Word: notions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...insanity defense rests on the fundamental notion that man has free will and can choose between good and evil. Conversely, if someone lacks free will because of a mental disorder, then he should not be punished for evil conduct. In colonial America, where more than 200 crimes were punishable by death, this defense often was the only way to spare someone from the gallows. Over the years, the standard became more cumbersome. The M'Naghten rule, devised by the English in 1843, declared that a defendant was not culpable if he "was labouring under such a defect of reason...
...very hard to blame them. Professors who feel they're contributing to scientific progress while making a buck don't like to be told they should stick to University activities. After all, private industry does boast far more advanced equipment than even the richest of universites. The notion of universities spearheading the quest for scientific advance is romantic, but it simply doesn't always happen that way. The 5 per cent of faculty members who choose not to disclose their outside lives--one expert's educated guess of the rate of noncompliance--may just be the ones who forge...
Other board members are much less enthusiastic about gold's powers. Charles Schultze, chief economic adviser to President Carter, thinks that the metal's allure stems from a wishful notion that financial stability can be achieved in a "fixed mechanical way," rather than by "trusting human beings." The danger, says he, is that the gold standard would put policymakers into such a "straitjacket" that they would be unable to respond to changing economic conditions. The result: even greater instability and more frequent bouts of high unemployment. Joseph Pechman, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, agrees...
...hard time for purists, especially traditional Freudians who believe that the psychoanalyst should keep a chilly distance. Free association and the transfer of buried memories to the doctor-patient relationship, they believe, work better in an uncongenial atmosphere. This is not a popular notion especially at a time when people fear being stuffy if they do not establish an immediate first-name relationship with their muggers. Says Aaron Green, the pseudonymous New York analyst whose good-natured fatalism forms the tough core of Malcolm's book: "No one likes to hurt people-to cause them pain, to stand silently...
What the New Right proposes instead, in its pending array of court-hobbling bills, is to substitute its own predilections. But the very notion of such legislation, says University of Southern California Law Professor Leonard Ratner, implies that "Congress could by statute profoundly alter the structure of American Government." If the bills were actually enacted, the traditional balance of power between the three branches of U.S. Government would be put thoroughly askew. The Supreme Court would be supreme no more. The "supremacy clause" of the Constitution, declaring that document to be the prevalent law of the land, would become...