Blawg Review: Infamy, Praise, Several Butchers’ Aprons

The new Blawg Review is up at Colin Samuels’ Infamy or Praise. Colin explains the origin of his blog’s name — Dante’s Inferno, which is also the source of the title of one of the most influential books in my life (Inferno probably should have influenced me a little more, actually), Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. The latter reference is to that circle of Hades “Reserved for the souls of the just people who never knew Christ, and those (especially infants) who died without baptism and never committed a sin. Here Dante encounters the ancient philosophers and poets.” Solzhenitsyn analogizes this lot to the zeks, the relatively non-political political prisoners in the Stalinist Gulag system whose residents live a relatively cushy existence in return for doing the bidding, via research and experimentation in their respective fields of specialty, of the system that imprisoned them and did far worse to their friends, family and neighbors.

Yes, does sound like another law blog, doesn’t it?

Ron Coleman