Ttc Legal

The civil liberties and constitutional rights our nation's citizens possess—not only in theory, but in the courtroom, where the state can be forced to honor those liberties—are a uniquely American invention. And when we were taught history and learned about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, we were always made aware of that uniqueness, of the extraordinary experiment that gave every citizen of this new nation a gift possessed by no others. But what, exactly, was that gift?

If a product or service exists, someone might want to buy it or sell it. And if they do, the vehicle they’ll use is a contract. This makes contract law a fascinating field that is as broad as everything humans do.

Roughly 2,500 years ago, the Athenian people established a radical democracy in which power derived from the votes of ordinary citizens. At a time when local governments ranged from oligarchy to tyranny, the elite classes of Athens gradually ceded power to the inexperienced masses, whose votes served as referendums for everything from taxation to war to welfare. The sequence of events that led to this development is astonishing, and the society that flourished under Athenian democracy is one of the greatest—even if greatly flawed—achievements in world history.

The ancient Greeks, more than any other early people or culture, have given us the template for Western civilization. An amazing number of the cultural, civic, and intellectual institutions that we take for granted in today’s world were first fleshed out by the Greeks, including phenomenal achievements in the fields of political theory, law, philosophy, science, and art. ancient Greece was the birthplace of drama, as well as democracy.

Confucius. Buddha. Jesus. Muhammad. Four extraordinary sages who influenced world civilization more deeply than any other human beings in history. As just one measure of their importance, current rankings of the most influential people in history consistently put them at or near the top of the list. Four centuries after the rise of the scientific worldview, their influence in human affairs continues to be fundamental, underscoring issues ranging from questions of ethics and justice to religious and political conflicts to other issues that dominate today's headlines.

Western philosophy is a vast intellectual tradition, the product of thousands of years of revolutionary thought built up by a rich collection of brilliant minds. When most of us study philosophy, we're focusing only on the Western intellectual tradition brought about by people such as Aristotle, Descartes, and Nietzsche. But to understand the Western intellectual tradition is to only get half of the story.