Publication Date
5-2000
Document Type
Front Matter
Abstract
On the western front, English, French, and German soldiers spent nights knee deep in water and sewage and disease and the stench of comrades' deaths, all the while lobbing ordnance at each other across a frontier that, at its narrowest, stretched no more than a few yards. Dead replaced dead replaced dead ad infinitum in fetid trenches. Imperial Germany was on the move; western Europe was exploding. In the east, Russia began allied with the West and ended drenched in its own bloodshed-Bolsheviks versus Menscheviks, Reds versus Whites. Russians fought their own battles of ethnic cleansing, then described (euphemistically, in my opinion) as the Russian Revolution. The Reds were on the move; eastern Europe was imploding. And then the Yanks went marchin' in! Over hill over dale! Or something. You get the picture; we were our very own heros. ...
No one whose career began after the Civil War and ended before World War II could have imagined the technological developments the twentieth century would bring. Imagine telling high school graduates in 1919 that, before they died of old age, human beings would walk on the moon or fax a document to Sri Lanka in real time. Fax? And yet Justice Holmes' prescience about the need to trade ideas freely has never been clearer, and his understanding about the dangers posed by those who "have no doubt of [their] premises or ... power" remains as vital today as it did over eighty years ago. This Symposium is dedicated to the discussion of these ideas.
Recommended Citation
Blumoff, Theodore Y.
(2000)
"Introduction,"
Mercer Law Review: Vol. 51:
No.
3, Article 2.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.law.mercer.edu/jour_mlr/vol51/iss3/2