Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Timely Read

When Gödel was asked by Judge Philip Forman –as I read Palle Yourgrau’s book “A World Without Time” -if a dictatorship such as the one that flourished in Germany could arise in the US? Gödel spiritedly reply with an affirmative. The reason being that according to his “incompleteness theory” in mathematics it will apply to law in the sense that any legal code couldn’t –even if intended to be fully explicit and complete- cover the whole set of situations that could eventually arise.
Today we face a situation if we try to reconstruct the constitution by looking at the letter of the law and forget to look for the spirit of the law.