Events

Title: Climate of Uncertainty

Abstract: Caught in the maelstrom of climate breakdown, global pandemic, skyrocketing inequality and proliferating ethno-nationalisms, it is sometimes easy to forget this is not the first time the world has seemed to teeter on a precipice. Half a century ago, in the shadow of nuclear buildup, Hannah Arendt remarked, “to the question how shall we ever be able to extricate ourselves from the obvious insanity of this position, there is no answer”. Then, as now, an apocalyptic sensibility was not confined to Chicken Littles or street-corner preachers, but had become, paradoxically, quite normal.

And yet, even as we are reminded of the naivete of declaring “this time it’s different” the current conjuncture does seem different—and in many ways, whether that is “really” true is a secondary question. Today, after more than two centuries of arrogant triumphalism in the wealthy part of the world, much of the planet seems to be degenerating into what one could be forgiven for calling permanent emergency, the kind of conditions the wealthy and powerful of the world have often visited upon other peoples and places, but have mostly been able to defer at home. The broad narrative of history as told by this “civilization”—a bumpy but generally consistent path called “progress”—does not make much sense any more. If that history has a plot, even the most privileged of us are discovering it might very well be tragic, and we are in a transition during which “adaptation” supplants “progress” as its object.

 I am currently tangled up in the very early stages of a project focused on the sense of concatenated but uncertain calamity, and attempts to come to grips with it. While my “empirical” emphasis has thus far largely been climate oriented, I am interested more broadly in investigating the pasts and presents of uncertainty, and how our anxious efforts to manage it—politically, economically, institutionally and culturally—are destabilized and remade in this precarious moment. Approaches to uncertainty might be able to provide some orientation in these uncertain times. My goal sympathetic but rigorous critique of the effort to tame, diminish or dismiss uncertainty—or worse, to prefer any certainty at all to uncertainty—in a moment when politics and economies all over the planet are falling forward into a future for which the past often does not appear a useful guide. What approaches to the unknowability of what is to come might support collective institutions that make hope seem like a sensible thing to have, without pretending that tomorrow will be like today, or that somehow, everything will turn out all right?

Bio:Geoff Mann is Distinguished Professor of political economy at Simon Fraser University and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. His most recent books are In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution and (with Joel Wainwright) Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, and is currently at work on a book about uncertainty. Geoff was a Guggenheim fellow in 2022-23, and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 2023-24.  He lives on the territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh in Vancouver.

Colloquium Reading: "Climate of Uncertainty" Geoff Mann, (October 2024)

Pre-Seminar Readings:

“Treading on Thin Air” The London Review of Books, vol. 45 no. 17 (September 7, 2023).

“It Was Not Supposed to End This Way” The Boston Review (April 13, 2019)

 Title: Lessons from the ayllu: The Power and Promise of Continuous Political Assembly.

Abstract: In this paper, I will argue that the solution to a crisis in Western leftism, namely how to build a lasting and resilient Left community based on principles of radical participatory democracy, already exists and has for many thousands of years. This is the practice of continuous political assembly whereby ordinary life doubles as a forum in which people can meet together and make collective decisions. In the West, this ability has long been suppressed. When it comes to engaging in revolution, Western leftists organize into local assemblies but they have to start from scratch without building forms of collective knowledge and trust that can only come after a very long time. For this reason, they tend to supplement these assemblies with what I would call "archist" institutions such as parties and unions (archism being a term to refer to the system of hierarchy based capitalism that has dominated the world for the last 500 years). Inevitably these archist structures betray the revolutions that they help to foment. By looking at the case of the ayllu in the Andean Highlands, I show how a one thousand plus year form of continuous assembly has allowed the local communities a tremendous degree of resilience allowing them to survive genocide and colonialism and changing and adapting  to various subsequent threats. At times (such as the Gas and Water wars in the 2000s in Bolivia) it has allowed them to win real victories.  This offers a lesson to would be Western revolutionaries about how best to organize themselves so as to maximize their own chances of a lasting and effective form of self organization in the face of archist power. 

Bio: James Martel teaches political theory in the department of political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author, most recently of Anarchist Prophets: Disappointing Vision and the Power of Collective Sight (Duke, 2022); Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead (Amherst College Press,  2018 and  The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke, 2017). 

Colloquium Reading: The Power and Promise of Continuous Political Assembly: the case of the ayllu

Pre-Seminar Reading: Chapter 5, “Navigating (and Fighting) Archism,” from Anarchist Prophets: Disappointing Vision and the Power of Collective Sight.

Title:

Abstract:

Bio: Jennifer L. Culbert is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. She received her PhD from the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley and taught at Arizona State University as well as at Amherst College before coming to Johns Hopkins University. At JHU, she teaches courses in political theory and law. She has interests in a wide range of subjects, including state violence, jurisprudence, ethics, judgment, aesthetics, and language.

