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Whereof One Cannot Speak to an Attorney…

March 18th, 2003 · No Comments

Via Matthew Yglesias, I learn that the judge in the Jose Padilla case has based his decision on Padilla’s right to counsel in part on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The key point is Wittgenstein’s distinction between “interpreting” a rule and merely “grasping” it. Rule following cannot just be a matter of interpretation, he argued, because if so one would need a rule to interpret the rule, and then a rule to interpret that rule, and so on ad infinitum

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