Law Commons^™

Vulnerability And Social Justice, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

This Article briefly considers the origins of the term social justice and its evolution beside our understandings of human rights and liberalism, which are two other significant justice categories. After this reflection on the contemporary meaning of social justice, I suggest that vulnerability theory, which seeks to replace the rational man of liberal legal thought with the vulnerable subject, should be used to define the contours of the term. Recognition of fundamental, universal, and perpetual human vulnerability reveals the fallacies inherent in the ideals of autonomy, independence, and individual responsibility that have supplanted an appreciation of the social. I suggest …

Vulnerability And Inevitable Inequality, Martha Albertson Fineman

Faculty Articles

The abstract legal subject of liberal Western democracies fails to reflect the fundamental reality of the human condition, which is vulnerability. While it is universal and constant, vulnerability is manifested differently in individuals, often resulting in significant differences in position and circumstance. In spite of such differences, political theory positions equality as the foundation for law and policy, and privileges autonomy, independence and self-sufficiency. This article traces the origins and development of a critical legal theory that brings human vulnerability to the fore in assessing individual and state responsibility and redefining the parameters of social justice. The theory arose in …

Foreword – Latcrit Praxis @ Xx: Toward Equal Justice In Law, Education And Society, Tayyab Mahmud

Faculty Articles

This article marks the twentieth anniversary of Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory or the LatCrit organization, an association of diverse scholars committed to the production of knowledge from the perspective of Outsider or OutCrit jurisprudence. The article first reflects on the historical development of LatCrit’s substantive, methodological, and institutional commitments and practices. It argues that these traditions were shaped not only by its members’ goals and commitments but also by the politics of backlash present at its birth in the form of the “cultural wars,” and which have since morphed into perpetual “crises” grounded in neoliberal policies. With this …

Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’S Intended To Help, And Why Universities Won’T Admit It (Book Review), Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

Mismatch is one of the most important books about law and public policy published recently. The authors, Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., offer a provocative and deeply researched conclusion: empirical evidence strongly suggests that affirmative action in the admission of African-Americans and Hispanics to selective colleges and law schools is more harmful than helpful.

The problem of underrepresentation of African-Americans and Hispanics in the American legal profession is a continuing problem. But the work of Richard Sander strongly indicates that relying on the power of affirmative action has generated deleterious effects for those this “solution” was designed to …

Just Talking With The Furniture, Emily A. Hartigan

Faculty Articles

The current social and political situation of the United States is post-modern, post-colonial, post-critical, and post-secular. It is located in a two-party system in which the substantive values of the population are radically fragmented. As such, American social and political culture needs new prospects for conversation, both about and constituting justice, which can cross the vast differences between its members. It is time to enter a discourse on substantive justice in a way that uses the imagined unity of modernist thought as a way station for something both old and new.

Finding And Incorporating Spirituality In The Work Of The Clinic, Ana M. Novoa

Faculty Articles

forthcoming

Solidarity And Suffering: Toward A Politics Of Relationality, By Douglas Sturm (Book Review), Emily A. Hartigan

Faculty Articles

In his latest book, Douglas Sturm reveals himself as almost predictable. In Solidarity and Suffering: Toward a Politics of Relationality, here he is again in the guise of the knowledgeable scholar forever moving to include more: more spirit, more people, more difference, more tension, more justice. His movement of inclusion draws the reader always outside the framework of the conventions of discourse he last inhabited. Yet something about that movement itself has an integral, almost definable theme, a theme of relation and connection permeating the incisive distinctions his fine mind navigates for the reader.

Once again, in Solidarity and Suffering, …