I'm just interested, is that context hard?

Do you think we're missing that? Or what are your thoughts on how we can best have those types of conversations? Those are, I think, very, very deep and difficult questions at the same time you're posing. Because it seems somewhat that by requiring context and saying that, things must be read in the context in which they happen, that the invitation somewhat is to condone whatever is that took place in the past. And that's not, I think, how I take your point. The point is that we cannot at the same time adopt a position of superiority from the present and impose our own values on people who lived, and they're very, very different circumstances. And to that

extends, I think it's important for us to remember that the past is a very different country. So I personally always like to approach those past circumstances with quite a lot of humility, because there is a lot of things that I don't know about the past, about the people who inhabited, about how they perceive the world, about how they relate to each other, try not to simplify too much and to caricaturize them, to try to understand that, as you're saying, people from the past can be complex. It's rarely an issue of white and black.

It's always a lot of gray areas and ambiguities. And I think philosophy is quite comfortable living or dwelling in that ambiguity in these gray areas. This doesn't necessarily mean that we cannot have our own moral commitments or our political views about the present and our discussions about what needs to be done, which is perfectly, perfectly all right. But I also care about trying to be fair to those circumstances in the past as they were happening and not try to simplify too much. So it's, I think, a very delicate, delicate balance and very difficult debate to have because sometimes they need to simplify or to come to a resolution on a matter makes us forget the complexities of the situation as they were happening.

So you're mentioning questions about slavery and about... So those judgments, of course, we have certain views. in the present, but they don't necessarily fit to the circumstances in which this was done, for instance, in ancient Greece. It's not the same to think of slavery in ancient Greece as it was in a pre-civil war in the United States. It's just a completely different context. So if we need to have thoughtful conversations, yes, we must approach those phenomenon in their context and try to understand and have a rich debate as opposed to shut off the debate

by saying, okay, I'm right, you're wrong, that's the end of it. I don't think that's conducive to under learning. And so these debates then have to take place in a context of trying to understand each other and try to see where we're coming from and just having our own moral compass at the same time. steel manning is a term that I've really come to love because it forces you to make the best argument against something or for something that maybe you don't agree with and it seems like that was something I didn't hear as much as I would have liked to in law school because it fascinates me that you could take a position that you completely disagree with on all of its merits then try and understand or glean an understanding of why it could be right and that's very difficult to

because it's close to the scientific method of like, you're going to try and find the good in this, even though you think it's wrong. It seems like something that's very difficult for people to do today. I feel like straw manning is very, very commonplace. When I try and explain the challenges I personally have with pipelines, on the one hand, often bring economic development to indigenous communities and allow indigenous communities to rise out of poverty with the environment and trying to act in its best interest. To me, it's very difficult to square those.

So I can hear the very supportive position, on one hand, for bringing in pipelines. And then on the other hand, I can see the very strong arguments that it's time to make a stand in support of the environment and who better than the people who have lived in harmony with the environment for so long. I can see both positions, and I always want to take in as much information as possible. possible. But when I speak to certain people who are perhaps pro-environment or worried about climate change, and I say, well, what about the poverty and the crimes that are committed because of poverty in indigenous communities as a consequence of not developing economically?

They view me as a pro-pipeline person. They want to simplify me down to, I hate the environment and I'd love it destroyed. Yet, Steele Manning would ask them to really think about what I'm trying to say and understand that I'm open to both that I can and I think it's for the community to decide but it's a tough it's a lose win situation you either have economic prosperity and careers and positions for your community or you often remain in poverty and perhaps the environment's better off but you're not and your family isn't and children are abused as a consequence of this and so steel manning seems like it's a difficult tool do you think that it's underused Do you feel like you use it often?

Do you think it's something that needs more awareness for people to consider? It's somewhat, I think of it, I'm trying to think of a different word to say because it's somewhat funny that you're saying this skill is somewhat underused because it used to be the case that this is what being a lawyer entail. So you're trying to make the argument of the opposite party is stronger so that it can perhaps undermine your position and then you're able to switch roles and see the strongest argument on the opposite side to actually first understand it in its own light but practically speaking for your own self-interest

to be able to rebut it more fluently. So you began saying something that now something you notice in the present argument is that we're too soon to try to demolish or try to find a flaw in the other argument in the other person's argument and I also feel that's a pity that it's not conducive to having a good conversation or even a good discussion I don't think philosophy is sometimes free from it either, but this is something I also learned from James Woodwide and his approach to reading text and trying to always try to see what of truth can be found in this text or in this position

or this other person. If we are to treat everybody as worthy of respect, as I think we should, then this must mean we must take their position seriously and not understand them as a straw person, as a straw person, as a straw man and so forth. So this must mean that we must make the most to first understand their position without trying to distort it

or before we try to rebut it. And a thing requires patience, it requires humility. it also sometimes requires to bite our tongues. But it used to be the case that that was something which was valued, having a conversation and having time, and go over beers, have a discussion and so forth. I think it might be that we're losing that.

I don't know whether it's part of the social media atmosphere where we live in our own eco-chambers and the immediacy of the response and we are all only preaching to the choir and so there is a lot of things and then of course we are all guilty of that on occasion but I see the valuing what you're saying and I think that if we are losing it,

it is a pity that we are losing, that ability to put ourselves on the shoes of somebody with whom we might disagree and might disagree profoundly and nevertheless listen to that person try to understand what might be true in what they're saying or what of truth can be rescued from what they're saying. And then perhaps our response might still be the same

and believe that they're wrong. I think we are still entitled to having our own opinions, but not before we have done the work. I had this older professor when I was in Michigan and he was a great books professor and he was teaching Dante. And so Dante's inferno is a story where he puts a lot of sinners into hell.

And some students were a bit kind of complaining or objecting to some of the moral judgments that Dante was making and why this particular person, or not should be put into hell and he said something that stayed with me and I think he had to do, I don't know, I don't remember exactly what the scene was, but say a scene that we no longer consider to be a scene

and was like, well, this is perfectly natural and so forth. But he said, what we need to do as readers, and by readers, I mean in the most general terms, when we approach people as well is to try to understand them at their best and not try to look at when they might be at their worst. And if you take this interpretive principle, as a principle that applies to your encounters with other people and how it is that you interact with them,

it leads you to try to still see something of value in, the position that the other person might hold. I agree, sometimes it's difficult to do, and sometimes you just don't want to do that. But nevertheless, as a matter of principle, I think it's important that we keep that in mind, and especially for our social conversations, it's capital. Yeah.

That is, I think, the hard part that we're in right now is because it feels like more and more people have teams, that you, if you think Justin Trudeau's, a hero of our country right now, then someone like Pierre Polyev is the evil opposite of him. And we like to kind of categorize people and then not have to hear them any further. And the idea of taking someone at their best seems difficult. I just heard Sir Isaac Newton apparently was a huge conspiracy theorist. And he thought that there was a cabal of people controlling everything.

And we don't care about that. his contributions in terms of physics and his understanding of things is where we glean his value from. Do you think it's harder for us with current people to be able to do that because we see people making mistakes? I think it was like Kim Kardashian who's been working a lot on trying to address like overpopulation of like prisons and trying to get people pardoned who deserve to be pardoned and who was working on that, but we like to simplify her down to like just a model who doesn't contribute anything to society of value. We like to kind of put people into the category in which we understand the most for and then just sort of forget about any other things that

they've done. But with people like Sir Isaac Newton, since that wasn't a major contribution of his conspiracy theories, we forget about it. And all we remember is the positive contributions. Do you think that that's something with people living today, it's harder to do that because we get to see them as a dynamic human being making all the mistakes that human beings can make? I think that's a good point. And I think it's true about the social media platforms and we get immediate access to what everybody is doing through Facebook or through Instagram or those platforms. And in a sense, we do have too much information about, say, actors and their personal lives. And what these makes, I guess, is to distinguish the art from the artist more and more difficult, increasingly difficult, because we get the tabloids who tell us all that there is to know about this particular actor and so forth.

So perhaps people living contemporaneously with Sir Isaac Newton and didn't know these things about it or perhaps they did know about them but they were not in a platform where they were circulated in a way that completely shadowed all the other contributions he did to physics and our understanding of the world and the planets and so forth. So this goes back to our conversation about the fastness or the velocity of everyday judgments.

We are required to have an opinion about almost everything. And as soon as something comes out, we must tweet something or we might respond. And people are asked to respond on the spot about whatever is that happened. Without having had time the time to digest even what the story is about, without having heard what other people have said or might have said or whether even whether it is being reported, it is accurate, is it fair, does it represent what actually happened? Like, could we just stop for a moment before we rush to judgment?

So I'm afraid about this need of a constant judgment, and I wrote a book about judgment precisely because they think judgment takes time. And judgment is necessary. It is not that we can live in a world where we just tolerate each other and therefore you live your life, I live my life. No, we are constantly making judgments about each other, but we're trying to make them in a way that it's not so fast that the person is not giving a chance to explain themselves, for example. I do still think that some principles, legal principles that's a fair process, are important.

but in our everyday dealing with one another. So giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt, I think those values still matter. And that's how I try to also apply to my views of those things. At the same time, sometimes, of course, we are in this cycle, and then we unwittingly participate. participate in these.

Judgment. So let's talk about how does philosophy impact law? Because, unfortunately, from my perspective, it was only one course in so many courses. Yet, you basically put out the proposition, which I think is true, that philosophy is the big circle, and law is the little circle within philosophy. It is one aspect of where philosophy hits the road. where the rubber hits the road and where you start to see it come to life. There are so many key philosophical ideas that help shape our law. So what is that relationship from your perspective between philosophy

and how it shapes our legal system? Yeah, I think for me there are inextricably linked. I cannot understand law without philosophy or every law has a philosophy, Whether it does so explicitly or whether it that so implicitly, philosophy is embedded in every law and in law in general, if we think of law as such. So rather than this image that you had of the big circle being philosophy in the small circle below, I will put them quite interpenetrated and necessarily connected all the time. For me, philosophy enables me to understand law and also ask the question of what it is that we understand, when we understand something.

So asking the meta question about what it is exactly that we know when we say that we know something? Or at least we ask that question explicitly. So in terms of the impact that philosophy has on law, it's not that it comes from the outside, but is that by the very nature of enacting any law, we have embedded within it certain understandings of our community, the values that are important for that community,

the processes by which certain things are going to be adjudicated, the principles that we are going to hold dear and so forth. So to me, those are important philosophical questions that we might as well question. If we live in democratic societies, I think one important aspect of us who are reading the laws and commenting of the laws

or being affected by the laws is to understand, okay, what it is that philosophy that this law is showing us? And try first to understand what kind of individual is this law thinking about? Why is this law talking to us

only as consumers, for example? And what are the shortcuts comments of the law talking about as only as consumers. Why doesn't the law addresses as full-bodied persons or citizens? And so these questions are sometimes questions that people doing legal theory have, the privilege of asking and spending time on. So that's why I really enjoy doing it. Interesting.

