【每日阅读训练第三期——速度越障1系列】【1-13】文史哲

shelvey

今天速度继续前几天的克林顿总统秀~~~越障是来自关于法律的文章，字数比较多，不过文章脉络很清晰的！！

速度

American History: President Clinton's Legal Problems

速度一【290】
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.

This week in our series, we continue the story of America's forty-second president, Bill Clinton. He was a popular and successful president who was re-elected in nineteen ninety-six. But he also became only the second president in American history ever to be put on trial in Congress.

(MUSIC)

Clinton's past in Arkansas became the source of accusations and questions about his character as he was running for president. These included questions about financial dealings with a land development company called Whitewater.

In January of nineteen ninety-four, President Clinton asked Attorney General Janet Reno to appoint an independent lawyer to lead an investigation. She named a Republican, but some critics said her choice was too friendly to the Clinton administration. He was replaced by another Republican, Kenneth Starr.

In nineteen ninety-five the Senate Judiciary Committee began its own investigation of the president. The committee later reported that it had not found evidence of any crimes. However, because the committee was led by Democrats, there was continuing suspicion of the president among Republicans.

The main cause of that suspicion dated back to a purchase of land in Arkansas years earlier. Bill and Hillary Clinton had bought the land in nineteen seventy eight -- the year he was first elected governor of that state. The Clintons formed the Whitewater Development Company with Susan and James McDougal. The goal was to sell vacation homes along a river. However, the company did poorly.

James McDougal also owned Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, for which Hillary Clinton did legal work. Madison failed during the nineteen eighties. The McDougals were found guilty of wrongdoing in connection with that failure.

速度二【302】
A former local judge in Little Rock, the state capital, also became part of the story. In nineteen ninety-four David Hale pleaded guilty to charges of cheating the federal government. That case was in connection with a lending company he owned and was not connected to Whitewater. But Hale accused Bill Clinton of having pressured him while governor to loan money to Susan McDougal and other politically influential people. Clinton denied the accusations.

During the president's first term, investigators sought billing records for Hillary Clinton's past legal work for James McDougal. They wanted to know, in connection with the Whitewater investigation, how much time she had spent on that work. The first lady said she could not find the records. Then, in January of nineteen ninety-six, the billing records appeared without explanation in the White House.

That mystery only added to the suspicions of some Americans. Others thought Kenneth Starr was just wasting taxpayer money on his investigation of the Clintons. They felt it was just for political reasons.

The Whitewater investigation became increasingly complex and difficult to follow. In the end, President Clinton was never charged with any wrongdoing in connection with his financial dealings. But his legal problems did not stop there.

(MUSIC)

In nineteen ninety-four, a former Arkansas state employee named Paula Jones sued President Clinton. She brought a civil action accusing him of sexual harassment while governor of Arkansas. In her lawsuit she said he had asked her for sex. A federal judge dismissed her case for lack of evidence.

Paula Jones appealed that ruling. Her lawyers said they wanted to prove that Clinton had a pattern of such behavior with female employees, including while president. They suspected that these included a twenty-one-year-old woman named Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky had worked as an unpaid intern in the White House.

速度三【306】
Kenneth Starr was still investigating the Whitewater case early in nineteen ninety-eight. He received permission to include Lewinsky in his investigation.

MONICA LEWINSKY: "Hi.

LINDA TRIPP: "How'd you know it was me?"

MONICA LEWINSKY: "I have Caller ID."

LINDA TRIPP: "What's it say?"

MONICA LEWINSKY: "Linda Tripp."

A former friend of Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, had given Starr tape recordings of her telephone conversations with the younger woman.

MONICA LEWINSKY: "I hate him."

LINDA TRIPP: "No you don't."

MONICA LEWINSKY: "I do."

LINDA TRIPP: "You hate his behavior, at times."

In the recordings, Lewinsky talked about her relationship with the president. What she told her Linda Tripp conflicted with the information she gave to lawyers for Paula Jones. She had told them that the relationship had not been sexual.

Lawyers for Paula Jones also questioned President Clinton. He too denied that the relationship with Monica Lewinsky had been sexual. On January twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-eight, the president stated his denial to the American public.

BILL CLINTON: "But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie. Not a single time. Never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people."

Later in the year, the president agreed to answer questions before a federal grand jury.