She has written articles and book chapters on revenge, mercy, pain, capital punishment, metaphysics, the philosophy of becoming, and law and literature. She is the author of Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment (Stanford University Press, 2008) and the co-editor, with Austin Sarat, of States of Violence: War, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die (Cambridge University Press, 2009). She is currently writing a book on the philosophy of law inspired by the political thought of Hannah Arendt and her reflections on forms of art.

In 2020-2023, Professor Culbert was the Director for the JHU Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. She is also affiliated with the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (German section) and the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at JHU. She is the Review Editor for the Law, Culture and the Humanities journal. In 2023, she was the Birkbeck School of Law Writer in Residence at Birkbeck, University of London. She has also been a fellow at the Murphy Institute in the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at Tulane University (2008-2009) and a recipient of the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany (2011).

Recent articles:

• “Interrupting the Legal Person: Thinking Responsibility with Hannah Arendt,”Studies in Law, Politics and Society Vol 87, Part A, March 2022

Colloquium Readings:

Supplemental Readings: 

Title:

Abstract:

Bio: Joan McGregor’s current research interests are focused on a number of questions in moral and legal philosophy.

Bioethics and environmental ethics join in research on the moral issues in sustainability. One of the most pressing sustainability questions pertains to modern food systems. Contemporary food systems are complex and multinational, involving workers and consumers from diverse cultures and economies. These systems must be capable of feeding large culturally varied populations without compromising social justice, human health, and the health of the planet.  These questions are multifaceted and require approaches and methods from a variety of disciplines. In order to tackle these challenges, McGregor’s current  project is directing "Just Food," a multi-year, transdisciplinary project designed to research moral and cultural questions related to modern food production and consumption, including the consideration of the unintended consequences of the practices and technologies that we develop in our food systems.

McGregor directed three National Endowment for the Humanities summer institutes on sustainability, “Fierce Green Fire: Aldo Leopold and the Foundations of the Land Ethic” in 2009 and in 2011, “Beyond the Land Ethics: Sustainability and Humanities”, "Extending the Land Ethic."

Colloquium Readings:

Supplemental Readings:

Colloquium Readings:

Supplementary Readings:

Legal Realism and CLS from an LPE Perspective

What is the role of law in political economy? And what is the role of political economy in law? And in both cases, when we speak of “law” and “political economy,” are we speaking of academic disciplines or social realities? This tangle of questions constitutes, I take it, the orienting research agenda of the emerging “law and political economy” movement in legal academia. Questions concerning not so much the interaction as the interrelation of law and political economy, with each of these understood simultaneously as fields of study and areas of social life. And within that agenda the legacy of two prior efforts at grappling with these questions—Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies (CLS)—looms large. This Article seeks to take stock of that legacy, and to advance a critique of central aspects of the received traditions of Realism and CLS, for the sake of developing new foundations for the analysis of both law and political economy.

The best way to understand Legal Realism and CLS, this Article contends, is along two dimensions: (1) the first concerns the critique of legal reasoning; (2) the second the role of law in society. After setting out the central Realist and CLS claims on both these fronts, I offer critiques on each, ones that seek to push further in the same direction as the Realist/Crit views but in ways that ultimately repudiate the premises underlying these views. The main lines of Realism and CLS are, I contend, hostage to formalist premises in legal theory and liberal ones in social theory. This owes to the posture of internal critique that both adopted as their dominant strategy. Yet a central claim of the present Article is that the method of critique is always already a method of construction, both in the critique of law and the critique of political economy. To think the two may be separated is perhaps the fundamental flaw in the dominant strands of Legal Realism and CLS. And so in that vein, the Article offers a set of contrasting ideas for the development of legal, political, and social theory.

Bio

Professor Syed teaches at UC Berkeley Law, and is a graduate of University of Victoria Law School and Harvard University. His research is in law and political economy, with applications to intellectual property, property, torts, antitrust, educational policy, and theories of distributive justice. His present research focuses on three areas: a series of articles on the legal, political, and social theory of a distinctive "law and political economy" approach; a pair of articles on the intersection of antitrust and IP; and a book-in-progress titled Pharmaceutical Innovation Policy--From Patents to Public Utility.

Colloquium Reading:

 Syed, Talha, Legal Realism and CLS from an LPE Perspective

Pre-Seminar Reading:

The pre-seminar is from 1:30 - 2:30, in room 205, Fraser bldg (March 15).

Benkler and Syed, "Reconstructing Class Analysis" 

Supplemental Reading:

Syed, Talha, 2018. "Educational Accommodation as Distributive Equity: the Principle of Proportionate Progress." Connecticut Law Review 50:2 485-560. 

Real Interests, Well-Being, and Ideology Critique

In a common, pejorative sense of it, ideology consists in attitudes whose presence contributes to sustaining, by making them seem legitimate, social orders that are problematic. An important way a social order can be problematic concerns the prospects for well-being facing the people living in it. It can make some people wind up worse off than they could and should be. They have “real interests” that are not properly served by the social order, and the interests aligned with it are in fact “false” or merely “apparent.” Ideology critique notes the existence of such different interests and challenges the latter to facilitate the fulfillment of the former. This picture of ideology critique implies that ideology thwarts well-being This paper aims to clarify, develop, and vindicate this picture. It argues that ideology critique should indeed draw (inter alia) on prudential considerations, and that a specifically objectivist view of well-being would be fitting. The fruitfulness of this approach is shown by exploring the specific case of the critique of working practices in contemporary capitalism, in particular regarding the problem that in them workers’ self-determination, self-realization, and supportive social relationships are stunted rather than unleashed.