What do you think, so where does religion fit in with philosophy of law? Is it another just piece of the puzzle? It seems from what I've learned through law school, but also listening to individuals like Jordan Peterson, is that religion has contributed to our understanding that all individuals have value, that there is something divine about every person. That is very easy for the everyday person to forget when they're at the grocery store and someone hits their cart or someone cuts them off in traffic. It's easy to forget that. Yet, our whole legal system was predicated on the idea that even as someone as terrible as Robert Pickton, who murdered so many innocent people, still deserves to be treated fairly. In a mob mentality like social media, it's very easy to forget that he's a human being that has some sort of divine value

and that perhaps he will be judged in another time or that all of the decisions at the end of his life will leave. to some sort of consequence. It seems like those ideas kind of came from religious ideas. I'm not naming any one religion, but the idea that you're innocent until proven guilty is again kind of that same idea that everybody has a divine value, kind of enacted into our legal system. And I find that really fascinating because we're really mad at religion right now. There is a, particularly with indigenous communities, there's a feeling of deep hurt

and I really understand that. My grandmother went to Indian residential schools. I understand the role the church played. And so, again, trying to make the situation more complicated rather than simplifying the good actors and the bad actors, there is some sort of value. I spoke to Keith Carlson, who's researched Stolo history, and he talked about how when Christians came here,

they had a mindset of marrying who you love. And within indigenous culture, we had arranged marriages, and we kind of went, that's a good idea. We like that. Marry who you love, be who you want to be with, and make a loving family from that, is way better than forcing arranged marriages on people. And so we changed our culture based on that idea. And so indigenous communities, we had slavery, pre-colonization. That started to disappear once Christianity came here, because, we were changing our kind of economic systems.

So I'm just interested, where does religion fit into this? You're asking very big, big questions. What does religion fit into that? Because some people might say that nowhere at all, right? So the idea of some legal philosophers is that law and religion are to separate entities and they have nothing to do with each other. I don't think that's quite so true. I do see a lot of similarities.

If we think of religion as a normative order, if we think of law as a normative order, so they do have similarities in the way religion and law are structured. They both have, I guess, certain bodies of beliefs and certain practices. that are required and certain commitments from those who are either believers or those who want to be law-abiding citizens,

or they might have, I don't know, certain cast of people who interpret those laws or religious laws, it might be priests or maybe, I don't know, legal officials or they might be judges. So I do see a lot of similarities between both law and religion. There might also be differences in the way that it is sometimes said that law allows perhaps certain form of skepticism about itself,

that maybe religion and such might be less inclined to. But of course, the distinction cannot be one between law being the world of reason, on the one hand, and religion being the world of unreason or the irrational or the emotional. It cannot be. I do still think that there is many elements of the religious in law still. I say still because there is a thesis that as civilization progresses, and there is, this is a maxverer thesis of the disenchantment of society, and then religious feelings or religion is left behind.

I don't think that is actually true. But I think your question is also asking us to think of what about religion is still with us, as our legal principles, are still in livens, our legal systems, our constitutional systems, and so forth. And I do think that that is true. I don't know whether we could necessarily attribute the origin of certain of those principles to exclusively religious origins. So you mentioned the questions of certain criminal law principles about guilty until not proving, sorry, innocent until proven guilty. It might be that there is a connection with the inherent value or sacredness, as you put it, of every individual being. But this is a very strong in the philosophical.

tradition since Kant, the idea of the human dignity and the value. So I do think that there might be parallel origins or sources from those legal principles that at the same time converge on the content of what the principle is. And I think we can also bring many other religions of the world to that view. So if we think of religions of the world, the East or you're of course talking about indigenous communities. I do think probably some of those principles coalesce and converge upon certain core principles, but their historical origin might be a little bit different and therefore if we are to unpack them, we will have to be quite precise as to how it is that these principles came to be and what it is that they

represented in their societal context and so forth. So it will still have to do a little bit more of a nuanced approach to how it is that certain principles, for instance, in our constitutional law has or have come. And definitely religion might be one of those sources, but there might be more as well. For sure. I just think of like the perfect example of innocent until proven guilty not being upheld is Jesus Christ, and I'm not religious to want any belief system, but he is the ultimate example of someone who is persecuted and basically murdered despite according to the text, having done nothing wrong. And so in that moment, it seems like the idea of innocent until proven guilty

kind of comes to life when you put it into that context. And it kind of gives this idea that religion can help, kind of put the idea into context in a meaningful way. Because you meet someone and they say, oh, this person, like, nobody's innocent until proven guilty in our day to day. It might seem rational, but it seems also so unlikely that we would all agree on those terms. We'll see a trial and we'll watch it play out. Amber Heard might be a good example.

She was guilty until proven innocent. Like, we did not. Nobody felt like she was getting the raw end of. of the deal. Our culture kind of agreed she's the bad actor, Johnny Depp's the good actor, and we have this kind of new idea of like trial by media, and where we don't decide things based on legal principles, but we kind of go, O.J. Simpson, we all kind of feel like he's guilty. We all kind of know that. And so it doesn't matter what the court says in that circumstance. We all agree on that. Yet we can pull it back to maybe it's the idea of Jesus Christ puts it

into context, which makes it more like, oh, okay, well, that makes sense, why we would have that rule. And whether you believe he's a real person or not a real person, the idea that he was innocent and that he was a good person, and then he was killed, despite having done really nothing wrong, is what we can all agree on. That's a bad thing. We shouldn't go down that path. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. To think of those historical examples, that show by their negative example what happens when that principle is broken or is not followed.

So I do think these legal principles in criminal law, in particular, but other areas of law, they are historically sedimented knowledge that happens throughout generations. And they are there for a reason and we might not necessarily see what the reason is, when we are judging by media, as you put it, my instinct tells me that I might judge this person immediately, as opposed to, like, wait procedurally how it pans out.

So this person is guilty until proven innocent. But I think that historical examples, probably of the most negative kinds, are, stern teachers of the real value of why these principles were implemented in the first place. So we can go back to procedural rules against torture, for example, and how information was extracted by the most violent means during the Inquisition in Spain, right? And yes, they did extract a lot of information, but they did extract a lot of misinformation, but they did extract a lot of misinformation as well.

And so partly for prudential or pragmatic reasons and also because eventually there was other type of discourses who were precisely talking about the dignity of every human being, the inviolability of human beings and the bodily integrity. So all those reasons coalesce at some point for certain principles of procedures, of criminal law to have been established at certain historical times. And there you probably had different groups of people who were agreed upon those principles.

So I'm sure religious people, like we're thinking, for instance, about abolitionism as how it is that those principles come to be historically. So you must have had people from different walks of life to coalesce upon the concept content of certain principles for their own independent reasons. But I do think that once those principles have been established and they are historically sedimented,

we might as well at least pay attention to them. When we have the temptation, I mentioned, for instance, a principle against torture and human treatment. So some US government had the temptation to massage a little bit of those rules, so make them lead-binding upon their army and so forth. And then we realize, okay, but there is a reason why we hold those principles there. And we have very good historical examples of what might happen if you do not abide by,

these principles in the way that they have been laid out. So I think negative examples of the kind are really important for us to see what happens if you suddenly make those principles vanish and right on the rush of judgment to the moment because you need to extract information for a person and you are tempted to say, okay, let's just, you know, make things a little bit more

or easier for us, right? But the cost cannot be measured necessarily by what you are gaining or failing to gain this context, but you are really changing the way, the cultural way, in which we think about this, and the repercussions can be really dramatic. And sometimes we're not mindful of what those consequences might be. the long run. Do you think that most people, you kind of pointed out that it's like it's impractical to torture people. It's not pragmatic. It doesn't feel like most people operate that way, though. Do you feel like that's normal? I just think of how people feel about Mr. Putin

right now. And if we were to do a poll right now about who would like to see him removed by any means necessary, it seems like there would be a lot of people who would go, yep, any means necessary. no, no judge, no trial, none of these, like some people just don't care about that process. They don't care about the practicality, the reasonableness. Again, with people like Robert Picton, there are some people who are like, we know he's guilty. We don't need to do any more deep diving. Yet the law is meant to be some sort of buffer between us and our mob mentality. It's supposed to kind of give us that sober second thought about things.

yet it seems like the average person maybe that's not at the forefront of their mind I know certainly with Mr. Trump people felt like this is a terrible person and shucks wouldn't it be just neat if he wasn't here anymore and we had someone else lead the country and all reason, all logic, all practical

well this is how the system works and this is the optimal way to work the system people don't care about that that's why we had witch trials is because maybe that isn't always our first instinct is to be reasonable and practical and what makes a logical sense. Like, even more recently, the United States was torturing people to try and get information, despite a lengthy literature saying that that is not best practice to get really good information.

But when they were attacked in 9-11, it felt good to go after people at all costs. And they were in Afghanistan for a very long time, past what was reasonable, past what was practical, because there was a part of them that felt like justice was being served, despite maybe no evidence of that. Yeah, that's a very good point. And we are again in the discussion about the instant gratification of certain instincts, which might not be the best guidance for our actions, or at least our policies. So, yeah, I like how you phrase it, that law,

the buffer between our first reactions, knee-jerk reaction and a more reflective reaction. And I think that's how we began about what the role of philosophy might also be to forces for second thought, to slow down, to think through things. But those are extremely important questions, political questions about, for instance, extrajudicial killings of suspected terrorists. which is now done on the basis of judgments of probability according to data that they might be able to capture on your phone. And there is very little in terms of public scrutiny or accountability of those measures,

and there is a sense that, oh, this is the worst of the worst kind of offenders, and there is almost a collective cheer within certain circles when somebody gets killed with a drone despite the fact that maybe their family members might be killed as well or despite the fact that maybe there is a mistake and there is a wedding

because the drone is not able to distinguish between different bodies and so forth. I worry about what this says about our mentality and our cultural practice when we are so fast to judge these things and not take time into understanding that those judgments require the legal process and require certain things that cannot be assessed

only by military needs because we have seen many instances in history where this judgment was done for those that we will completely abhorred nowadays. growing up I was in the bus country and so we did have political turmoil we did have an issue with terrorism

and so forth and I've learned from leaving that complex situation again grey areas a lot that it is not a question of saying terrorism bad or terrorism good

I think we still need to uphold very important principles of the rule of law and for instance, questions about if I was mentioned forbidding the use of torture to get information or to punish or to make it feel satisfying or gratifying at the moment because if we follow that path

and the society in which we will become will be precisely that and so I think that the instant gratification does not need to lead us astray into forgetting who it is that we want to be. Not who we are, but what kind of society do we want to be? What are our fundamental values? Can we actually justify those actions before a third party, not only before ourselves?