BILL CLINTON: "The opening statement I made is that I had inappropriate intimate contact. I take full responsibility for it. It wasn't her fault; it was mine. I do not believe that I violated the definition of sexual relations I was given by directly touching those parts of her body with the intent to arouse or gratify. And that's all I have to say."

速度四【289】
This was the first time an investigating jury had ever called a president to testify while in office.

(MUSIC)

BILL CLINTON: "This afternoon, in this room, from this chair, I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel and the grand jury. I answered their questions truthfully, including questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.

"Still, I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight."

After his appearance, the president went on national television and admitted the nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He said his actions were a personal failure, but he denied trying to get her to lie about the relationship.

BILL CLINTON: "As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information. Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong."

He said his actions were a personal failure. But he denied trying to get her to lie about the relationship.

BILL CLINTON: "But I told the grand jury today and I say to you now that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence or to take any other unlawful action. I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that."

(MUSIC)

Kenneth Starr sent his final report to the House of Representatives. The report suggested that President Clinton may have committed impeachable crimes in trying to hide his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

速度五【293】
In the United States, to impeach a president means to bring charges in the House of Representatives. The charges result in removal from office if the president is found guilty in a trial in the Senate. The chief justice of the United States serves as the judge and the senators serve as the jury.

(MUSIC)

In December of nineteen ninety-eight, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Clinton. The House sent the charges to the Senate to hold a trial. The two articles of impeachment accused him of lying to a federal grand jury and obstructing justice.

Only one other president had ever been impeached. In eighteen sixty-eight, the House of Representatives brought charges against Andrew Johnson. The case related to his removal of a cabinet member. The Senate held a trial, but Andrew Johnson's presidency survived by one vote.

The threat of impeachment led President Richard Nixon to resign in nineteen seventy-four over his cover-up of political wrongdoing in the Watergate case.

BILL CLINTON: "It is up to the members of the House of Representatives to vote their conscience on the Constitution and the law, which I believe are clear. And I have no intention of resigning. It's never crossed my mind."

Bill Clinton still had two years left as president. In public opinion surveys, two-thirds of the people said they opposed removing him from office.

BILL CLINTON: "What I want the American people to know, what I want the Congress to know, is that I am profoundly sorry for all I have done wrong in words and deeds.

"I never should have misled the country, the Congress, my friends, or my family. Quite simply, I gave in to my shame. I have been condemned by my accusers with harsh words.

自由阅读【288】
"And while it's hard to hear yourself called deceitful and manipulative, I remember Ben Franklin's admonition that our critics are our friends, for they do show us our faults."

The Senate decided President Clinton's future in February of nineteen ninety-nine. The one hundred senators held a trial to consider the charges and decide if he should be removed from office. Each charge required sixty-seven votes to find him guilty.

(MUSIC)

Ten members of the Republican majority joined Democrats in voting to clear Clinton of the perjury charge. The Senate was evenly divided on the charge of interfering with justice. Thus, no guilty verdict.

Bill Clinton remained president of the United States.

As a historical footnote, as it turned out, Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich was himself cheating on his wife while leading the impeachment action against President Clinton. The difference, Gingrich would say years later, was that Clinton was charged with lying after he legally swore to tell the truth.

(MUSIC)

In October nineteen ninety-nine, Kenneth Starr resigned as the independent counsel. An assistant, Robert Ray, completed a final report on the Whitewater investigation. He issued his report in September two thousand. The report said there was not enough evidence to prove any wrongdoing by Bill or Hillary Clinton.

(MUSIC)

The Clinton presidency covered much of the decade of the nineteen- nineties. The American cultural and social landscape of the nineties will be our story next week.

You can find our series online with transcripts, MP3s, podcasts and pictures at 51voa.com. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter at VOA Learning English. I'm Steve Ember, inviting you to join us again next week for THE MAKING OF A NATION -- American history in VOA Special English.



越障

“I Couldn’t See It Until I Believed It”: Some Notes on Motivated Reasoning in Constitutional Adjudication

I. Introduction

It is commonplace, though controversial, in the philosophy of science to note that all observation is theory-laden. You can't see something until you believe it — that is, until you have some background account — a theory — about how to understand the messages your neurons are sending to and in your brain. If in science with its commitment to intersubjective objectivity, surely even more so in the normatively freighted field of law in a morally pluralistic society.