Bio

I am a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). I am a native of Argentina. My areas of specialization are social and political philosophy and ethics. Within these areas, my research and teaching interests include topics in social justice and human rights. I am also interested in distributive issues, democratic theory, contractualist theories in normative ethics, the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, Kant’s practical philosophy, and Marxism and socialism. 

Pre-Seminar Reading:

The preseminar is from 1:30 - 2:30, in room 205, Fraser bldg (March 1)

Haslanger, Sally. 2021. “Political Epistemology and Social Critique.” Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 7: 23-65

 Pablo Gilabert “Real Interests, Well-Being, and Ideology Critique”

Trash-Talking Democracy: How Leaders Erode Their Democracies and How to Stop Them 

Abstract

Prime ministers and presidents who aggrandize their powers and erode their democracies use rhetorical strategies to retain popular support. They use polarizing language, vilifying opposing parties, and they denigrate their countries' democratic institutions. This latter strategy, which I call trash-talking democracy, has been little studied but has significant advantages over polarization, from the standpoint of backsliding leaders. It also raises distinct challenges to those who seek to resist democratic erosion: how to bolster confidence in democratic institutions while being forthcoming about their very real shortcomings?

Bio

Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy.

Her research and teaching interests include democratic theory and how democracy functions in developing societies, distributive politics, and comparative political behavior.

Her single and co-authored books include Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (2001), Brokers, Voters, and Clientism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics (2013), and Why Bother? Rethinking Participation in Elections and Protests (2019). 

Pre-Seminar Reading:

The pre-seminar will be held Friday, January 26^th at 1:30pm at the Fraser (Law) Building, Room 205. 

Trash-Talking Democracy: How Leaders Erode Their Democracies and How to Stop Them

Democracy-Friendly Theory of the Rule of Law

Abstract

The dominant way of thinking about the rule of law is that it is a constraint, a limit, on government. On this view the limitation applies with equal necessity to all forms of government, democratic and undemocratic, and to both the executive and the legislative branches. The privileged institution for enforcing those limits is the courts. Democracy and the rule of law are, in effect, portrayed as though they were in opposition to one another.

That, I claim, is a mistake a) historically (for, in the Anglo-American tradition, the rule of law developed first as a restriction on an undemocratic executive, with a less undemocratic Parliament acting in concert with the courts to institute the rule of law); b) in principle (for there is a strong argument that democracy needs the rule of law for its fullest expression, and the rule of law needs democracy); and c) strategically (because it hinders us from mobilizing our full resources to protect both principles; this paper began its life as a response to populist movements, many of which, wrongly, are conceded to be democratic).

In this paper I make that case, especially focusing upon its most controversial claim, namely that the rule of law needs democracy. This paper forms part of a larger project on democratic constitutionalism in which I reconsider key concepts in constitutionalism in a manner that takes democratic decision-making to be fundamental to contemporary constitutionalism.

Reasoning in Character: Virtue, Legal Argumentation and Judicial Ethics

Abstract

This paper develops a virtue-account of legal reasoning which significantly differs from standard, principle-based, theories. A virtue approach to legal reasoning highlights the relevance of the particulars to sound legal decision-making, brings to light the perceptual and affective dimensions of legal judgment, and vindicates the relevance of description and specification to good legal reasoning. After examining the central features of the theory, the paper proposes a taxonomy of the main character traits that legal decision-makers need to possess to successfully engage in legal reasoning. The paper concludes by discussing an array of strategies in legal education, institutional design, and legal culture that can be put in place to work virtue in legal decision-making.

Bio

Professor Amaya works primarily in philosophy of law, with a particular focus on legal reasoning and epistemology, theories of justice, and international normative theory. Her prior work has aimed at analyzing the role of coherence in legal reasoning. The main outcome of this research is the book The Tapestry of Reason (2015). Professor Amaya’s current research project is on law, virtue and character. On this topic, she has co-edited Law, Virtue and Justice (with Ho Hock Lai, 2012), The Faces of Virtue in Law (with Claudio Michelon, 2020) and Virtue, Emotion and Imagination in Legal Reasoning (with Maksymilian del Mar, 2020). She is now working on a book manuscript that seeks to develop a virtue approach to legal reasoning and judicial ethics. She is also interested in exploring the role of exemplarity in contemporary legal and political culture and, especially, its implications for problems concerning the nature of authority at both the domestic and the global level. In addition, she is engaged in research on fraternity as a legal and political ideal, which addresses the conceptual, practical, and institutional dimensions of the idea of fraternity. 