That's fascinating. When you talk about the challenges with terrorism good, terrorism bad, the one that I think of, at least in modern times, is this idea of environmental terrorism and how these environmentalists are destroying pipelines or trying to block roads or whatever they're doing, that this is being defined as an example of terrorism. I'm just interested in your thoughts on this kind of relationship we have with the word. It invokes an emotion on us. We think of the 9-11s, yet sometimes it feels like it's being used to get us to skew against a group of people, a viewpoint perspective

that does have impact, but we were, I think, the truckers were also called, like they were terrorizing the city and they were kind of put in that category as well. So do you think that that is a more complex word that we don't kind of deeply think about as much? Yes, and we need to because it's a label that, simplifies judgment for us. If we label somebody as a tourist, we might dispense with certain formalities that the law will require,

or we might forget that they too are human beings that deserve equal treatment or fair trial or even see this person as fellow human beings. People who deserve, as we had a conversation before, to be heard and for their position to be, the stood in its best possible light before then we might criticize

or disagree with that position and I think what they use, the mobilization of this world, especially after 9-11 and how this was used increasingly in an expansive way to label more

and more people, more and more activities you mentioned, ecoterrorism and so forth, things that might not have been labeled prior to 9-11 as terrorism were increasingly labeled terrorists with the consequence or with the impact that we know it has, which is, as I was saying, that it humanizes the person and then it makes them a legitimate target. So I worry about the use of those labels so fast because they are not just a descriptors, they're not a description of the world, they imply political decisions that

might be quite consequential without public scrutiny, right? And I think governments and, but also society, we are good at using words to us as somewhat weapons and to forget, make us forget that those definitions require much more discussion before they apply. Yeah. I'm interested in your thoughts on, like, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Like, it seems again like we have these ideas, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, these abilities to allow people to seek truth. What a weird idea in modern culture. You rarely hear someone, you go, hey, what are you up to this weekend? Seeking truth. Yet it is the idea

behind many of these rights is to try and figure out what is true, what is meaningful perhaps within the United States. It's the idea of the pursuit of happiness. And so I find that really fascinating because, again, that, like, can't we all just agree on what the truth is? Like, it seems so hard for people to grapple with the idea that truth is not something concrete, where we go, oh, well, CTV said it, so it must be true, that there is a more miraculous version of what the truth is. I'm interested in your thoughts on this pursuit of truth, pursuit of meaning, and that these rights, they're not guaranteed by government, which I think is often misunderstood. They are inherent. They are inalienable.

They are a part of being a human that somehow we all agreed on that, despite, again, a... an idea that we're racist, that we hate other people, that were these terrible things that were all so flawed. Like, I believe that we're all flawed and terrible and short-sighted in our own ways, yet we all agree that we should give people the freedom to pursue truth. What does that mean when you hear something like that? Yeah, it's an interesting thought you have about how shocking it sounds to our ears that that somebody is seeking truth.

So I have a comeback to that question, which is through an old story of kind of Plato, because in a very famous dialogue, he kind of, he has a discussion or rant against the old sophists. Sorry, what are sophists? The sophists, they were kind of professors of rhetoric, and in Plato's rendering, they are the equivalent to the modern lawyer who twists the argument to sat in a pretzel to such an extent that what looks, or what

is truth, looks like, falls and vice versa. The lawyer is this person, as the sophist of all times, who has the ability to make, as Plato put it, the weakest argument. The weakest argument look the strongest and vice versa. And so if we take that description seriously, and as I think we should, at least as a critique of our profession as lawyers and think, okay, how can we come back to the accusation, to the charge that we are not interested in truth? In fact, that truth is irrelevant for the legal field, which I think it's quite an

insightful comment that he has about what it is our self-perception in the law field where we say, I'm not interested in making judgments, I'm just interested in telling you what the law is, which is the position of probably some law professors as well. I know that I had professors that, I'm not interested in the morality of it. I'm just interested in telling you how it is. But it's nevertheless true that law, if the interest of law were only true or exclusively a true, it has a very strange way of going about it, which is always to have this adversarial structure where you pursue truth, but by not going one dimensionally in one path, but by at least going in two adversarial positions, right? you have two positions, and then eventually you have the triangulation with the adjudication

process, which is a third that is supposed to adjudicate where truth might or might not lie. And then another interesting or curious fact about how the law works is that you are prevented. There are some obstacles that prevent you for presenting things, evidence, that might not be admissible, that in a conversation might be perfectly fine to do, but nevertheless we have decided in law that, okay, yes, I might possibly have this means of proving this to be true, but I'm not interested in that. So the interest in truth in law is quite paradoxical, right, because it seems that we are interested, but we put a lot of obstacles to get at the truth. So one roundabout way of addressing that.

question is to say that perhaps the interest of the law is not so much in truth as it is in justice. So we might say that justice requires truth, but nevertheless, the emphasis is somewhat different if we think that we do those things, we put those obstacles in means of arriving to truth, because our deepest interest is in giving a fair trial to both parties, listening to both, in preventing certain unfair treatment in the process and so forth and so forth. So I am somewhat persuaded with these that one way of coming back against this charge of Plato, that lawyers are completely amoral and they don't care about anything such as truth, it is to say that, okay, but we do care about justice. That's actually the goal that we do

have as a profession. And we try that in the aggregate, the mechanisms we have, are geared towards that. Whether or not we are just in particular cases, of course, is very, very debatable. But I think the question of justice is always relevant for the law. It cannot be made irrelevant. Interesting. So we have this idea of bringing the justice system into disrepute. we, I asked Nikos Harris about this and I'd be interested in your thoughts. Have you heard of Martin Screlli? He is, he is, uh, in the United States. Um, he was a hedge funder and he was involved in pharmaceuticals. He's the person who took a pill that I think cost like 80 cents and pushed it pushed it up to, uh, hundreds of dollars per pill and then it went from

costing people $30 a month to like $15,000 to $100,000 a month. He is, I just watched a documentary on him on Prime, where they basically go through this person's life because he started doing live videos. And he would allow people to hop online and ask him anything. And part of it shows how unprepared people are to have a conversation with someone they hate. Like, you have this vision and you think you're going to say all these things. Once you get him cornered and you've got all these points to make against him. And very few people were able to articulate what he did wrong, what his crimes were, why did you do this? His philosophical argument is he gets paid mostly by insurance providers.

And so he is trying to take a drug that was undervalued, push it up to a higher amount, how the insurance providers pay him. And in the documentary, they show when people reached out to him individually, he was fine with giving them free medication all they want. But he wanted those insurance providers to pay more. force them into that circumstance so he could take the money and reinvested into new drugs now whether or not he did that or not I have no idea but that was his kind of philosophical claim as like hey I'm not the bad guy I'm using a system that already exists other people are doing this you just see

me doing it and I've got this kind of unlikable face like if you look at him he kind of looks like a jerk and so he was he was hated by the public he ended up going under investigation by the SEC, I want to say, it had nothing to do with drug pricing because what he did wasn't a crime. But once we decided we hated him, then we started looking for the crimes that he may have committed in other assets of his life and other facets. And so to me, it's just a fascinating example of how these larger structures can cause problems. One of the questions I had for Nikos is there were criminals who acted unethically that impacted a lot of people during 2008. They caused housing crisis. Today, you can attribute the homeless problem a lot to 2008 crisis. You can

attribute people not being able to live comfortably, the destruction of the middle class. A lot of these issues back to that. Now, we kind of forget about it and go, well, that was 2008. We're 2022 now. Who cares about that? But a lot of those issues kind of exacerbated during that period. Yet, not many people went to prison. We don't know the names of the people who did it, particularly in Canada. We can't think of them the way we can think of a Robert picked in. We don't blast those names on social media the way we do when somebody steals our bike or our candy bar from our store. We put that all online and talk about it and kind of dive into it. My question for Nikos and for you is like, how do we square this?

How do we kind of grapple with the fact that it's really easy to arrest a homeless person for stealing? It's very hard to go after Wall Street criminals, people who act unethically that do impact way more people at scale than the person stealing the candy bar. Yet we invest a lot of money into security guards that are save on foods or our safe ways to catch the small-time criminals. And it seems like this is where justice kind of gets complicated. At least for me, it's very hard for me to square this because I think of people being mad about I can't buy a house. And it's like, well, a lot of that has to do with these people that you have no idea the name of who've kind of changed our society. And we didn't get what I would call justice with these people. Do you think that this is a failing? Do you think that this is

like just steps we need to improve the system? Like what are your thoughts on kind of that maybe imbalance? Yeah, and I will agree with almost everything you said that we don't even know who these people are. We're responsible for it. So it's even worse because if we think of improving the system, how are we going to improve the system if we don't know who is responsible of what actually happened. I don't think we do have a proper diagnosis, which will be sure enough socially,

among all segments of society, to know what exactly happened and what is the cause, what are the root causes of what happened and how to address them. Of course, we could go quite in the abstract and talk about global, capitalism as something that we must address.

But then how do we go from that big monster to specifically talking about specific issues and specific decisions which were done to exacerbate the 2008 crisis or to actually provoke it so that we can address it and hold those people responsible? I do think we don't have the same narratives available to us as when a homeless,

person steals in a supermarket. There is almost like a cutphrase already, and we're discussing about the usefulness of labeling somebody a terrorism also applies. We label this person a thief or a homeless person that then we identify as somebody who is prone to that kind of criminality, right, like completely based on no...

on no factual basis, only based on prejudice. So when we go to those big crimes, economic crimes and big pharma, even, I haven't seen the documentary that you're referring to, but again, the idea of individualizing into something to make somebody the evil person, and this person is saying quite cynically, probably, I might add, I didn't invent the rules I was just playing the game

and the game was there before me but it's true that we need to get away from kind of the more individualized understanding of the phenomenon to understand okay what is that caused what are the root causes and how is that we can address

I don't know exactly how the situation was in Canada in 2008 I wasn't here, but I was in between the United States and Spain at the time. And so I felt 2008 in the United States when it fell. But then the ripple effects across Europe were very big. And what I do know is that the bank got a lot of money from the government that is from taxpayers. when it was shown that the entire system will collapse otherwise.