This Comment suggests that Professor Dan Kahan's provocative Foreword might benefit from reflection on the commitment to science it exhibits. Motivated reasoning may be at work in the Foreword as well — not reasoning from cultural premises to legal conclusions, but reasoning from a background theory of science as a good explanans for law in general to conclusions about the structure of legal reasoning as displayed in Supreme Court opinions. A related form of reflection suggests that Kahan's route out of the problems he diagnoses might be unavailable in practice. To put it somewhat more sharply than I will as I develop the argument, his target audience — the Justices of the Supreme Court — might see his proposal for a new style of opinion-writing as itself motivated by cultural predispositions, packaged as science for merely strategic reasons. One response might be to shift the target audience from today's Justices to tomorrow's, to those who will be selected over the next decades. Then, though, we would need some institutional and political account of how the selection processes, by Presidents and Senates, that have produced the Justices we now have, might be changed to produce the kind of Justice who would find Kahan's prescriptions appealing — and so produce a different kind of Justice.

I think there is a rather deep tension between the form and substance of Kahan's argument. In form it presents itself as an argument by a detached observer, noting how different cultural commitments affect the way each Justice assesses the cases the Court decides. Its substance is the claim that motivated reasoning is pervasive and arises from cultural commitments. The question naturally presents itself: from what position is Kahan able to stand such that he is a detached observer?

The light cast by the intellectual history of U.S. legal scholarship suggests an answer. Kahan writes in the Progressive branch of the legal realist tradition. That branch accepted Progressivism's deep commitment to science and technical expertise to address — and solve — society's problems.3Kahan's argument is legal realist in its invocation of social-scientific knowledge as the basis for understanding what courts do in fact, to use Holmes's phrase. And, it is Progressive in its belief that social-scientific knowledge will provide guidance for the resolution of normative difficulties, here, normative difficulties associated with the way in which Justices write opinions. But, of course, Progressivism was more than an intellectual program. It had political commitments as well, to roughly liberal solutions to normative issues of public policy.

In this light Kahan's is a partisan intervention not different in kind from the opinions he discusses. Though I am not nearly as deeply immersed in the scholarship on cultural cognition as Kahan, it is clear to me that the commitment to social-scientific knowledge the Foreword exhibits is itself one component of one of the cultural complexes that scholarship has identified. As Kahan observes, those with a hierarchical and individualistic culture seem to tend to be climate-change skeptics, and I suspect are skeptical about purportedly scientific claims more generally. If so, I think it quite unlikely that hierarchical individualists would be shaken from their views by Kahan's social-scientific claims. Again, to put it a bit more sharply than is justified, we are quite unlikely to observe anything more than superficial invocations of science by judicial conservatives. Put another way, the stance of detached scientific observer is one taken by a partisan — as indeed Kahan's analytic framework requires.

Seen in that way, Kahan's Foreword offers just one of many possible ways of thinking about the Court — within his framework, a social-scientific way associated with a particular cultural world view. I note that we need not take his framework as the only one available. Again, attention to the history of U.S. legal thought suggests a number of possible responses to the social-scientific turn: pure normativity or skepticism all the way down, for example.

II. Changing the Court's Style

I turn now to a more particularized discussion consistent with these relatively general observations about Kahan's enterprise. Kahan suggests that a different style of opinion writing might alleviate some of the difficulties associated with motivated reasoning. Opinions should acknowledge openly that there are competing perspectives that would lead to different results, and that those perspectives, while rejected by the majority, have the same kind of integrity the majority's opinion does. As an example, Kahan uses the majority's concession in District of Columbia v. Heller that the recognition of an individual right to bear arms does not threaten many long-standing regulations of gun possession and use. The example is more complex than Kahan indicates.

As is well-known, the main line of analysis in Heller was thoroughly originalist. Seeking to determine the original public meaning of the Second Amendment's words, Justice Scalia looked at contemporaneous discussions of those words and concluded that a reasonable and reasonably well-informed person of the 1790s reading those words would conclude that they guaranteed an individual right. Justice Stevens mined the same sources and concluded that such a person would conclude that they guaranteed only a right related to membership in an organized militia. Strikingly, both opinions are written in a tone of certainty about what the historical record reveals, and indeed a reader could reasonably conclude that Justices Scalia and Stevens each presented the other as incompetent in reading the sources, or — as Kahan would say — as motivated to read the sources as they did because of their cultural predispositions.

