The lack of the capacity to understand and act on [legal] justice problems plays a key role in creating [social] inequalities.

Hanko, sometimes called insho, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures.

Hanko seals are made from materials ranging from plastic to jade and are about the size of a tube of lipstick. The end of each hanko is etched with its owner’s name, usually in the kanji pictorial characters used in Japanese writing. This carved end is then dipped in red cinnabar paste and impressed on a document as a form of identification.

Museum of Nonhumanity calls for the deconstruction of the categories of animality and humanity in order to enter a new, more inclusive era.

… wealth and power did not seem to ease disruptive conflict

The fascinating details of monastic life in medieval Dunhuang as told by their cave-preserved legal documents.

That Buddhism became so ritualistic, excessive, and subservient to the state even along the Silk Road demonstrates how common and impactful state intervention has been to the history of Buddhism.

Besides honesty and truthfulness, the other value that most of the participants mentioned, or described as part of the Buddhist lawyering practice, was compassion. That may surprise some, and it may be especially surprising because the participants who mentioned it practice across many different legal settings

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.

A book about how our trusting and generous nature has been systematically undermined by aggressive policies and its tragic consequences for Sandra Bland and our society as a whole.

I recommend starting with chapter three (available for free here!) and four and then skipping ahead to the last two chapters because the middle chapters are awful and the first couple simply aren’t important. These four chapters (3, 4, 11, and 12) give you all the meat of the book while sparing you some horrific and unnecessary diversions into e.g. pedophilia.

While the monograph exists in written form, I recommend listening to the audiobook. With archival recordings of the original interviews used wherever the book quotes a primary source (or actors where such recordings don’t exist), original music, and narration by, of course, the author himself, the book sounds more like a slick podcast than a scripted robot. Hopefully the future of audiobooks!

The law of sacred centers imagines space from the inside out.

A fascinating meditation on the way modern culture thinks about space and sovereignty and what is lost, even by the state, when local communities are disrupted.

… there will be resistance to giving the thing rights until it can be seen and valued for itself; yet, it is hard to see it and value it for itself until we can bring ourselves to give it rights — which is almost inevitably going to sound inconceivable

On the history, and future, of how we define property and rights.

… the vinaya is nearly as central to the Buddhist religion as the shari’a is to Islam. If we were to rank religions in order of legalism, Theravāda would come at the legalistic end of the scale, near to Islam and far from, for example, Taoism.

The fascinating history of Burmese law demonstrates and explains the relationship between textual conservativism and legal sovereignty in the Theravāda world and the profound effect this had on Buddhist discourse in the region.