And what happened in Spain was that unlike some other countries, which have recovered some, I think in the United States, have recovered some of the money that was loaned to the banks. In Spain, this money has completely disappeared. So that adds to the sense of dissatisfaction or injustice of the people. when you say, okay, we have so many problems that will require a fraction of the money which was invested in, to solve this problem for bankers,

and there you did have the money, and now you don't seem to have the problem for solving the housing crisis, for instance, or the homeless problem, or drugs, and so forth. And so there is where the question of social injustice, I think, comes in, in people's mind. And I do think, yeah, 2008 might be far in some people's memory, but some of the political tensions that we are living today

are directly attributable to that crisis, economic and global financial meltdown that has led to the rise of populist movements and so forth, right? So I do think that is important for us to understand globally what happened and how to address those problems, but also in a way that responds to the social concerns for justice. And it doesn't just replicate, make up the system and say, oh, let's just fix the system as it was before, but without any impact or any change or any responsibility

upon those who might have caused this. I don't know this has been done properly. I do think that it's somewhat unaddressed. It does worry me because, as I would just say, and I do think that part of the very divided society that we live today can be attributed to the anxieties that these might have created in lots of the population, in the worker class, in people with less financial resources and so forth.

So it has polarized society in a way that, I think it's somewhat unhealthy. Do you think that our, I know that there's flaws within it, but do you think that our current system is sort of miraculous, that it exists today, that we, for the most part, go to the grocery store, come home, live our lives, and for the most part, have no struggles, have no quarrels with one another,

that we can live on average, a very peaceful life. And there are moments that stand. out to us that are unjust. There can be a decision around perhaps, I think sexual abusers are often really good examples of like they got, I think in the U.S., it's worse, but in Canada we're certainly don't have a clean record of having someone who's committed sexual crimes against a female, kind of not getting the sentence, we feel like they deserve. And so someone like Stephen Harper comes in and says, we'll do mandatory minimum sentencing.

and then that comes with a whole slew of other problems that really didn't fix it. In Chilliwack, we have a council member Bud Mercer who's running under this kind of argument. We need to be tougher on bail. And one of the things I just tried to point out to him is like, I totally hear that. I see people kind of get released back into the community that shouldn't be there. Yet the people who are the people we want to keep in will always have the financial resources to get out of that circumstance, to have the best arts. arguments to go to the best treatment centers, the people you're really going to catch

the people with nothing who have no resources. And so we're just going to catch the wrong people again. And to his point, he kind of went, yeah, you're right. We have done this before. And like, I don't know what the better move is. And so there's a feeling of like we're constantly working and scratching towards justice. Yet it always feels like we're missing the mark. and I think for so many people that can be like depressing, can be terrifying, it can feel like you're not represented in the community and it leaves us sort of fragmented. Yet to me, the court is one of the, I've gotten to see the court at its best, where I've seen particularly an indigenous woman who is a sex worker who had her trials, her tribulations,

her abusive upbringing kind of said, and the judge went, you've been through this, you've been through that, you've overcome all of these obstacles. Like, the fact that you get to be in my courtroom today, like, I am honored that you're here today, and that these things haven't killed you, that you have been able to survive all of this and be here today. And she started crying.

And then the judge started crying, and there was this feeling of like, nobody else in this woman's life was going to acknowledge her the way this judge was able to, to hear her story. And then that's when Gladu, for me, came to life. And it was like, this is what that judgment was for. This is it being done at its best.

This is the words of the Supreme Court of Canada coming to life. And to this day, I still remember it. I still feel like it was an important decision. But I got to see it play out the way I think the judges maybe sat there and were like, how can we do this better? See it actually work. And there are moments that nobody gets to see of the beauty of our justice system. So I'm just interested.

How do you see our legal system? Are we way off course? Are we constantly working towards better? Where are we in your mind? Because it seems like a lot of this is unlikely that we'd have innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. All of these ideas seem so unlikely

when I kind of just sit back and think about it. Yeah, that's a very moving thought. And I like the way you describe this experience as very unlikely. But at the same time, as the system working as it at its best, because this at least gives us a name towards which we must strive.

And I do think those several people may have different ways of describing what's justice looking at its best, because some people might say, justice looking at its best is when it catches the most criminal and sends them away for a longer period of time. But I think your experience in the court system has taught you that, and it's very interesting how you were able to rebut the councilman or the politician that was proposing a facile, a very fast and a supposed politically expedient way of solving a problem

that will not solve the problem that it was meant to solve. So I think the way you see is that, okay, if we don't want to get repeating the same mistakes, we must address the problems differently. We must contextualize, we must understand the social context within which these crimes occur and the life is or so forth. So I think this is your experience who have taught all these things. it's very, very important.

I'm going to tell a little story about when I worked in the court, and I worked with questions of, this was many years ago after I graduated in law school. I worked in my regional government as a legal officer, and then we worked with psychologists with questions of children and like protection of children and so forth. And there we had a judge who was extremely, extremely sensitive and extremely empathetic, and the kind of questions he would ask were not necessarily what I was thought in law school were the real relevant legal questions. Of course, he also asked those, but he was interested in understanding where the different parties were coming from. And so I started to appreciate how important this was for what this court in particular was trying to accomplish was. So I think what I

trying to say here is that it's important for us, and this is where philosophy comes up, is to say, okay, but we have this system, but what are the goals of this system? What is that we're trying to accomplish? And then what's the best way if accomplishing them then is? If we think that what the system is there to do

is just simply to do sausages and like in a chain and to put people in prison, we might never get to addressing the questions that you are concerned about, right? So I do think it's important for us to question what those aims are. And then, of course, the more we know in terms of the impact that this causes and families and I don't know, the socio-economic context and the importance of your upbringing and so forth,

the more we will be able to approximate those aims or those targets that we hope to accomplish. And just the final thing about this, which is to say I think it's important. and sometimes it's difficult to keep it, to not be cynical about the justice system, as it is about many other things. I don't think it's necessarily a good thing, even though sometimes we may despair and sometimes we may think that the solutions are so complicated,

the problems are so complicated as to defy or understanding or a possibility of solving them, but do not lose hope and the possibility that justice can happen and that in this case, of course, it can also work at its best without being naive

about how when it's sometimes and oftentimes it fails to deliver those promises. You've talked a lot about values and I think you're just a really interesting person to ask because you've experienced Spain, the United States, Canada, where perhaps we have a lot of underlying values that are similar,

but we're somewhat different that I think what's valued in the United States that's unique to Canada is disagreement. There is something admirable about getting on whatever it is CNN, getting two people who disagree and just having them two minutes and then two minutes and you just have them hash it out. There's something they enjoy about seeing that disagreement. It's like a value of theirs to not have to have a dissent. Within our legal system, we have dissents.

What values do you think make a country stronger that are almost non-negotiable? Is there values where we can't kind of debate about that they're so important, they're so key to us all being able to live peacefully, that they're almost non-negotiable? Like, what are these values that you speak of? Yeah, before I answered that question, which is human rights doing that, that role of, like, this placeholder of those values which are non-negotiable and not subject to critique, but not because, because we do have historical experiences where those values have been completely destroyed, and therefore we realize, wow, we cannot do without.

But I guess in terms of the disagreement, and I want to make a point about that, I will distinguish very much, very sharply, the disagreement of the example of CNN of having two on opposite sides and the disagreement or the dissent that might happen through a dissent in a court. Because I do think that behind the appearance of having a debate, CNN is not promoting actually a healthy debate. It's more like having two people talking past each other and having two minutes and having basically talking points to preaching to their choir.

Whereas an ideal dissent, and I think this is a very important value for legal system but also for a society, the ability to disagree, respectfully disagree, as they put it, but we must

make it mean. What does it mean to respectfully disagree? And so the ability to actually listen to the other party respect that they might have the authority at least to decide and go in a different direction and

nevertheless hold to a different position and reason with them still as part of the same conversation I think it's important and I think this is different from the models that we have now on social media and the CNN model

of having to very antagonistic perspectives supposedly each representing a side or as you put it before like we are members of a team so team A and team B or whichever colors we choose to favor but I think this agreement is

a really important value and so going back to your final question about what are those values that we hold here and and so there might be many and I don't think there is there is a list there should not be necessarily a fixed list

so you were asking about the chart there are some provisional list we have invented we have created or drafted through the centuries it seems I don't know Amuravis time

in all Mesopotamia and you know lists that we hold dear and, you know, we have, of course, you mentioned Thomas Jefferson and the creation of independence. We have the French Revolution, but I don't know. We do have the Declaration of Rights of Women that Olymp de Guz wrote in response to the Declaration of Rights of Man and so forth.

So we do have lots of leads, potentially. And I think some of those leads are overlapping, and they seem to speak about, similar things and then I also want to say that the world is quite wide and we do have many lists coming

from different parts of the world which might look a little bit different but sometimes we look we're talking in my class about Ubuntu and reconciliation in South Africa I'm not sure whether it was in this class or in the context of the human rights class

that I was teaching but so they might look a little bit different and there is a temptation sometimes to conflate them and say, okay, but they nevertheless look basically the same, which is partially true, but this goes back to the question of the importance of this agreement. We must accept that there will be reasonable ways of interpreting those rights or those values, fundamental values, and that people will have fundamentally different ways of seeing things from us. so we live in a situation where simultaneously

both things are true we have some values which are non-negotiable we cannot negotiate them and yet we know people will disagree over their meaning constantly and I think we have to live in that tension we cannot just say okay but they are no negotiable and I'm not going to talk with you

and it seems that it doesn't take into account the other part of the equation, which is to know that, oh, yes, but there will be people that I will disagree with. And so how do we do we do that in a way that is civil or maintains at least a sense of, you know, personhood and interaction? And it doesn't just break into completely sectarian or complete teams where you just start with the members of your team

and that's basically it seems an impoverishment. Yeah. Within Canada, it seems like we're trying to have that conversation. We're trying to figure out, okay, we've got this system that's, I would say, Western in nature. And we're trying to say, okay, well, this is really left out the population that was here before we got here, which is the indigenous communities. I've heard terms like decolonize. And I'm always hesitant on that word because it, doesn't say what, how much of the old system do we keep? How much of the indigenous traditions do we bring in? What does that replace? Like it's a, it seems like a bag of cats type of word to me because, of course, I believe that there are certain really valuable insights that indigenous culture has, particularly, I always use this, elders. We look at our elders with a sense of admiration, a sense of gratefulness, a sense of awe that we don't know everything, that history matters.

And so it seems like Western traditions kind of missed that. Or they put more weight on things like priests and pastors to play that role within their culture, that when they disband with religion and say, well, I'm an atheist now, that you don't have those sources of knowledge to pull on anymore. So now you're kind of left with like seniors being mistreated. And I use kind of Ontario as a good example. They don't have air conditioners and they're going through a heat wave. And people will likely die as a consequence of that.

