Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Forest says "guilty until proven innocent"

I woke up very tired, I knew yesterday that I was only going to get a little sleep. I persevered though, got dressed and went to breakfast in a timely fashion. The breakfast seems worse and worse each day, the fruit even seems to be getting worse. But I stuck to my daily diet with cereal, juice and a croissant, so it was too bad. From breakfast we headed to class and we knew we were in for a long day. Because we didn’t have class on Monday we had to double our work load today.
We had morning lecture for an hour and a half where Mrs. Kaplan surprised us with a visit. The lecture was focusing on John Locke and his idea of natural law. His natural law focused on individualism and no one is to cause harm to with anyone’s life, liberty or property. Whereas the other philosopher Aquinas’ natural law focused on what is wrong and what is right. He said if you are in true need of something you can steal it, hence violating someone’s property. After the lecture we had discussion groups for about an hour, concerning Locke and basically the things Kramnick discussed in lecture. I got leave lecture about 15 minutes early because today was my day to have lunch with the professor. Lunch with Kramnick was pretty good; we discussed our lives back at home with our family and schools. Also we discussed our future aspirations and goals for life. When I introduced myself he said “oh yes, one of Ramsey’s kids,” I felt this was good that Mr. Ramsey always makes beneficial connections.
After lunch with the professor we had to head back to our lecture hall to hear a guest speaker. His name was Nelson Roth, and he was a lawyer. He discussed a famous case in which a police officer used fingerprinting in a mischievous way. He would either frame people or cover up for one of his friends. Fingerprinting is not an effective method for crime investigation because of all the possible flaws it entails. A point brought up by Mr. Roth was, shouldn’t we be innocent until proven guilty? One of our classmates Forest, lives in Singapore and the law of their land is “guilty until proven innocent.” He said because of this mind set, Singapore has way less crime rate than America. This just seemed a little interesting, and it’s always good to hear different opinions from different people.
After our guest speaker we had about a 10 minute break, and then resumed our second John Locke lecture. This lecture was more interesting because it had more ties to America, not just England. We didn’t get out of class until around 430, so this truly a long day, but oh yes I forgot to mention our Preliminary Exam is tomorrow, so we have a lot of studying to do. I went to office hours today, just to get some insight about the exam, but truthfully it wasn’t that helpful. I feel very well prepared for the exam tomorrow, and look forward to receiving the exam back with a big red A plus at the top of the page!

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