Pre-seminar readings

"The Virtue of Judicial Humility"

"The Relevance of Fraternity"

Seminar reading

"Reasoning in Character"

Solidarity with the oppressed? Challenges of solidarity in contexts of structural injustice

Abstract 

Calls for solidarity with the oppressed are ubiquitous. Institutions have increasingly issued statements of solidarity with the oppressed, and a variety of practices, from signing online petitions to mass social protests, have been characterized as examples of solidarity with the oppressed. This paper has 3 parts, answering the following questions: (1) What does solidarity look like in conditions of structural injustice? Is solidarity in such contexts emancipatory, instrumentally and non-instrumentally valuable? (2) Should we characterize cooperative activity between the privileged and oppressed as solidarity? What are the benefits and pitfalls of doing so? If we try to conceptualize privileged-oppressed cooperation as solidarity, what are the criteria for the privileged to act in solidarity with the oppressed? (3) What makes a solidaristic society? If the correct aim of solidarity is to transform unjust social structures, what makes a solidaristic society distinct from a just society?

Bio

Catherine Lu is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, and Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre, as well as coordinator of the Lin Centre’s Research Group on Global Justice. Her research interests intersect political theory and international relations, focusing on critical and normative theoretical studies of colonial international order, structural injustice, and global justice; alienation and reconciliation;  and cosmopolitanism and the world state. She is the author of articles on these themes, as well as two books: Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which won four book prizes, and Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Pre-Seminar reading

Reconciliation as Non-Alienation

A Taxonomy of Injustice

Abstract

In recent political theory, various arguments have been mounted to suggest that we can perceive or intuit injustice more directly than what is just (and perhaps, more broadly, what is bad as compared to what is good). Call this the asymmetry thesis. This thesis has become increasingly influential. But what kind of injustice? Whose injustice? After some general reflections on the nature of the asymmetry, I offer an initial taxonomy of injustice. Recognizing the diversity of our senses of injustice might well have implications for how we theorize about justice more generally, but might also cast some doubt on the strength of the purported asymmetry itself.

Bio

Duncan Ivison is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Can Liberal States Accommodate Indigenous Peoples? (2020), Rights (2008), Postcolonial Liberalism (2002), and The Self at Liberty (1997). He was previously Head of the School of Humanities (2007-10), Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (2010-2015), and Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) (2015-2022), all at the University of Sydney.

Pre-seminar reading

Ivison, "Pluralising Political Legitimacy"

Seminar reading

Ivison, "A Taxonomy of Injustice" 

World-building, Democracy, and the Limits of Sovereign Mastery

Abstract

What does democracy require of us when it comes to governing land? More fundamentally, what does it mean to be free with regard to land? This talk explores these questions and proposes a geographically-attuned theory of democracy as world-building. To do so, I draw on a set of puzzles and shortcomings in European political theories of land, property, and work. My primary interlocutors are Hannah Arendt, GWF Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Bonnie Honig. Ultimately, I find that these thinkers fail, albeit in illuminating ways, to provide convincing normative foundations for democratic world-building. To ground a robust theory of democracy over land, we will have to turn elsewhere, for example to indigenous theorists and anarchists. Moreover, I find that when it comes to land, it is time to abandon the framework of popular sovereignty that has long guided democratic theory. A truly democratic and participatory theory of land governance must sever any connection with sovereign mastery.

Bio

Anna Jurkevics is a political theorist and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia (PhD Yale 2017). Her research explores theories of land and territory from the vantage point of critical theory and the German tradition. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Contested Territory: A Theory of Land and Democracy Beyond Sovereign Bounds. Her work has appeared in Political Theory, the European Journal of Political Theory, and Modern Intellectual History, among other venues.

Pre-seminar reading

Jurkevics, Land Grabbing and the Perplexities of Territorial Sovereignty 

Seminar reading

Jurkevics, World-Building and Democracy*

*Note: readers may want to skim the sections on Arendt and Hegel to save time.

Inventing Necessity: Law and Revolution in Cold War Africa

Abstract

Law and revolution have shaped modernity, yet their study remains dominated by the writings and concerns of a narrow Western canon. This paper responds to this history by exploring alternative anticolonial writing on the specific problem of the coups d'état across independent Africa in the 1960s. I first set out how British legal scholars framed and analysed the problem of revolutionary legality: if and how judges should rule on the legality of an unconstitutional change of government. I juxtapose this discourse and its assumptions to the heated debate in the pages of Transition, the Kampala-based popular magazine, between Ugandan, Kenyan and Tanzania scholars over these same events. The evolving answer of the loose 'Dar es Salaam school' started from an immanent critique of African postcolonial political economy. The result was a different set of problems that asked what role of judges should play in the broader reconstructive project to decolonise the modern African state characterised by political independence and economic dependence.

Bio

Coel Kirkby joined Sydney Law School in 2018 and is Associate Director of the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence. He was elected the Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge for 2017-18. Before that he was a McKenzie Fellow at Melbourne Law School, an Endeavour Fellow at UNSW, and a researcher at the Dullah Omar Institute in Cape Town, South Africa. He has also worked on contemporary constitutional reform projects from Fiji and Tuvalu to Victoria and South Africa.