And so they don't, their culture, Western culture, doesn't treat their elders very well. And so there are things we can say, hey, that's a good idea. Let's pull on that. Let's bring that in. That might be a better system. having loved ones be able to speak and be involved in the court process. Like, within First Nations court, the idea is to say, hey, let's bring in an elder who these people respect and admire and have them speak to them about how they could live a better

life. Well, that seems like a good idea for all people. Find someone that the person admires to speak there and say, hey, you're not living up to your potential. We want you to see you do better. So let's do something different. And I really admire people like John Burroughs who are kind of seeing where there's lack in our system and saying, well, what if the indigenous traditions could help rebuild and restructure the system? But there are some who use the term decolonization to say, tear down all the courts, tear down these old systems, and let's just replace it with this system.

The term means different things to different people. And I really embrace the idea of let's look at the flaws, the vulnerabilities, the shortcomings of our current system and strengthen it with a different viewpoint. Like when we talk about the environmental movement, it seems really unfortunate that I think protesters have a point that capitalism is not perfect. It isn't going to save us from destroying ourselves. And so we have to start to rethink these things. yet when a court decision comes down that puts in an injunction, it says those protesters can no longer protest. But this is an important right that we need to stand in the way of things

if we believe they're for the consequences of our society. And so an indigenous perspective would likely lean towards understanding those protesters' point and saying, well, let's redo the assessments then. Let's re-figure out how we could do this differently. It seems like that might bring about a more just system. That would be the value I would want to bring to bringing them together. And I'm just, you're here, you get to learn about legal philosophy and our Canadian legal system. And we've spoken this in your class.

And I'm just interested in your thoughts. What does decolonize mean from your perspective? What is the best case scenario of how we could do that correctly? Yeah, that's a big and tough question, especially for myself being a foreigner who has so much still to learn and to understand about the specific problems of Canada. But that's one of the first things that, or not the first things, one of the things that have struck me the most and that I'm taking with me now every time people ask me,

so how it is to live in Canada, and what are the problems, what are the debates, basically, not the problems of what are the debates and the political things, Because I always thought that Canada was from the outside, like a role model and a type of country that deals with issue in a way that we don't know how to deal with in my home country. And so the first thing or the most important thing is the strength and the importance of indigenous communities in Canadian legal system and how this is not a theoretical debate and how practical this is and how this is. embedded in every discussion that we have and I think socially but also at the law school

at the level of students at the level of teaching the design of the curriculum and on the radio and I think it's really important so the question of DeColos identification is a good one what you're saying how do we give a best sense or a best meaning

of best definition provided that we agree on what that means that it's not necessarily something that we should take for granted, but provided that we mean that we know where we're headed, like, what is the best way or the best path forward? And those questions, I think, in general, speaking now generally, I think are quite complex, and there is not a single solution that will get us there.

I like the way you put things that it seems to me that I don't want to kind of rephrase your argument in a sense of revolution. or reform, because I think it's more nuanced than revolution or reform, but let's speak for a moment that language of revolution of starting from the ground up, because the entire system is so corrupt that the best way that you deal with this is to basically start from scratch and replace it with the new.

This might be a really natural instinct, because what was there before, and especially since the experiences of residential schools, and, you know, the graves that appear, I've seen those in my very little time here. So this is really something in the present, it's not only in the past. It's happening. So it's quite natural reaction. At the same time, I do think that if we go historically in experiences of revolution,

of starting the system from the ground up, you realize how almost impossible that is. You always need some fibers, some threats from the past. You can never start from zero. The French Revolution tried to create new months, and now the world starts from year one. They failed. Right?

And not that I disagree with what they were trying to accomplish, I think it's very admirable. So I do think that because of human fallibility, because the decision are so complex. The likelihood that we will just trash you in a system completely and start from zero, it seems unlikely or very, very difficult. Not that it's not desirable, but I think it's very difficult. And at the same time, the idea of reforming the system from within,

it's very attractive and there's things we can do. But at the same time, we need to understand that sometimes the system has so many barriers for us to do any meaningful reform that it seems hopeless. It seems that the changes we are trying to implement are either too slow or too menial or they don't really go to the root or to the court of the problems. And I don't think there is unfortunately a solution which will be clean, which will be now we have found it. perhaps the way forward takes years and now I'm talking decades and generations but it's important that that we do not lose hope that things can get better

and at the same time develop certain sensitivity for when they do get better so highlight those moments of improvement and say oh, okay, everything is actually terrible. But this moment of making things a bit better, of reconciliation, of encountering, of bringing in indigenous law principles into the legal system has proven to be a success.

So let's just dwell on it a little bit. Can we replicate it? What did it work? So perhaps now I'm showing a more reformist, attitude, but again, in the interest of seeing the long run of things, not just because I think that the entire system deserves to be maintained. Yeah, I think of people like John Burroughs, and I feel like he doesn't get the shine. Like, I think he is an exemplary person to have on, like, see TV every night and just have him

going through what his thoughts are, because I think he is like my rubric of like, How, in the article that you shared with us, about how in indigenous culture, we learn from how the flower grows and how the butterflies come. And if the butterflies don't come, then we as a culture, as a community, have done something wrong for them not to return. And so we have to think about that and we have to figure out what we can do better to have the butterflies return. It's the same with the salmon ceremony within the stolo area, which is we conduct a salmon ceremony. We take the first salmon we fish. We all come together. The goal is to have everybody come in and share that first salmon, and everybody gets a teeny, tiny little piece.

And we all have that first bite, and then we take the bones, and we put it back into a container together. And an elder, a spiritual advisor, and a youth, and sometimes a chief, all return the bones to the water and give thanks to the river, to the salmon, to the ecosystem, to the creator for giving us that salmon. and to me that overlaps with grace, which is what Christians often do before they eat a meal. And so we have these opportunities to think about why we do things about the norms that our culture has and see how they bring us together. And I just think he does a good job of saying this is what we could pull and apply to our legal system to make it better, to make it more fair, to make it more representative. And again, I just don't think he gets the shine.

I think he deserves for having that very thoughtful approach. And I see our system have opportunities for change. Like I had a client who was charged for fishing when they weren't supposed to. It wasn't an opening. And so one of my points was, why don't we have this person do a salmon ceremony, which is not what the court usually thinks of. They think of fine. They think of regular penalty or whatever it is, community work hours, something like that.

that idea just needed to be proposed to the judge and say this is what a salmon ceremony is, this is what it might look like and they were like, yeah, that sounds, that sounds like it. That sounds reasonable. Yeah, and it just takes somebody knowing the culture and seeing how it could be done in a fair way where I think maybe somebody else in the position could have gone well, indigenous people have been fishing here for thousands of years

and who are you to tell her when to, like, and then we don't get anything accomplished because we're just infighting where the benefit for the individual going to a salmon ceremony, it's not punitive, it's, hey, learn about the ecosystem, understand the value of the fish, and try and do it in a better way. And I do think that there is a place to zoom out and say, well, who's regulating her right to fish? And how do we make that system more fair and making sure that other levels of government are operating equitably? But in that circumstance, she didn't recognize the harm she could be doing to the environment. And so a salmon ceremony makes sense to me. It just, I think, takes making sure that you articulate the wise and treat the judge and the crown and the defense counsel all with humility of, like, they don't know what a salmon ceremony is.

They don't know what the benefits would be. So you have to be very thoughtful in your articulation of the benefits of doing that instead of a $300 fine. And so I think that patience that John Burroughs brings is really like a model. to follow. That's a very, very important point. And while you were speaking, I was thinking that that's precisely

what needs to happen for reconciliation and so forth. And I will speak of, I will use the language of cultural translation. Like, we do need translators, which are culturally sensitive. And translator, it means that to be somebody who is, who has,

one foot in one culture and one foot or another, so you need to carry metaphorically speaking, we need to bring parts of that world in contact with a different world, which has different assumptions, different presuppositions, and

so forth, and use the language that it's able to communicate both similarities and difference, understanding that the audiences of both worlds are different. And that's what you're doing in that example of the salmon, like, okay, I'm not going to assume the judge knows what I'm

talking about, and I have the responsibility of explaining what is the cultural significance of this, what is the impact, why is the community doing this, and what might be the benefits and so forth, so that the judge eventually might say, ha ha, that makes perfect sense to me. But I think there, what you're proving to be, it's a very good cultural translator. And so I do think that John Boris's work does that as well quite efficiently, in my view, which is to adopt, I guess, the role of mediator between cultures. So in Greek traditional mythology is the work of Hermes, the God, which was the messenger of the gods.

So it's transmitting the messages of the gods to the mortals because, of course, otherwise, the messages will be illegible. Like, we wouldn't be able to understand what the gods want from us. And so this is where the work hermeneutics or interpretation comes from, the idea that we need a messenger somewhat. But now talking about cultural translation, I think the work of people like John. boroughs, and there might be others like Val Napoleon in Yovic and so forth.

The really good cultural translator are trying to articulate is having the world, sorry, the food on both worlds, let's try to teach law trans-systemically. Let's try to think through both systems. And we have done in Canada with common law, civil law, in McGill, and I think we're trying to do replicate something with indigenous communities and common law now in British Columbia. And I do think that there are steps forward now in ALAR as well, but it takes time to do it properly. You need to train the right people, and it's complicated if you want to do it properly, as I say, and diligently and ethically, as opposed to just simply, you know, kind of a token type of thing, tokenistic thing, which nobody really wants.

It doesn't serve any purpose. I think the point is to train people and, for instance, language literacy. It's a huge, huge challenge because questions that John is asking, should we do this in English? Should we do it in a different language? And those are key questions that are both practical but also our cultural. And how it is that we best make a connection. between cultures when we're talking about specific laws.