Suppose, though, that the sources really are divided. Having done my own review, I think that the evidence is something like a sixty percent to forty percent preponderance for the individual-right view. Neither opinion in Heller is written in a way that acknowledges this possibility. Rather, both opinions follow advice attributed to Justice Louis Brandeis: "[T]he difficulty with this place is that if you're only fifty-five percent convinced of a proposition, you have to act and vote as if you were one hundred percent convinced." This is a prescription for the kind of cultural conflict Kahan seeks to transcend, a prescription filled in Heller's core analysis.

So, one part of Heller reinscribes cultural conflict. Does the savings paragraph open up a different possibility? Not necessarily. Much depends on how the Court proposes to defend the wide range of existing regulations it says it is not questioning. Kahan might be right if the Court were to say that a regulation could be justified by showing that the public-safety benefits it provides outweigh the restrictions it places on the individual right to keep weapons for self-protection. Yet, the textual evidence in Heller points away from this sort of functional inquiry. Justice Scalia's opinion indicates, though it does not quite say in detail, that the relevant inquiry is going to be whether a particular regulation is sufficiently similar to long-standing regulations, especially of course those in place when the Second Amendment (or the Fourteenth Amendment, for state-adopted regulations) was ratified, to fall within a historically defined category of regulations outside the Amendment's scope. That inquiry, though, may well yield the same "sixty-forty" results about the evidence and the same "one hundred percent" results in opinion writing.

III. Changing the Justices

Justice Brandeis referred to an institutional culture of "this place." Presumably, then, Kahan hopes for a change in that culture. Yet, it is unclear to me how the change is to come about. On his account, the Justices in place already have the cultural predispositions that motivate their reasoning. Perhaps merely talking to them about the phenomenon will lead them to reflect on and then change their practice. But, they will hear Kahan's advice about opinion writing through the filters of their cultural predispositions. And, as he emphasizes, one effect of motivated reasoning is suspicion of those who reach different conclusions. So, I would think, the Justices would treat Kahan's suggestions as themselves motivated by cultural predispositions they — or at least some of them — do not share.

Another possibility is that a Justice might take a small step in offering a Kahan-like opinion that leaves things open and that, through its rhetoric, exhibits a seemingly genuine openness to the possibility that the other side might have something to be said for it. Another Justice might then reciprocate, and the small steps might accumulate and eventually transform the culture of "this place." Nothing is impossible, of course, but I must note my skepticism about the proposition that the Justices currently on the Court will find it worthwhile to engage in this behavior.

One way out of this difficulty is to change the Justices — not to change the minds of those already in the position, but to change the kind of person who is chosen as a Justice. As those who accept Kahan's diagnosis and prescription come to staff the Supreme Court, the Court's institutional culture will change. Formally, this is well and good, but of course it says nothing about how the change in the selection process will come about. Presidents nominate Justices, and the Senate confirms or rejects those nominations, for political reasons. To change the selections we would need to change the politics. I am all in favor of doing so, but at present I do not see even glimmerings of the kind of transformation we would need.

IV. Conclusion

In the end I return to Kahan's attraction to a science-based analysis of the Supreme Court. As I have suggested, I hear in his work the sounds of an earlier era, the era when Progressives believed that scientific expertise could be called upon to resolve normative questions that divided the nation. Committed to the idea that there was a public interest that transcended the interests of any group within society, the Progressives succeeded for a while, and a revived "progressivism" of science and expertise might succeed as well. But Progressivism collapsed some time in the middle of the last century. It did so partly for political reasons: its successes generated a new kind of pluralist, interest-group politics in which the beneficiaries of Progressive innovations used politics to defend their turf. In one sense Kahan's analysis of cultural cognition attempts to retrieve the ground of science by taking pluralist politics into account. But, Progressivism in law collapsed for intellectual reasons as well: the Progressive view of science was imperialist and utopian. Technical specialists would replace political decisionmakers across the entire range of public policy, from ratemaking in economic regulation to rehabilitation in the criminal justice system and beyond. The specialists were discredited when they failed to pay off on their largest claims. I wonder whether Kahan's position might also be vulnerable to the latter objection.

