over the bridge we go, looking for love...

I just got out of my Corporations final exam, which was...uneven and rather idiosyncratic, to say the least. That's two down (Copyright was last week), with two to go. However, the other two are just papers.

The paper for my Socratic Jurisprudence class deals with Nietzsche's figure of Socrates, in which I argue that Socrates (equipped with his infamous Socratic method, and his all too clever gimmick, "the unexamined life is not worth living") was for Nietzsche the preeminent slave moralist, predisposed to avenge himself against the aristocrats of his day by subordinating their natural virtues of strength, beauty, and power, to the eminently metaphysical notion of a "noble soul." His was a "most spiritual" revenge. Even so, Socrates was for Nietzsche a "genuine philosopher" who was able to create and legislate values, which leads me to believe that Nietzsche's bitter attacks on the great Athenian were in fact the sincerest form of flattery.

My other paper is for my Church and State class. It attempts to make sense of the jurisprudence governing the display of religious symbols on government property, with a particular emphasis on the Ten Commandments cases. I argue that Justice O'Connor's endorsement test, which utilizes a reasonable-observer-plus standard, is for all practical purposes the dispositive test in deciding such cases. Why? Because she's the swing vote. This has the curious effect of supplanting the accommodationist approach followed by a plurality of the Court (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy). That is, the most popular jurisprudential approach is rendered moot by the fortuity of a divided Court.

Fun stuff, all of it.