Those are big challenges, but I think, and Canada is asking those questions. We are asking those questions here, and I think those are right questions to be asking, and they are conducive to elucidating the question of whatever decolonization might mean. Yeah. If we don't do that work, I think it's very unlikely we will ever get there. Well, and this is credit to your course, because I really didn't understand the full beauty of an oral tradition until I took your course. Like, we say that, I feel like agnosium, like we just, we always say, we come from an oral tradition. But it wasn't until reading one of the articles that you gave us where they were like, the beauty of an oral tradition is that you fully develop, like,

basically like a biblical text of understanding the world through that lens and it's fully integrated into the person where, because you can recite it, you can tell this story or that story and you know it all in your person and that our memories are far better when it comes to that than just reading it

because you read it, you put it down and then you kind of forget about it where when it's an oral tradition, you're passing that on to your children, your grandchildren, you're sharing that story, you're talking about what it meant, And so there's more, I would argue, integration into the person of what those values mean. And that's the challenge with a written tradition is that we have these rules, but we can lose the context,

we can forget about the person, we can misunderstand, we can think somebody said something stupid and kind of underestimate it when it's a full story. You're not taking any one sentence and saying it's true, untrue, unreasonable, reasonable. You're kind of taking the story and going, okay, what can I glean from? from this, that I can learn from. And I just found that really interesting. Was that something that surprised you as well? I just find oral tradition meant more to me, and the podcast meant more to me after kind

of thinking about the benefits of long-form kind of communication. Yeah, no, that's an article. I think it might have been like Patrick Glenn's article that we read on the importance of tradition and of oral tradition. and because there is a long debate since Plato again about the distinctions and the benefits of the written versus the oral tradition. And Plato famously wrote that he never wrote any philosophy, which if we take that seriously, it's an interesting thing, because it must mean that his philosophy is not in the body of the text. but perhaps in the performance,

in the interaction of the dialogical form in which he writes. But coming back to the question of the orality and the written tradition, of course, Western tradition has been pretty much based on writing. And this is an argument that Jacques Derrida also develops in contrast. But writing has been a privileged form of. knowledge and knowledge transmission and and as a consequence a devaluation of the oral tradition and I do think that article was what he was trying to do is to rescue this notion and actually as you well described show us the way in which an oral tradition can be very

very very strong and and has a different way of engagement with its own materials if its own resources of culture. But these being so, then of course it's so tragic that I don't know if you eliminate physically the people

who hold the tradition through killing, through massacres, through genocide, then the oral tradition is more at risk of this appearance. That's why it becomes even more tragic.

when you have entire generations taken away because then the important role of cultural transmission has been lost or interrupted. And I think that's something that, again, we have to dwell on the importance and the significance or the impact of the stolen generations might have had in disrupting the cultural. transmission, because in a written tradition, you might theoretically rescue or breach in the

absence of the persons, in the absence of, yes, you do have the risk of decontextualization, misunderstanding. Remember, we were talking about how Roman law was again rediscovered 10 centuries later somewhere else, completely, and they didn't know the people. They had simply the text. And of course, those texts changed meaning completely. But the idea was that the tradition had been rediscovered, rescued. So I do think that in the sense of oral traditions, then, because the persons are so important, it's so important then to, you know, to have healthy children having a society and not been taken away in this case to

the school residential schools I'm talking about. Yeah, that is why I like this is because it seems like an echo of that oral tradition of being able to talk to you. We're not rushing off anymore. It's not a quick coffee shop. You're able to really develop on your thoughts and hear the person out fully. And I think lectures are another good example of that. Or tradition coming to life is like, as you said, there's something about reading it that it doesn't come to life the same way as you performing and delivering the information

in an engaging way, which is why I'm particularly disappointed when a professor doesn't view their role as to kind of bring the information to life. When they treat it like I'm just here to, and often it's a challenge with the university where you get grants and funding to do research and then you kind of want to do that more than speak to the students, but when we miss out on that as students, we don't see the brilliance of the ideas come to life. And I think right now we need to be humbled again. I think we feel like everything makes so much sense. You have your phone. Everything works all the time. Your lights, your electricity. Everything is so effective. You forget that you're a small person

on a giant planet, that you'll never be able to see all the countries. Even if you see a bush down the road. You'll never be able to count all the leaves. You'll never be able to count the grass. And so the world is overwhelming to you. But we get so, oh, I understand how this works, and I know how the internet works, and I know how these things work. So I have the world figured out, and you absolutely don't. And it's always fascinating to hear people explain that we don't know how, like, aquifers work, how long it takes for the water to fill, or how these processes work, how birds migrate. Like, the world is very complex place, but we are able to simplify it down in today's society and forget all of that and lose that humility. We don't get

the same exposure to space where you see the stars and you go, wow, like, I am just on this teeny tiny planet and there are thousands more out there. There are different galaxies. There's different dimensions. Like, what does that all mean? It doesn't mean anything to us because it's so incomprehensible to our mind. And I think professors often do a good job of reminding people of that. Like, hey, you don't know everything. I don't know. everything about this topic and I've got a PhD I've studied for 10 12 15 years on this topic and I don't know everything about it so you never will and I think we need that now more than ever it seems like yeah that's a good way of looking at education and and the the sense of recovering that sense

of both wonder for those things that we are curious about and also that sense of humility about those things that we don't know about, which are many. And I find increasingly that they are more than I used to think. They were. The more you know, the more you realize, the less, actually, you know. And so this to me translates into the classroom as a habit of asking questions about those texts, those materials or questions we have to decide. and not presuming to know an answer beforehand,

and not presuming to lecture on what the answer might be, and to pose them as open questions, and to see how they might make sense or not or fail to make sense or resonate or connect with some aspects of the student's life. And one thing, of course, that I'm debating now, and you know these rules that I said for my class, said for my class, there's not many, but I don't like computers in my room. And that makes me a dinosaur, obviously. But the pedagogical reason is because I do not have that distraction

from what I think is the most valuable aspect of education, is that interactional moment of the meeting of the minds, if I can use that language for a moment. But is the idea that you know, we are asking questions of each other, interrogating the text we have for the class and trying to think through the questions in a way that it's not dogmatic or there is not necessarily at least at the end of the day that you're supposed to memorize

because I don't think that's very productive as a way of learning. So, unfortunately, the context in which we live now, dominated by social media, it's not helping us to lead that kind of pause, interaction, low reading. It requires us to go much faster and to immediately say, is this going to go in the exam or not? Or what about my grade from the first days of class? And so I don't want to make a little of those concerns because of course for students

are very important concerns but I wish there was from the moment or at the moment in which you are in the classroom a sense of okay let's just enjoy the moment of education let's see what it beats us let's

make the most of it because I do think at the end of the day it's one of the few things your education that nobody can take away from you. The more you benefit from it. You're not there for any other purpose but to educate yourself.

So enjoy that privilege, I suppose. That's my motto there. Yeah. I find that really interesting because Nicos actually wrote a paper all about the problems with technology in the classroom and going low tech in the classroom for all the benefits you describe. Yet I find myself, and I found myself

in your classroom and his, wanting to still use those and so it's fascinating to know that it's bad to have the person who actually wrote the paper on why it's bad and to have it shown to you that it is bad yet still there's this weird thing we do in our mind where maybe you're speaking at the front of the class and then I realize I need to pick something up or I need to order something we're running low at home and then all of a sudden it's like, well, I'll just really quickly check that. Like, just, I just need to order that and then I'll focus again. And it's like, it's that weird relationship with truth because I'm partly lying to myself. And I'm being, like, I'm trying to make it seem like that's not what I'm doing,

but it's exactly what I'm doing, which is like, you don't need to order your soap right in the middle of this classroom. Like, this is not an urgent thing. Yet, there is a part of you that wants to make it seem like it'll be quick and I think we do that far more than we realize I find myself when I don't bring my phone into like I'm going to like save on foods and I'm standing in line I'd rather be on my I don't even need to be doing anything I can just be standing there just hanging out and I don't want to look around and stand and look like in my head I'm like you've got a stupid look on your face you're just standing there like it would be so much more comfortable to just check your phone, see if you've got any mismessages, do that as like

a safety blanket with no need. Like the elderly lady standing next to me, she's not on her phone. She's just happily maybe thinking about what she wants to have for lunch or enjoying people's company. Like you just, you get so stuck with like feeling like you need to be on something, feeling like, like I often tease people who say they're busy when I know they're not busy. Like, you're not, you're not, like, Elon Musk running four companies. You're working a regular job.

You've got, like, your regular day. You're not overwhelmed with, like, things to do. Now, maybe you have to do laundry and whatever it is, but you're not busy, busy where, like, you couldn't do your laundry in a few hours. Like, we like to pretend we're really busy and that we've got all these things pulling on us. And my concern around that is that we don't know how to reflect as well. We don't know how to sit with a text.

there was somebody who was talking to like a monk and they were talking about how he would sit there for days and think about something, the same thing, and just sit there. And I can't imagine doing that. Like I can't imagine just one topic, one sentence and just letting yourself get lost in like, what does that mean? Or having an imagination and thinking of like, how would I paint this? And where would I take that? And how far would I go? When you think about how many family members only spend, I think it's like statistically like 15 minutes a day of quality time with their children. Like we're in such a fast-paced society that it makes us uncomfortable for you to say something I didn't know. And then me go, I didn't know that.

Like, should I have known that? Am I dumb? I'll just check my phone really quick because maybe something's going and then I can come across as smart. Like it's a hard technology has become a crutch for us in so many ways that it makes us feel like naked, exposed, vulnerable to not have it on us, not be like, oh, sorry, my phone just vibrated. I got to just quick text, and then I'll just get back to it. It makes us feel like we're not busy enough. And I don't know how we combat that.

I don't know how we reduce the noise in our own mind. I find my best reflections are often when I'm on a run where I'm not going to grab, I'm moving. So it's like, then I start to think about, oh, I've done there. And then some of the inspiration for maybe I need to upgrade this or change this about the podcast or what if I did that happen in those moments yet in those moments perhaps I feel the most uncomfortable because I don't have a quick distraction and so it seems like a battle even when you know it's a problem it's hard to address and that's what I guess makes it an addiction

is because it's a fear of being without it and it's so and you know it's bad for you yeah and yet you still gives you pleasure you can you can kind of just justify it. Yes, yes. What I'm trying to do by making this admittedly impopular, and I think I might fall down at that point as well, because there is other considerations to have about the use of technology in the classroom and how strong I am in my convictions.

but the reason I do it because what I do want to provide is precisely to bracket that as a space of undivided attention that I think it's getting lost in the world. People now do meditation or people go to yoga. Okay, can we do that in the classroom? Can we replicate that? Can we have a moment for purely intentional, intellectual work while we are here for the duration of, say, an hour.

Can we just think closely about this question? And I also want to avoid having phones because when I ask a question and it's a temptation in all of us, my temptation, if I don't know an answer, is not to think about an answer, is to find an answer in Wikipedia. And I want to discourage that precisely by saying, No, no, no, I'm not interested in Wikipedia. I know that Wikipedia is out there, or Google, that can tell us an answer.

But what I'm interested in first is that you understanding the question I'm posing, understanding why I'm asking this question, understanding why that might be irrelevant, and then eventually trying to find yourself something that might or might not connect, give it a try. Let's see where we go from there. And I don't know what you're going to say. and it's a risk-taking that I find it's quite challenging and that's where progress happens, intellectual progress,

where you are taking risks. If you're skiing and if you don't fall, it means you're not doing progress. That's what they told me when I fell. That's a good thing that you're falling. So in a similar way, in a similar way, I think in the classroom, if the temptation is to ask a question that happens,

as one answer, or at least, or sometimes I mention names that I don't expect anybody to know, but I'm just mentioning because it's important that at least you're aware of some names and some people that are there and I might write them in the whiteboard, but the point is not to feel that, oh, you should know about those things. I don't expect, I don't assume anything. And what I'm saying is, okay, just forget that they're there, but like, can we talk to them as real human beings, as if they were with us now? And let's just bring whatever is relevant to the classroom. And let's just find a way that we can talk about these things that matter in a way that we can use our own language to do it.