Dr Kirkby is both a historian of the legal thought and practice of British imperialism, and a comparative constitutional scholar concerned with its legacies in postcolonial states. He has published a number of articles and chapters in the Modern Law Review, University of Toronto Law Journal, Osgoode Hall Law Journal and elsewhere. Coel is currently completing two books on the birth of liberal democracy in the British Empire over the nineteenth century. He is also working on a new book, The Immanentists, on law and revolution during the Cold War.

Seminar reading

"Inventing Necessity" [DRAFT] 

Seminar: The Razian's Elephant in the Room: When do Interests Give Rise to Rights?

Abstract

Many legal theorists and political philosophers – myself included – rely on Joseph Raz’s version of the interest theory of rights: we use rights-talk when we believe that some person’s interest has sufficient moral importance to justify holding others to be under specific duties to serve that interest. Sometimes the specified duties are purely moral, but often they’re presumptively legal too. When we rely on Raz’s interest theory we tend not to dwell, however, on the fact that we can conceive of the moral importance of interests in different ways which yield different answers to the question of whether those interests generate rights. This paper explores four factors that can alter our assessment of the moral importance of interests. These four factors represent challenges that must be grappled with if we are to draw determinate boundaries around rights generating interests, especially in key areas such as human rights law. First, when assessing the moral importance of an interest, should we take into account whether it is possible to secure that interest? Second, should we consider an interest in isolation from a person’s other interests or in aggregation with some of her other interests, thereby allowing that individually unimportant interests could aggregate to form morally important bundles that generate rights? Third, should we focus on types of interest or on token interests? For instance, in the case of marriage, should we focus on the fact that adults have a type-interest in being able to marry or on the fact that many women (and girls) lack token-interests in being able to marry? Fourth, should we take into account a person’s own perspective on the importance of her different interests? This lecture will unpack these four challenges and consider the pros and cons of possible solutions.

Pre-seminar readings:

Raz, "On the Foundations of Human Rights"

Tasioulas, "Morality of Freedom"

Seminar: Marx Update

Abstract

Marx is a moving target, but so are his readers. And so are his scholarly editors and translators. Regrettably, though, some of his recent biographers and commentators haven’t moved on very much, partly from keeping him the same and playing safe, and partly from the genre-constraints of intellectual biography and textbook-mainstreaming. Moreover some of his ideas go unmarked and uncredited because they have merged with liberal-minded commonsense and taken-for-granted methodologies. In sum he is a complex cultural phenomenon, taking in visual, dramaturgical and cinematic representation.

This talk will cover various ways that Marx has changed, because we – or rather some of us in the scholarly community – have changed. The text for this talk will be in outline form covering topics such as the Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) or Complete Works project and its editorial politics; the shifting canon of ‘great works’ over the last 120 years; ‘Marx and ...’: ecology, the anthropocene, settler societies, Indigeneity and racial capitalism; feminism and the politics of sex, gender and sexuality; democracy, social democracy and socialisms.

But how to read Marx is changing, given his will to interpret the world and to change it. This is because our understanding of his reception through Engels and subsequent Marxisms has critically evolved; because our contextual understanding of what he thought his words were doing is improving; and because our literary and analytical skills have developed very considerably in a multi- and inter-disciplinary way.

It's a fair question what Marx’s words are doing for us, and why we don’t want him to leave us alone.

Bio

Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published very extensively on Marx, Engels and Marxisms, and is co-general-editor (with Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto) of a book series of that name for Palgrave Macmillan. His latest books are Marx in the ‘Classic Thinkers’ series for Polity Press, 2018; Engels Before Marx for Palgrave Macmillan. 2020; and The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30^th Anniversary Edition, for Palgrave Macmillan (2020).

Talk materials

Abstract + Outline

Seminar: When is Democracy Constitutional? On the Relations between Political, Populist and Popular Constitutionalism

Constitutional democrats tend to argue that the constitutional qualities of democracy are derived from a legal constitutional framework that provides the justiciable foundations for and constraints upon the democratic process. Political constitutionalists have disagreed, arguing instead that a democratic process can be understood as embodying constitutional qualities. However, they have, in turn, been subject to two powerful criticisms. On the one hand, liberal minded constitutional democrats have argued that political constitutionalism encourages populist appeals to the tyranny of the majority which can undermine important constitutional checks on democracy necessary to prevent it undermining both itself and the basic rights of citizens. On the other hand, radical and participatory democrats argue political constitutionalism neglects the role of direct forms of democracy as a means for allowing the people themselves to constitute the democratic process via referendums, and to appeal to the constitution through the courts to contest executive actions that serve the few rather than the many. This piece seeks to defend political constitutionalism against both these criticisms.

Richard Bellamy is Professor of Political Science at UCL. His main research interests are in the History of European Social and Political Theory post-1750 and Contemporary Analytical Legal and Political Philosophy. He has written extensively on the history of both Italian political thought and European liberalism, on Pluralism, Compromise and Public Ethics; Constitutionalism, Rights and the Rule of Law; and Citizenship, Representation and Democracy. His books include Liberalism and Pluralism: Towards a Politics of Compromise; Political Constitutionalism and Citizenship: A Very Short Introduction, and A Republican Europe of States: Cosmopolitanism, Intergovernmentalism and Democracy in the EU.

