Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Why Do I Feel Calm?

After looking at my title, one might assume that I have a completely lackadaisical attitude to my upcoming midterm tomorrow, but they would have completely misinterpreted what I meant by that. What I mean to say is, while many of my classmates are cramming and in a complete panic mode, I feel calm and confident heading into tomorrow’s test. Not to say that I won’t be studying, I’ve already finished a study guide handed out to us by our TAs, but I feel more prepared then I would’ve expected to be for a test only a week and a half into the course.


But test feelings aside, today was another long but informative day in Freedom and Justice. I wasn’t looking forward to the first day of class after a three-day weekend, and those feelings were increased when I realized our day would run two hours longer than usual, because of a double lecture by Kramnick. Over the 4th of July weekend, which celebrates our country’s independence, or freedom, we read writings by John Locke, whose topic of choice was ironically, freedom. Locke had many fascinating points, and is still greatly influential today (as Professor Kramnick said, Locke started the basic ideas of Liberalism and individualism. After we broke into discussion sections in which we prepared for the upcoming exam, it was time for our guest lecture of the day, from attorney Ray Schlather. He spoke about some very interesting teen rights cases, and did a little exercise with the class showing just how few Americans actually ever exercised their 4th and 5th amendments. After his entertaining stories, it was back to a 2 hour lecture by Kramnick, which really just covered Locke’s main point, that all should be able to have property that they had made or worked on.

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