And eventually, I think the hope is that it becomes less awkward. it becomes easier. We lose fear of ridicule. We know that we're not going to be judged on a mistake because the point is not to get it right, but it's to get increasingly thoughtful and mindful about the questions we're asking. But the challenge of teaching is that you're doing both the content of a course

and you must transmit some knowledge, somebody of knowledge, and if you teach something, students expect to get, okay, what it is that I'm going to learn if I do public law one-on-one, right? But at the same time, you are also transmitting a methodology or a pedagogy, and things that you think are important. And what happens nowadays, I feel, is that our pedagogical tools sometimes undermine the goals that we want to accomplish because there's this stand in between students are learning. We mentioned PowerPoints and they are easy, they're efficient, and they are super useful, then you can share them.

It's an amazing technology, but it also has a cost, a trade-off, which is, okay, but then students might be paying attention to that, they might just take notes of those points. They might forget that what matters is not those points, but the conversation we're having around those things. How do you explain those things, right? How do you do that as a teacher is always a very difficult task because in every group of students you are having,

you have to explain all those unwritten rules all the time. And with your behavior, with what it is that you value, for instance, in the way you grade, do you look for analytical precision or are you looking for more an expansive mind right and the way you create the students will immediately pick up and say oh this professor is so and so or he values this and that and so for this professor I will perform this self I will be this kind of a student and so it's an interaction I find it's very interesting but it's always a real challenge. And sometimes you know that you fail, but you feel like, I wasn't successful, or you always divide,

I should have done this differently, or I think that's the struggle of a teacher who take this seriously, which is to say, okay, I wish students saw my point of view, and then sometimes you're wrong. And you say, oh, okay, I think the students have a point which I hadn't considered,

Right. So you also must be open to suggestions. That's why I was saying, I don't know how much I will hold to my no-computer room in the classroom because I do think that there is, of course, some students require the aid of having the computer. What I want to vote, of course, is the destruction of the Internet and checking emails, which, yeah, right. I'm not going to be blind to that reality. you. I love that you do that. I like that Nikos tries to do that as well because it's just it reminds you of something. Like the professors who care about that, they care because they care about you as a student. And I think that that can get overlooked by, well, how do I take notes? And it's like not to be negative, but I feel like your course is very unique in that you really don't need notes. You need to think about the material. And when I was writing my papers, I didn't get 100% on them, but I put forward my best understanding of what the material was, which is

what you asked for. And so I'm not all knowing, but I'm, I'm interested in your thoughts. I keep trying to think about this. It feels like with this law degree now, I get different reactions when I tell people I've gone to law school. Some people feel very intimidated by it. I can see that they recoil and they go, you, you must like, you must be really smart. I could never go to law school. And it's like, I don't want anyone to think that, but I, because I think that that can be discouraging. I think it's unnecessarily devaluing of the person. Like my mom, she didn't graduate high school. She was born with fetal alcohol syndrome disorder. And I've always tried to remind her that, like, high school doesn't define your intelligence. She's an incredibly emotionally intelligent

person. If you go to some of the stores she shops around it, they all know her. They all think she's amazing. Very thoughtful, very kind-hearted, very warm person, someone you can spend the afternoon with and time just flies by. Like, she's very easy to spend time with. In a way, some intellectuals at universities are not that enjoyable to be around. You don't want to have lunch with them. They're very stringent. They're very, oh, you said this wrong. You actually meant this. Like, oh, like, I don't, this isn't fun. This is awkward. And so some people miss out on the beauty of a person because we set these kind of stand. So I think being too intellectual can be dangerous because you disassociate from everyday people, the people who make sure your pipes work or make sure your house gets built properly, you start to think you're above them. And I think that's incredibly dangerous. Yet at the same time, I feel like we don't need to appreciate some people for being incredible intellectuals. Like it's hard for us to create the space to admit that Albert Einstein was way smarter than I was and had a deal.

deeper understanding of how the universe works than I will ever have. And so it's because of our own shame that we don't know, that we don't understand, we can't admire. Like, it puts a wall between us and admiring, like, when I took your course, when I listened to Jordan Peterson, I go, like, wow, there are people who can critically think about like a sentence and see it for all its beauty, all its meaning behind it, and look at the history of the person and understand the context and see the importance of the hat in that time and how that contributed to how we live today and go, I don't do that every day. I'd live a different world. And so I have, I feel like worked very hard to get out of my own ego way, speaking of Freud, my own ego and say,

you're not going to be great at everything. But you can admire that which you see in other people that is admirable because you know you're not going to be that. And so that doesn't take away from who you are as a person and it seems like we're right now it's hard for us to admire like if i were to write an article that says top five best professors at allard the other professors would be very how could you dare say that about me it feels like we're uncomfortable with the idea that there is the the best the smartest the most insightful person because that means we're not those things but we can be great in other ways like nicos consistently wins i think like best educator like sharing knowledge he's the best at it well I'm sure there's other professors that go every year he wins that award and every year I don't win and they take it like it's an insult but it's like admire the person for what they're doing for what they're sharing for developing a passion and working towards it and I just I feel like sometimes there's such an alignment between the student and the professor we forget that there's something admirable about the years you put in the time you sit there thinking about a topic developing on it and

and that our own insecurities about what we don't know block us from being able to admire that. You are able to do that with intellectuals that aren't even here anymore. You look back and you see Socrates or Plato and you go, wow, what it would have been like to have a cup of coffee with them. Yet we can't seem to do that with you today. Like it doesn't seem like students are like, I need to go grab a coffee with this professor because they're so insightful. like there's something that makes us uncomfortable and I'm just interested is it nice to be able to have a space where you can learn from intellectuals like Plato and Socrates and not feel any insecurities about yourself where it seems like when we're relating to other people I see people go oh law degree like I don't want to say anything stupid around you and it's like just be who you are like my law degree doesn't make me better than you I know more than you about this topic it doesn't make me better than you and it seems like you've because you're you've you study people who aren't here anymore, you're able to admire them shamelessly? Yeah.

I think this is also something that you learn to do. And so I've mentioned my supervisor James Boyd-White, and this is something that he taught me to do, to look at those things as things we should admire, or that we could find reasons to admire. And sometimes we find reasons to criticize. Admiring does not necessarily mean that we treat them as heroes. Now, going back to your point about how we treat histories and statute, it's not a question of either heroes or villain. It's a question of admiring what might be worth admiring

and then, of course, criticizing what might be worth criticizing. But let's put ourselves for a moment in the position that there's something to admire in all those texts we're reading in the class. There has to be a reason why they're assigned. So let's try to find that before then we try to demolish it, before trying to say we are better than that, or in the case you're saying, oh, I can never reach that, and therefore I will shut down my ears and my eyes

because it puts me down. Okay, no, let's just be kind of humble. let's just pay attention they are speaking to us they are intelligent beings but so can we if we put our minds to it

if we put our collective minds to it even more so so let's try to find that out and I found that personally when I was a student that experience so gratifying that is stayed with me and what I'm trying to do is

replicate that experience for my students nowadays, to say, isn't it actually quite nice to do it before we move to judgment? Before we move to condemn somebody, before we move to say, oh, there is nothing we can learn from this, whatever, this man in the past. Before we do that, let's try to first listen. And there's many texts with which I disagree profoundly in the text, in the class, and some because, of course, I show my true colors, I say, okay, whatever. But I try to give them, like, fair shake and say,

okay, is there something here that is speaking to us? And then it's just going to the question of who it is that you are. I think that, of course, meeting people that not too much. I feel every time I go to a library, I feel demean as an intellectual, because I realize how much I have not read. Most of the books that are written, I haven't read. I've read just a fraction of a fraction. And nevertheless, I feel, oh, I've read so much, but it's so little.

So every time I go to a library, I feel a bit, oh, there's so much I have to do. There's so much that I don't know. It's a kind of sense of responsibility of how much. I don't know. Then you are forgiving with yourself. You say, okay, but I need to be a little more patient with myself. But this doesn't necessarily need to translate into being an arrogant asshole

with people that you encounter, right? It doesn't change who you are, the fact that you have a low degree now from Allard. It just means you've accomplished something that you didn't think you might have been able to do five years ago. That's a good thing. But it doesn't necessarily need to change the way you behave to people. Of course, if you start looking over, you know, down on people, then people will notice. But I don't think that's how one deals with his or her equals.

I think if we think of ourselves as equals, then we may have different talents and we have different interests. So my interest is in this particular field, of which I know a little bit, there's people who know much more. And there's people who know less, fortunately. but I am not going to try to, for example, try to make you feel worse by talking about this philosopher that, oh, you haven't read that one, oh, okay, right,

like making you feel that you are lacking. I might say that, oh, it would be interesting to read this, but more as something that puts us in a position of learning, of wanting to learn more. because there's many things that we can still learn and you mention Einstein of course you think still we're learning from what he said

I just read today there's going to be in Vancouver an event about general theory of relativity these days so there are still almost a hundred years later they're still thinking or not even almost a hundred years later they're talking about what it is that he has to teach us so that's that kind of my attitude

and that's what I'm trying to impress upon students as well. Let's just be humble and it must translate into relationships of humility to one another and not for instance an attitude of name dropping for

the sake of non-dropping like trying to showcase that you know this much there is of course in some lawyers this attitude of all because provision whatever in section says that and who speaks that language

There is a context from that kind of speech. If you are in a courtroom, of course, you need to cite the particular rule and provision that you are relying on for your argument. But if you are in a neighbor's meeting, you should not be doing that, or people will think you are something that you don't want to be thought of, right? Do you have a philosopher you'd recommend people look into to understand, to understand, understand values better to connect themselves with the complexities of our system, of our culture, to kind of admire. You've talked about Socrates, Plato. Is there someone you go, if you're going to dip your toe into this water, if you're going to learn more about this, you think that they should start somewhere? It depends on what it is that people want to learn from it.