Preseminar readings:

Bellamy, "A European Association of Democratic States"

Bellamy, "Rights as Democracy"

Seminar: “South Asians and West Africans at the Inns of Court: Empire and Expulsion circa 1900”

Description: Between the 1860s and 1950s, thousands of non-European students from across the British empire studied at the Inns of Court in London to become barristers. Using the disbarment files of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, this paper explores the experience of being a colonial lawyer or law student in the British empire at the turn of the twentieth century. It focuses on three disciplinary cases involving South Asians or West Africans: A. K. Ghose and his fraudulent “spirit letters,” anti-imperial revolutionary Shyamji Krishnavarma, and O. R. Aladé following a criminal conviction. These three cases occurred in the relatively early days of the flow of South Asian and West African students to the Inns. They reflected the imperial legal profession’s views of racial difference; truthfulness, deception, good character, and loyalty to British rule; and the definition of terrorism and the legitimacy of using violence to resist tyranny. The paper is part of a larger book project on non-Europeans at the Inns of Court.

Preseminar readings:

Mack, "Representing the Race"

Sharafi, "Introduction" to Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947

Seminar: “Working with Perspectives in Making Sense of Section 35 Jurisprudence”

Professor Gordon Christie is one of Canada’s leading Indigenous scholars. He joined the UBC Faculty of Law in 2004 and held the position of Academic Director of the Indigenous Legal Studies Program at UBC’s Allard School of Law from 2005 to 2016. Professor Christie is of Inupiat/Inuvialuit ancestry. He researches in the areas of Aboriginal rights, Aboriginal title, Indigenous self-determination, and the Crown’s duty to consult and accommodate Indigenous peoples. He especially focuses on the intersection between Indigenous law and Aboriginal law that has developed through Canadian jurisprudence on section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.

Professor Christie holds a BA in Philosophy from Princeton University, an LLB from the University of Victoria, and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught at Lakehead University, Central Michigan University, and Osgoode Hall Law School at York University from 1998 to 2004, where he was the Director of the Intensive Program in Aboriginal Lands, Resources and Governments. This session coincides with the  publication of his new book: Canadian Law and Indigenous Self‐Determination: A Naturalist Analysis (University of Toronto Press). 

Abstract: Explanations of the nature of the jurisprudence on section 35 are wildly divergent, and there appear to be no serious efforts underway to work toward any sort of convergence.  Arguably, much of this phenomenon is the result of the groundings of legal theorists’ work in varied perspectives.  I tackle this problem directly, arguing for a form of methodological naturalism that treats the facts of divergence and perspectivalism as matters to be explored in the social worlds we inhabit.  The result is, I argue, an explanation for what Canadian courts have been doing that makes sense of not just the jurisprudence but of approaches to the jurisprudence evident in the literature.

Pre-Seminar Reading:

Christie, Suppression of Indigenous Understandings of Justice and Morals

Seminar Reading:

Christie, "Differing Understandings and the Way Forward"

Seminar: “Tough Love: The Political Theology of Civil Disobedience"

Alexander Livingston is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research examines race, religion, and dissent with a focus on American political thought. He teaches courses on civil disobedience, theories of democracy, political violence and nonviolence, contemporary political theory, and the history of political thought. 

His first book, Damn Great Empires! William James and the Politics of Pragmatism (Oxford University Press, 2016), examines William James’s role in debates about U.S. imperialism at the turn of the century to show how pragmatism developed as a political response to crises of authority and sovereignty driving the expansion of American global power. His current book project, Inventing Civil Disobedience, looks at the theory and practice of civil disobedience in the long civil rights movement, and their afterlives in contemporary protest politics. Before coming to Cornell, he was a Social Science and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University (2011-2013). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.

Abstract: This article examines the meaning of love in the theory and history of civil disobedience. Taking as its focus Martin Luther King, Jr.’s paradoxical notion of “aggressive love,” it offers a critical interpretation of love as a key concept in a vernacular black political theology, and the consequences of love’s displacement by law in liberal theories of disobedience. The first section contextualizes the origins of aggressive love in an earlier generation of black theologians who looked to India’s anticolonial struggle to reimagine the dignity of the oppressed as “creative survival.” The second contextualizes King’s early sermons on moral injury, self-respect, and personalism within this tradition to reinterpret Stride toward Freedom’s account of nonviolent resistance as love’s triumph over fear. The third considers this political theology’s implications for conceptualizing the moral psychology of the white citizen, and its consequences for contemporary debates over protest and the ideological uses of Civil Rights history. Responding to oppression with aggressive love illustrates a paradoxical character of civil disobedience obscured by both legal theories and criticisms of the very idea of “civil” disobedience. This is the paradox of affirming civility while enacting disobedience in order to bind political confrontation with political pedagogy.

