- UID
- 733811
- 在线时间
- 小时
- 注册时间
- 2012-3-9
- 最后登录
- 1970-1-1
- 主题
- 帖子
- 性别
- 保密
|
Ha! It is my first day, so any suggestion is welcomed.
The speed part is funny story about love, hope you guys enjoy it; and the second part is really hard, I have read twice but still not sound understand.
[Speed]
[Time 1]
We present the short story "The Lady, or the Tiger?" by Frank R. Stockton. Here is Barbara Klein with the story.
BARBARA KLEIN: Long ago, in the very olden time, there lived a powerful king. Some of his ideas were progressive. But others caused people to suffer. One of the king's ideas was a public arena as an agent of poetic justice. Crime was punished, or innocence was decided, by the result of chance. When a person was accused of a crime, his future would be judged in the public arena.
All the people would gather in this building. The king sat high up on his ceremonial chair. He gave a sign. A door under him opened. The accused person stepped out into the arena. Directly opposite the king were two doors. They were side by side, exactly alike. The person on trial had to walk directly to these doors and open one of them. He could open whichever door he pleased. If the accused man opened one door, out came a hungry tiger, the fiercest in the land. The tiger immediately jumped on him and tore him to pieces as punishment for his guilt. The case of the suspect was thus decided.
[203]
[Time 2]
Iron bells rang sadly. Great cries went up from the paid mourners. And the people, with heads hanging low and sad hearts, slowly made their way home. They mourned greatly that one so young and fair, or so old and respected, should have died this way.
But, if the accused opened the other door, there came forth from it a woman, chosen especially for the person. To this lady he was immediately married, in honor of his innocence. It was not a problem that he might already have a wife and family, or that he might have chosen to marry another woman. The king permitted nothing to interfere with his great method of punishment and reward.
Another door opened under the king, and a clergyman, singers, dancers and musicians joined the man and the lady. The marriage ceremony was quickly completed. Then the bells made cheerful noises. The people shouted happily. And the innocent man led the new wife to his home, following children who threw flowers on their path.
This was the king's method of carrying out justice. Its fairness appeared perfect. The accused person could not know which door was hiding the lady. He opened either as he pleased, without having knowing whether, in the next minute, he was to be killed or married.
[216]
[Time 3]
Sometimes the fierce animal came out of one door. Sometimes it came out of the other.
This method was a popular one. When the people gathered together on one of the great trial days, they never knew whether they would see a bloody killing or a happy ending. So everyone was always interested. And the thinking part of the community would bring no charge of unfairness against this plan. Did not the accused person have the whole matter in his own hands?
The king had a beautiful daughter who was like him in many ways. He loved her above all humanity. The princess secretly loved a young man who was the best-looking and bravest in the land. But he was a commoner, not part of an important family.
One day, the king discovered the relationship between his daughter and the young man. The man was immediately put in prison. A day was set for his trial in the king's public arena. This, of course, was an especially important event. Never before had a common subject been brave enough to love the daughter of the king. The king knew that the young man would be punished, even if he opened the right door. And the king would take pleasure in watching the series of events, which would judge whether or not the man had done wrong in loving the princess.
[229]
[Time 4]
The day of the trial arrived. From far and near the people gathered in the arena and outside its walls. The king and his advisers were in their places, opposite the two doors. All was ready. The sign was given. The door under the king opened and the lover of the princess entered the arena.
Tall, beautiful and fair, his appearance was met with a sound of approval and tension. Half the people had not known so perfect a young man lived among them. No wonder the princess loved him! What a terrible thing for him to be there! As the young man entered the public arena, he turned to bend to the king. But he did not at all think of the great ruler. The young man's eyes instead were fixed on the princess, who sat to the right of her father.
From the day it was decided that the sentence of her lover should be decided in the arena, she had thought of nothing but this event.The princess had more power, influence and force of character than anyone who had ever before been interested in such a case. She had done what no other person had done. She had possessed herself of the secret of the doors. She knew behind which door stood the tiger, and behind which waited the lady. Gold, and the power of a woman's will, had brought the secret to the princess.
[233]
[Time 5]
She also knew who the lady was. The lady was one of the loveliest in the kingdom. Now and then the princess had seen her looking at and talking to the young man.The princess hated the woman behind that silent door. She hated her with all the intensity of the blood passed to her through long lines of cruel ancestors.
Her lover turned to look at the princess. His eye met hers as she sat there, paler and whiter than anyone in the large ocean of tense faces around her. He saw that she knew behind which door waited the tiger, and behind which stood the lady. He had expected her to know it.
The only hope for the young man was based on the success of the princess in discovering this mystery. When he looked at her, he saw that she had been successful, as he knew she would succeed. Then his quick and tense look asked the question: "Which?" It was as clear to her as if he shouted it from where he stood. There was not time to be lost.
The princess raised her hand, and made a short, quick movement toward the right. No one but her lover saw it. Every eye but his was fixed on the man in the arena. He turned, and with a firm and quick step he walked across the empty space. Every heart stopped beating. Every breath was held. Every eye was fixed upon that man. He went to the door on the right and opened it.
[257]
[自由]
Now, the point of the story is this: Did the tiger come out of that door, or did the lady?
The more we think about this question, the harder it is to answer. It involves a study of the human heart. Think of it not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself. But as if it depended upon that hot-blooded princess, her soul at a white heat under the fires of sadness and jealousy. She had lost him, but who should have him?
