Integral Legal Scholarship

Last week Don Beck sent me a link to a recent article in the prestigious academic journal The Michigan Law Review that applies an integral analysis to recent Supreme Court cases that have addressed morals legislation, such as laws against bigamy or sodomy. This article, entitled: Evolving Objective Standards: A Developmental Approach to Constitutional Review of Morals Legislation, by Christian J. Grostic, can be downloaded here:

http://www.michiganlawreview.org/

I was impressed by the way Grostic used the stages of the spiral of development to identify how the Supreme Court regularly strikes down laws justified only by the morality of traditional consciousness, while upholding laws that can be justified from the moral level of modernist consciousness. This underscores the fact that the Constitution of the U.S. distinctly exemplifies modernist morality, and thus provides a clear standard by which to evaluate the legitimacy of various kinds of State morals legislation. It is on this basis of this modernist moral reasoning that the Court recently struck down a Texas sodomy law.

At the end of the article, Grostic explores the ways in which the Court has also occasionally exhibited the application of postmodern moral standards in its analysis of laws against prostitution. This article is thus a prime example of the power that “the expanded vertical perspective” provided by integral consciousness can bring to an important area of our society such as the decisions of the Supreme Court.

Please click here to make comments or ask questions about this blog.

SM

 

Welcome to SteveMcIntosh.com

This is the first blog entry for the new “Integral Consciousness” website. Although my book will not be released until September, there is already a growing “buzz” about my contributions to the integral worldview. Most of this has come from the series of recent interviews of me done by Carter Phipps of What Is Enlightenment? Magazine. Carter and I have now completed eight of these interviews, but only four of them have been put up so far on the audio section of Magazine’s website (found at: http://www.wie.org/).

In the creation of this new website, I’ve tried to exemplify an “integral aesthetic”—not too postmodern, not too modernist—but rather a “look and feel” that vaguely suggests the harmonization of science and spirit. Obviously, the expression of such an ambitious aesthetic goal is a tall order, but this is a work in process, so I hope you like it so far.

The template of this website has also lent itself to the upgrading of the power point presentation that goes with my fifty-minute talk: Introduction to Integral Consciousness. Eventually, we hope to videotape this talk and put it up on the website.

Anyway, thanks for visiting my blog. Please check back occasionally as I do hope to ad an item of interest on a monthly basis at least. If you’d like to make any comments about this blog, or any other aspect of this site, please click here.

SM