Pre-Seminar reading:

Livingston, “Tough Love”

Seminar: Being a Slave of the Community: Race, Domination, and Republicanism

Professor Rogers has wide-ranging interests located largely within contemporary democratic theory and the history of American and African-American political and ethical philosophy. His first book, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy, explored these issues through an interpretation of John Dewey's writings and the theme of human responsiveness central to his work. That book was haunted by the unpursued theme of racial injustice and its place in American democracy. Professor Rogers' second book--The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought--will be devoted to figures within American and African-American political thought; it will combine close readings of figures and historical contextualization to think through the themes of democratic responsiveness, redemption, and faith amid racial injustice.

In addition to his past published book and current book project, he has edited John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, is at work on African American Political Thought: A Collected History  (under contract: University of Chicago Press), a collection of 32 essays on figures in the tradition of African American political thought co-edited with Jack Turner, as well as a new edited project tentatively titled Race and the Imagination. His articles appear in major academic journals as well as popular venues such as Dissent, the Atlantic, Public Seminar, and Boston Review.

In addition to these past and current projects, Professor Rogers now serves as the co-editor of Oxford University Press New Histories of Philosophy series. The series attends to the unstudied resources in the history of philosophy. Although I'm interested in the entire series, I'm especially keen to build its list in Africana Philosophy.

Abstract:

Any effort to understand approaches to justice that rest on principles of non-domination would do well to reflect on those who have sought to address racial domination. In particular, the resources of 19^th century African-American political thought have much to offer. In the 19^th century African American intellectuals, seeking to discover how to undo and ward off racial domination, drew on two different strands of the philosophical tradition of republicanism. In the process they produced a third strand in which republicanism is linked to racial equality. A look at this body of work offers us the chance to recover resources for contemporary projects of justice, while also requiring us to revise traditional accounts of when and where republicanism, as a political theory, has waxed and waned. It will turn out that the work of building a political theory for justice as non-domination also requires undoing forms of domination reflected in the historiographic tradition. My lecture will recover this tradition in the African-American political thought while raising doubts about the inadequacy of the current revival of republicanism in addressing racial domination. 

Seminar Presentation:

• Being a Slave of the Community: Race, Domination, and Republicanism

Seminar Paper:

• Being a Slave of the Community

Pre-seminar Readings:

• Rereading Honneth: Exodus Politics and the Pardox of Recognition

• David Walker and the Political Power of the Appeal

Seminar: It's Too Late for Indigenous Justice: Problems with Urgency in Climate Change Advocacy 

I am a professor and environmental activist working at Michigan State University (MSU). My website features general information and links about my research and projects, drafts of my published and forthcoming articles and short essays (including the Indigenous science letter), teaching and research materials on #NoDAPL and Indigenous climate justice, and places where you can followmy updates.

My work focuses on the problems and possibilities Indigenous peoples face regarding climate change, environmental justice, and food sovereignty.

I participate in some great and unique programs at MSU that I encourage you to check out, including Philosophy, Community Sustainability, American Indian & Indigenous Studies, Environmental Science & Policy, Environmental Philosophy & Ethics and the Geocognition Research Lab.

Seminar Presentation

• It's Too Late for Indigenous Justice: Problems with Urgency in Climate Change Advocacy 

Pre-seminar Readings

• TBA

Seminar Presentation

• Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival

Pre-seminar Readings

• Normal Life

• Now Is the Time for ‘Nobodies’: Dean Spade on Mutual Aid and Resistance in the Trump Era

Seminar Presentation:

• Black Feminist Visions and the Politics of Healing in the Movement for Black Lives

Pre-seminar Readings:

• Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements

Seminar Presentation:

• Resistance Self-Respect: Another Challenge for Liberalism

Pre-seminar Readings:

• Robin Dillon, "Self-Respect: Moral, Emotional, Political"

• Tommie Shelby, “Liberalism, Self-Respect, and Troubling Cultural Patterns in Ghettos”

Seminar Presentation

• TBA

Pre-seminar Readings

• Black to the Future (main reading)
• Equality from a Human Point of View (supplementary reading)

Seminar Presentation

• The Corporation II

Pre-seminar Readings

• The Invisible Hand of Law: Private Regulation and the Rule of Law

Seminar Presentation

• Domestic Colonies and Colonialism vs Imperialism in Western Political Thought and Practice 

Pre-seminar Readings

• Domestic Colonies in America: Labour, Utopian and Farm Colonies

Seminar: Escape from Dignity: The Honour Politics of Jihad, Social Media Shaming, and Trump.