shelvey

我对不起你们啊！！！刚发上来，学校就断电断网了，格式还没调整，今天就委屈大家了……明早起来改格式……

泾渭不凡

phoebe0624

速度
1‘13
1’34
1‘11
1’04
1‘06
1’30

chloegrant

1‘33
1’37
1‘30
1’22
1‘23
1’23

越障明天继续

kaitlynyl

速度：第一段走神了没看完，其余按时完成。
越障：说实话这么多天的越障，我头一次看了三回，才大概知道了个框架。。。讲了作者说，看到这个K的观点，才知道开始不相信，从分析，到改变什么justice，才慢慢相信他的观点。最后还总结了一下，态度是大正小负。至于K的观点，开始做了个介绍，压根没看懂在说什么，中间还有了个K。好像是说，跟法院还是法律有关的，然后又扯到科学上了，主要围绕一个culture-predisposition的东西在说观点，这个词也不认识。看后面很邻家童鞋写的，才觉得自己好悲剧。能记住观点呢，我都看不进去。
要是有中文就好了。希望能多出出这种文章。因为我发现，GMAT OG12第8篇还有水权的那篇，也类似这种的，也是看不进，怎么都看不进去，感觉那个第8篇还比这个简单些。虽然这个能抓出框架，但是着实还是不知道在说神马。哎，这种文章看来要多练了。感谢楼主啊，发现弱点了。明天把这篇再看一遍。分析一下。

harryhenry

1‘36
1’11
1‘36
1’11
1’26

10‘25
越障没怎么看明白 果然文史哲是我的短板啊

fox0923

已经很感激了~~谢谢啦~~

1'15"
1'40"
1'18"
1'12"
1'31"
自由
1'05"

越障太恐怖了，看了半天没看懂~就记得几个小点~~
Introduction: people cannot believe something until they actually see what happen. The court system and belief should be changed as following. Then the author mentions about the Kahan's theory, which is applied to the court adjudication system. The court plays a main role to decide a case based on its culture commitment. Finally, the author praised Kahan's theory, but he also claims that there are some flaws about it.
Change court and change justice: Kahan's theory is to advocate that the openess of discussion and minds, so this would provide the different opinions and results for both parties. Even though one party only has 55% of the confidence of the case, this party should still vote and act as it has 100% confidence of persuasion.  The multiple thinking would bring one of parties to come up with different results? Change justice is to change the person who is choose as a justice, but not to change the court foundation.
Conclusion: The positive evaluation of the Kahan's theory which applied to the court, however, the author also worries if this theory is capable of taking different interests of any groups.
被打败了，彻底的，都不知道自己写的啥~~谁能给讲讲？

Daisy汪

1'59 写的是克里顿的legal problem。。买地，第一个律师，人们觉得他对克林顿太温柔？第二个律师。。。第三个律师。。。最后克林顿force whitewater把地卖给他
1‘40 J觉得自己（帮助克林顿）的行为对不起人民，人们想通过Susan知道克林顿到底对whitewater的investment是多少，但是无从知晓，克林顿手下的一名雇员（女）反映克林顿对她进行骚扰，但是无人相信
1’31 记者通过S的朋友听了一段S和她朋友的对话录像，里面并没有反映克林顿对S的谈话有关sexual，克林顿给出的发言是他并没有对S进行骚扰，之前所有的传闻都是假的。。。一年之后，克林顿再次回答了这个问题，他承认自己当时说的话是不合时宜的，这一切是他的错
1‘17 克林顿对他与M的关系进行了发言，他承认与M有一段关系，但是不承认自己通过lie的方式得到这段关系，并对自己的沉默造成的影响进行道歉，同时对自己的妻子道歉
1’24 impeach克林顿，历史上只有一位总统被impeach——A，最后A以一票险胜了N，克林顿还有两年就将离开总统的职位，他表示他会很怀念这里的一切
1‘09 克林顿对他的妻子的欺骗只是仅仅他个人的行为，不能称之为impeachment，最终克林顿获得了连任

越障9’34
就是写人只有在自己有相关只是背景的时候，才会相信自己看到的。。。后面通过这点解释说明了L作为一个目击证人，写的证词为什么很多人不相信
其他的不记得了

abjure

1:57
2:13
1:54
1:52
1:45

越障直接放弃了。。看了两段，都不知道在说些什么。。。

悲崔了。。

超时阿， 目标控制在1：30 多好阿。