How often, in her waking hours and in her dreams, had she started in wild terror, and covered her face with her hands? She thought of her lover opening the door on the other side of which waited the sharp teeth of the tiger!
But how much oftener had she seen him open the other door? How had she ground her teeth, and torn her hair, when she had seen his happy face as he opened the door of the lady! How her soul had burned in pain when she had seen him run to meet that woman, with her look of victory. When she had seen the two of them get married. And when she had seen them walk away together upon their path of flowers, followed by the happy shouts of the crowd, in which her one sad cry was lost!
Would it not be better for him to die quickly, and go to wait for her in that blessed place of the future? And yet, that tiger, those cries, that blood! Her decision had been shown quickly. But it had been made after days and nights of thought. She had known she would be asked. And she had decided what she would answer. And she had moved her hand to the right.
The question of her decision is one not to be lightly considered. And it is not for me to set myself up as the one person able to answer it. And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the open door – the lady, or the tiger?
[352]
[Obstacle]
The Undead Constitution
In what might be regarded as his standard “stump” speech, Justice Scalia has repeatedly championed what he calls the “dead Constitution.” The bon mot was and remains a good laugh line, but it has become increasingly inappropriate over the course of the quarter century during which Justice Scalia has been delivering it. When he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986, dead constitutionalism, that is to say, originalism, was still a mostly insurgent position within constitutional theory. Since then, and in no small part thanks to Justice Scalia’s own influence, originalism has become a leading approach to constitutional interpretation.
Meanwhile, originalism’s supposed archenemy, the living Constitution, has never been much more than a placeholder. As Professor David Strauss observes, “the critics of the idea of a living constitution,” that is to say, originalists, “have pressed their arguments so forcefully that, among people who write about constitutional law, the term ‘living constitution’ is hardly ever used, except derisively.”
Enter Strauss and another distinguished constitutional scholar, Professor Jack Balkin, to revive and redeem the living Constitution — to convert it from a term of derision into a proud banner, much in the way that the LGBTQ rights movement successfully appropriated the term “queer” from the bigots who meant it as an insult. In their respective books, Strauss and Balkin argue that the living Constitution, not the dead one, validates what is best in our constitutional tradition.
Strauss and Balkin address somewhat different audiences. Both Strauss and Balkin write lucid prose that should be comprehensible and enlightening to an interested layperson, but Strauss will likely reach a wider audience, whereas Balkin will likely have more influence within the academy. Strauss’s short book contains no citations and speaks to the general public. Balkin’s much longer book is deliberately more scholarly.
Despite uniting under the banner of the living Constitution, Strauss and Balkin offer different theories of what the living Constitution is and why the People should give it their allegiance. Strauss offers a descriptive account of constitutional law in which the Supreme Court uses the common law method to interpret and adapt the Constitution to changing times. He also thinks, as a normative matter, that the common law method itself confers legitimacy on the Court’s decisions. By contrast, Balkin places greater emphasis on popular movements. He argues that the Constitution’s legitimacy derives from a historical process of continual popular commitment to see in the Constitution the possibility of redeeming the document’s own promises of a more just society.
In embracing the originalist label, Balkin aims to accomplish a kind of intellectual jujitsu, turning a theory that was engineered largely by political conservatives toward liberal ends. If originalism can validate a constitutional right to abortion, as Balkin’s version of originalism does, then liberals need not fear originalism, and conservatives who seek to undermine the legacy of the Warren and Burger Courts must go back to the drawing board.
Despite its pretensions of objectivity and determinacy, the real strength of conventional originalism was always the way in which it seemingly derived its theory of interpretation from a straightforward and intuitively appealing theory of legitimacy: because acts of constitutional lawmaking were needed to make the Constitution into law, its words should be interpreted in accordance with the meanings those words had when they became law.
Popular acceptance can make the Constitution a useful focal point for settling otherwise fractious questions; it can provide what Strauss calls “common ground.” Yet the focal-point account of the Constitution does not fully capture the role the Constitution plays in American life. Balkin offers a bridge between the brute fact of popular acceptance, to which Hart’s theory and Strauss’s focal-point view would direct us, and a vision of “constitutional patriotism” that better fits Americans’ long-term attitudes toward our Constitution.
What would a truly living Constitution look like? This Review does not offer an affirmative theory in detail, but it gestures toward a synthesis of Strauss’s and Balkin’s visions. As Balkin argues, social and political movements build the meaning of the Constitution over time, but contrary to Balkin’s claims, they pay barely any attention to constitutional text, much less to original meaning. The views of these movements necessarily influence judges and Justices who are drawn from the larger society and appointed through a political process, but because they are judges, they use legal tools — especially the common law method emphasized by Strauss — to sort among those social and political changes that can be reconciled with the constitutional text and those that cannot.
In the end, the democratic legitimacy of judicial review comes from nothing grander than the fact that what the People more or less willingly accept when they accept the Constitution’s legitimacy is an ongoing legal tradition that includes judicial review. The result is the highly imperfect system with which we are familiar. It is unrealistic to expect anything better. Even a living Constitution will not be a perfect one.
[821 words] |
|
京公网安备11010202008513号 京ICP证101109号 京ICP备12012021号
发表于 2012-8-18 22:57:10
收藏
收藏
love this name