Orit Kamir publishes, teaches and is socially active in three interdisciplinary areas: 1. Dignity, respect and honor as moral/ethical values, bedrocks of social structures, and foundations of legislation and policy making; 2. Law-and-Film: analysis of mutual influences of two powerful contemporary discourses, that have substantial impact on the creation and determination of individuals’ and societies’ forging of their self-perceptions and visions of their identities and futures; 3. Gender politics in societies, cultures and laws. She has authored six monographs and dozens of articles, mostly in these areas, in English and in Hebrew, and has taught in universities in Israel and the United States. She has participated in drafting legislation in Israel, and as founder and academic head of the center for human dignity in Israel she has worked with diverse audiences on implementing dignity and respect in daily life as well as institutional policy making. She earned her BA in law, philosophy and literature at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and her Masters and Doctorate in Law and Culture at the University of Michigan (under the supervision of the founder of Law and Literature, Prof. J. B. White). She is an active participant in Israel’s public discourse and a social activist in gender equality and human rights.

Seminar Presentation

• Escape from Dignity: The Honor Politics of Jihad, Social Media Shaming & Trump

Pre-seminar Readings

• Cinematic Judgment and Jurisprudence: A Woman's Memory, Recovery, and Justice in a Post-Traumatic Society (A Study of Polanski's Death and the Maiden)

Seminar: The Normativity of Law: What is the Problem?

Leslie Green is the Professor of the Philosophy of Law and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He also holds a part-time appointment as Professor of Law and Distinguished University Fellow at Queen's. After beginning his teaching career at Lincoln College, Oxford, he moved to Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. He has visited and taught at many other law faculties, including Berkeley, Columbia, NYU, Chicago and, for some years, at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes and teaches in the areas of jurisprudence, constitutional theory, and moral and political philosophy. He serves on the board of many journals and is co-editor of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law.

Seminar Presentation

• The Normativity of Law: What is the Problem?

Pre-seminar Readings

• Law and Obligations

Seminar: The Territorial Rights of Animals: Zoopolis and Beyond

Professor Kolers’ particular research interests include issues surrounding territorial rights and solidarity. These highly “applied” issues touch on a wide range of problems, but also raise hard questions about how to navigate deep diversity in a shared world. His 2009 book Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory (Cambridge University Press) won the Canadian Philosophical Association’s biennial book prize. More recently, his 2012 article “Floating Provisos and Sinking Islands” received the Journal of Applied Philosophy prize, awarded for “the best article published in the year’s volume.”

Currently, Professor Kolers is working on a book on solidarity and further articles on territorial rights. He has initiated a research project on the emergence of a discourse of indigenous title in the 16^th-century Spanish Dominicans Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas as they grappled with the moral and political implications of the Encounter with the “new world.”

Seminar presentation:

• The Territorial Rights of Animals: Zoopolis and Beyond

Pre-seminar readings:

• Attachment to Territory: Status or Achievement? (primary reading)

• Animals and the Frontiers of Citizenship (supplementary reading)

Seminar: On rights and reality: from stated exceptions to states of exception

Professor Williams received her B.A., Wellesley, 1972 & J.D., Harvard, 1975. She practiced as deputy city attorney, Office of the Los Angeles City Attorney; and as staff lawyer, Western Center on Law and Poverty. She has served on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin School of Law, City University of New York Law School, and Golden Gate University School of Law and has been at Columbia since 1991.

Professor Williams is fellow, at the School of Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College, and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. She has published widely in the areas of race, gender, and law, and on other issues of legal theory and legal writing. Her books include The Alchemy of Race and Rights; The Rooster's Egg; and Seeing a ColorBlind Future: The Paradox of Race. Columnist, The Nation. MacArthur fellow. Board of Trustees, Wellesley College.

Seminar presentation:

• Breeding, Or The New Black: On Fashioning Genetic Brand

Pre-seminar readings:

• The Alchemy of Race and Rights

• The Holman Rule Once Allowed Congress to Purge Leftists From Government Agencies—Now It’s Back

Seminar: Racial Regimes of Ownership: Thinking Through Property with Cedric J. Robinson

Professor Bhandar’s current research project explores the relationship between racial formations and modern property law in settler colonial contexts. She examines articulations of race and ownership that emerge through the appropriation of Indigenous lands, drawing on a combination of critical theory, archival sources, and interviews in Canada, Australia and Israel/Palestine.

Professor Bhandar is co-editor (with Jon Goldberg-Hiller) of the book Plastic Materialities: Legality, Politics and Metamorphosis in the work of Catherine Malabou (Duke University Press, 2015). The contributions in this volume assess the political and philosophical implications of Malabou's innovative combination of poststructuralism and neuroscience across the disciplines of legal theory, sociology, literature and philosophy.

She is also co-editor of a special issue of Darkmatter Journal, "Reflections on Dispossession: Critical Feminisms" (2016, with Davina Bhandar). This collection traces a path for contemporary critiques of neoliberal capitalism and colonial dispossession. The authors show the compelling need for complex strategies and tools to evaluate the interlocking or intersectional practices of dispossession, and their particular effects on racialised, Indigenous, sexualized, and gendered subjects.

Lastly, Professor Bhandar is co-editor of the Routledge Book Series, Law and the Post-Colonial: Ethics, Politics & Economy, and has served on the editorial board of Feminist Legal Studies and the International Advisory Board of the Law and Society Review.

Seminar presentation:

• Racial Regimes of Ownership

Pre-seminar readings:

• Title by Registration

• Disassembling Legal Form