I also mentioned that I read the work of Nietzsche, who is like kind of the anti-platonist. in all respects, and he's a very, an incredible writer, somebody who was against organized religion, and he wanted to be a man unto himself, and he had this very, I don't know, say crazy, really out there ideas about what was wrong with the culture that we had inherited. And that was a very important influence upon me when I was growing up. Then I realized I've no longer that same person that I was reeniche when I was 17. But what I would recommend is that you read somebody that speaks to you in a way that you get a sense of who they are as a person.

they open up a new world for you. For instance, I've mentioned a few times the work of James Lloyd White here, but that's what he had meant when I read his work. It's like, wow, this person just forces me to revaluate everything. Can you tell us about that? That was just like a complete shock or all. I don't know how a complete transformation of who I was and who I thought I was as a scholar.

When I was a law student, I was a very critical law student and somewhat, maybe not an angry student, but very picky and I will protest to my professors and I will point them when they were wrong. And probably I must have been, although I met a professor this summer and she had a very fun memories of me as a student, which is very nice. But this goes to say that my style of criticism was more like, this is wrong, and this isn't just, and you have to change things. And there is a time and place for that kind of critique, negative critique. But then with James Woodrow, what happened to me was that he enabled me

to see myself differently situated about the law, which I, at the time, more or less, hated. And to start, enable me to see that there might be something about law that can be loved. So it really forced me to self-evaluate my own emotional attachments to the field that I had chosen as my profession. And I realized that, so this is a big, big major transformation. There's nothing in which he said specifically that may do it. It's just he's a style of writing, he's a style of addressing me. He forced me to reevaluate those emotional attachments.

And I realize that there is something much more fulfilling in loving the profession you've chosen to dedicate your life to than to feel that you're constantly in a negative quest for critiquing and pointing flaws and pointing at the mistakes and the reasoning of everybody. There is a certain pleasure in that, but he made me realize that maybe I had to outgrow that form of pleasure to engage in other types of more fulfilling pleasure. So it was a very humbling experience, and it did. didn't happen from one day to the next. It was a learning experience.

And I had always, when I was writing my dissertation, I would always have this kind of a little genie of him in my mind, like what he will say to me and how he will respond to me. And this forced me to all the time self-evaluate my work critically and say, is this what I really want to say? How is my voice coming? across and that was always a challenge for me so I think that and that was a very important thing but there's many many philosophers that one can can encounter there's really good philosophers

nowadays Margaret Davis is somebody that I really like Desmond Manderson Robert Cover it's a legal philosopher that I really recommend reading So, just on that note, have you watched the Harry Potter movies? I've seen like a couple of, but I haven't read the books. I just, yes. I find them so interesting because you watch them and you're like, it's just a movie. But the more you maybe look at it, review it, think about it, think about what it means, it means more than people realize.

And those movies, my partner and I have watched multiple times, and it may be us realize that there's a story under the story, that there's a meaning, that there's archetypal characters that play a role, and it seems like we don't, first of all, reviews of movies don't do a good job of talking about that. And then, like, a good example I think is like horror movies. A lot of people go, I don't like horror movies. They're so typical. But the idea that everybody has demons in their life and those demons aren't connected with the house, I think is the message of most horror movies that it has nothing to do with the house. If you're an alcoholic and you move from this house to that house, that alcoholism is going

to follow you wherever you go. That's your demon. And I think horror movies are often sort of representing that for us, which is you can't flee from it. It will follow you no matter what. And so there's a deeper meaning if you give it some thought, if you try and sit with it. But the Harry Potter movie specifically made me realize that we suck at that, that is not a good skill set that we have. So many people will watch the Avengers movies and go, no, it was not bad.

I like the fight scene. And it's like, no, but like the idea that Thor and Loki are like, Kane and Abel is like, it's very like evident if you think about it. And when you think about the fact that like in the beginning, movies, the Tony Stark character was the selfish, thoughtless person who was just out for himself, and then he dies for the sake of everybody. Like, that's an archetypal story. And it seems like we miss out on so much of that. And that's where, to me, philosophy can be so valuable to make you go sit with the movie.

Think about why that scene was the way it was. What was the purpose behind it? What did the director want you to take from it? and it seems like that's something we need to get better at. Do you have any thoughts on how we can develop that? Yes. I think it's a question of cultural literacy as well and literary literacy. So I'm a legal theorist, a legal philosopher, but really where my heart is, and it's in the field that sometimes called law and humanities

or previously was called law and literature, speaking of which there is several books and articles written about superheroes and law and trying to understand, like, Harry Potter and Law, and trying to understand those as either representations and different layers and different levels of understanding those as worlds which construct certain understandings of law, certain understandings of persons and so forth. And I've been in many of those conferences when we talk about movies,

we talk about comic books, we talk about science fiction. And I can give you some names and references if you want. But I think it's important for us to develop, as I was saying, this cultural competency or this literary. which is about, you know, trying to understand the stories that we are told and try to see what it is that they mean or what it is that it will mean to enact them for us and what kind of emotional attachments they require from us.

So you mentioned Harry Potter for us or for me. My growing up book was The Lord of the Rings, which obviously is such a story. It's a story about kids growing up, the hobbits being more or less, like, little persons who are eventually the most powerful, who are eventually able to defeat the old powerful, like, lore of darkness. And there is this, there's really interesting growing up thing that Tolkien was telling the story to his children and so. forth. So I think those stories are very, or can be, very meaningful for us to analyze and to read through. And this being said, I recently have seen many movies which fall very flat, superheroes movies, which fall to me flat. And they don't have the same resonance as

some of the old stuff. And I do think that they are putting too much money into a special effects and less money into script writing and actually thinking of okay let's actually put together a good movie a movie that has some cultural value and some cultural criticism of the culture i was recently seeing the series with with my partner uh the boys about superheroes and that has elements which are really interesting there is a lot of squeezing of heads and blood that uh That might not be for all audiences, but nevertheless, I think there is more thought put into the story that is being told, and so it will be quite fun to actually analyze it a bit critically and read it and take it as a serious thing, because I do think those texts are what constitutes

us as members of society. We are the stories we believe or are told. We are, yes, autonomous individuals, but we are not self-creating. So we feed into those cultural patterns, archetypes, and we must understand what it is that we do. It makes me really sad when there's something, have you ever seen suits? I really enjoy the suits series. It's all about lawyers.

And it's so fascinating to me because people will come back and I'll say, have you seen suits? And they'll go, well, it's not real. It's not how the law is practice. And it's like, who would want to watch people just sitting in an office filling out forms all day? The underlying, like, message of the story is that the, like, and I think they do it a good job in the final season. I'm basically saying the main character, Harvey Spector, he was never concerned with what the law told him to do. He was always focused on his moral compass within the law.

And if the law didn't properly reflect that, he would not follow it. He would not follow those rules blindly to a terrible place. And it meant him paying certain, like, breaking the law in certain regards. But the idea of that was really interesting because it's like the law isn't a perfect reflection of how you should live your life. Like, some places have jaywalking laws. Lots of people go, I'm not going to follow that. Like, I'm going to cross the road when I need to cross the road. And we don't hate people who do that.

The law has certain parameters, which we all agree on, that isn't always a perfect reflection of how you're going to live your life. And that was sort of the message. And I always just find it unfortunate when people have this mindset of like, oh, Harry Potter's like silly, it's for kids. And it's like millions of people have read those books. It's not by accident. It's not just a kid's book. There's something to this that is breaking like the social barriers for us. that's, if children are willing to read that many books,

something's going on here that's bigger than just a silly book about monsters and dragons. Same with Lord of the Rings. Those are big, thick books that if you ask them to read a legal textbook that size, people would be like, that's not reasonable. This is abuse. Like, I can't do this. Yet we will get on board for something like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. And I just, I find it, that's where I think the intellectual part of me is like,

we need to humble ourselves to those stories. And we need to get out of our own way and say, if so many people are reading this book watching these movies, probably for some sort of reason that we're not able to articulate. And that seems to be, as you said, the ability to communicate. It seems to be the barrier. Yeah, no, that's a very important point where you're making. And I think that that's also what I try to get across in the jurisprudence class and through the concepts of narrative and the importance of, of the storytelling and which are so crucial for the law. And historically, there has been a tradition of legal thinking that has divided, like, storytelling or narrative as different and somewhat alien to the idea of law, as rules, as kind of prohibitions or permissions or things we can and can do, the work of officials, the institutions of power. and so forth, but I do think that the stories and stories

how they are told and how they are being learned and internalize is so important for our own legal systems. What are the stories that our legal system tells of itself, of us?

What's the stories that it is trying to make come true? And so to interrogate our legal systems through the stories we are told, it's a very important task to do. And so these, what I was suggesting before about this law and literature, along humanities fields, what it tries to do is to question those openly and allow

ourselves that space to think, oh, actually, it's a really important time for us to devote. It's not kids play. It's a thing that requires, intellectual attention and not just pleasure eating popcorn, but to think of it critically. Yeah, absolutely. I have absolutely loved this conversation. I am always inspired when people dive into something and understand it at a deeper level and are willing to share that because I think it's so interesting. Most people, when they think of the law, they think of a speeding ticket or like the last criminal case they saw, but it's much more elegant than that. I think in many regards, it's much more complicated in that I can see where our whole system

could do better, where the areas of improvement are. And I think that that's fascinating to have someone who really understands the people who've contributed and try and criticize certain approaches, whether it's, oh, we're just reading the letter of the law and trying to apply it. Well, you can never really do that because you're a complex person and you're weighing some things more than others and you're prioritizing this perspective or this evidence over that. And so we're fallible. We're imperfect.

And we need people to go through and see this is what could be changed. If we made this change, it could make us stronger in this way. This is what the effects would be. And I think that when we listen to people like yourself, we're reminded of something. And I think you've really steelyaned the position for why philosophy is important, how it interacts with our culture. And this is exactly the conversation I wanted to have. And why I was so excited to have you on is because that's what you brought out in all of your lectures, this belief that there is important people to hear from that are going to help you understand

where a judge can make a pitfall or make a mistake and that it's important to consider those things and that might not change the outcome of a decision but if they're missing information if they're avoiding certain information because it's not prudent we could have a less just system and I just I've really enjoyed this so I appreciate you so much for being willing to come on No, I know that this is normally what is being said, but the privilege is all mine, because in all truth, there is not many chances one has to speak at this level, and I've really enjoyed our conversation and the possibility of talking to you one-on-one, as opposed to having my role as a teacher and you as a student. but it's been really my pleasure because I enjoy talking about it and the opportunities are far in between.

Thank you. And I think that that just creates the opportunity for other people to realize that passions can be so unique and philosophy does matter and that's definitely what I've taken away from this conversation and we've just done three hours.

Wow, okay, okay, it went really fast. Thanks a lot. Aaron, it's been wonderful. Yeah, what can I say? Yeah, I cannot believe you made that trip out and it's just it's so appreciated. So thank you. Okay.

Thanks a lot.