Law Commons^™

Covenant And Feminist Reconstructions Of Subjectivity Within Theories Of Justice, Janet Moore

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article bridges the dichotomy between communitarian and liberal social contract conceptions of subjectivity by excavating the deeply rooted meaning of covenant as a promissory relationship constitutive of identity. I trace the covenant paradigm’s role in formative debates over the creation of “We the People” as a constitutional subject. I connect tensions in that debate with polarities between freedom and equality and between the private and social construction of first-order value claims. I argue that feminist-intersubjectivist critiques of Rawls’ Theory of Justice can benefit from a careful mining of the covenant paradigm’s emancipatory potential for metaethical and constitutional doctrine.