Political Theory Commons^™

On Moral Arguments Against A Legal Right To Unilateral Humanitarian Intervention, David Lefkowitz

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As the international response to recent events in Darfur demonstrates, the restriction of authority to intervene to the United Nations poses the greater legal barrier to intervention. From a practical perspective, then, the more pressing question may be whether international law ought to be modified to permit states, or multi-state organizations, to carry out unilateral humanitarian interventions; that is, interventions that are not authorized by the United Nations. The issue here is essentially a moral one: would the incorporation of a right to unilateral humanitarian intervention entail a moral improvement to international law – for example, a decrease in the …

The Refund Booth: Using The Principle Of Symmetric Information To Improve Campaign Finance Regulation, Ian Ayres, Bruce Ackerman, Georgetown University Law Center

Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture

On March 22, 2006, Professor of Law, Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, delivered the Georgetown Law Center’s twenty-sixth Annual Philip A. Hart Memorial Lecture: "The Refund Booth: Using the Principle of Symmetric Information to Improve Campaign Finance Regulation." The article, The Secret Refund Booth, was co-authored with Professor Bruce Ackerman of Yale University.

Ian Ayres is a lawyer and an economist. He is the William K. Townsend Professor of Law and Anne Urowsky Professorial Fellow in Law at Yale Law School and a Professor at Yale's School of Management. He is the editor of the Journal of Law, …

Book Review, Robert W. Gordon

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

The Failure Of The Oslo Peace Process: Causes And Impacts, Nidal Mahmoud Al-Natour

Archived Theses and Dissertations

[abstracts not provided]

Three-Strikes Legislation And The Evolution Of The Liberal Conception Of Justice, Lisa Dillon

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this paper is to examine the changing nature of the liberal conception of justice using three-strikes legislation as a basis for comparison. It includes a brief examination of the legal debate surrounding three-strikes legislation, as well as comprehensive tables comparing the content of the laws in several states. The preponderance of the paper explores the evolution of the liberal concept of justice in the works of John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill. It concludes with a discussion of contemporary liberal thought on justice, and more specifically, with an examination of the work of John Rawls …

Race And Place: Social Space In The Production Of Human Kinds, Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Recent discussions of human categories have suffered from an over emphasis on intention and language, and have not paid enough attention to the role of material conditions, and, specifically, of social space in the construction of human categories. The relationship between human categories and social spaces is vital, especially with the categories of class, race, and gender. This paper argues that social space is not merely the consequent of the division of the world into social categories; it is constitutive of social categories. To put it more bluntly, if who we are is bound up with place, then not only …

Camera War, Again, Sharon Sliwinski

Data and Test Instruments

The war in Iraq has undoubtedly produced some of the most dreadful entries in the history of camera war.

Utilitarianism And Beyond: Contemporary Analytical Political Theory, David Miller, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

In this chapter we sketch a body of political thought that became predominant in the second half of the twentieth century among academic political philosophers, primarily in the English-speaking world, but increasingly elsewhere, too. To call this type of political thought ‘analytical’ may not be particularly revealing, but no other term better describes the movement in question. Sometimes ‘liberal political theory’ is used, and there is indeed a close connection between analytical theory and liberalism. But that label is in one way too broad and in another too narrow for this kind of political thinking: too broad because liberalism has …

Freedom And Rights, Richard Dagger

Political Science Faculty Publications

Liberalism, of course, is quite a capacious theory, with room for liberals to debate quite vigorously among themselves, as well as with others, the meaning and significance of freedom, rights and other concepts. It is also capacious enough to allow for a rethinking of these concepts at a time of pressing environmental problems. Such a rethmking, I shall argue, should lead us to conceive of freedom and rights less as barriers or shields that protect individuals against interference - as forms of independence - and more as matters of organic growth and connection, or interdependence. Indeed, we must conceive …

Recognizing Victimhood, Christine Wilke

Studio for Law and Culture

The category of victimhood resonates deeply with many contemporary struggles for recognition without, however, receiving similar attention by political theories of recognition. Many “struggles for recognition” are fought with explicit reference to massive injustice that have ceased without having been publicly recognized as injustices. The state responses to claims for the recognition of victimhood mirror, I will argue, the state’s dominant conceptions of justice and injustice. In many cases, the state affirms its conceptions of injustice and moral innocence through the selective recognition of victims. For example, the U.S. government has granted Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War an …

[Introduction To] America And Enlightenment Constitutionalism, Gary L. Mcdowell, Johnathan O'Neill

Bookshelf

America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism shows in detail the Enlightenment origin of the U.S. Constitution. It provides vivid analysis of how the Enlightenment's basic ideas were reformulated in the context of America. It is particularly successful in bringing out the competing strains of Enlightenment thought and of articulating crucial Enlightenment concepts of public opinion, equality, public reason, legislature and judiciary, revolution, law, and the people in their American context. The collection is timely given contemporary debates between republicans and liberals about constitutional interpretation which are addressed throughout.

Cold War Games And Postwar Art, Claudia Mesch

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

During the Cold War both “superpowers” used games, particularly chess, in order to construct an ideology of complete conflict and irreconcilable division between East and West. This essay focuses on the broad cultural challenge to divisive Cold War zero-sum mentality issued by a number of artists—André Breton, Marcel Duchamp and Öyvind Fahlström, and Fluxus artists George Maciunas, George Brecht, Robert Watts, Takako Saito and Yoko Ono. These artists, in a second wave of game-focused art, returned to the concerns of surrealist art practice and to earlier cultural game theory. Even conceptual art production was impacted by the predetermined structure of …

When Does Deliberating Improve Decisionmaking?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Daniel B. Rodriguez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Mirage Of Global Justice, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The political pursuit of global justice is not a worthy goal, and our aims in establishing international legal and political institutions should be more modest. The pursuit of justice in the international order is dangerous to the extent that it requires the establishment of powerful supranational agencies, or legitimizes greater and more frequent exercise of political, economic, and military power by strong states or coalitions. The primary concern in the establishment and design of all legal and political institutions should be not to secure justice but to limit power. It is a mistake to think that a distinction can be …

Rights Of Culture, Rights Of Conscience, Chandran Kukathas

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this contribution I take up a particularly troubling issue in the theory of human rights. It is the issue of intervention to defend or uphold — or re-assert and re-establish — human rights. The issue is a troubling one because intervention in the affairs of others is always something we should be wary of, not least because history is full of unhappy episodes of intervention, from the Spanish in the Americas to the Chinese in Tibet. Indeed, so difficult and complex are the issues raised that one might be tempted in a discussion of human rights simply to separate …

Commodification And Contract Formation: Placing The Consideration Doctrine On Stronger Foundations, David Gamage, Allon Kedem

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Under the traditional consideration doctrine, a promise is only legally enforceable if it is made in exchange for something of value. This doctrine lies at the heart of contract law, yet it lacks a sound theoretical justification a fact that has confounded generations of scholars and created a mess of case law.

This article argues that the failure of traditional justifications for the doctrine comes from two mistaken assumptions. First, previous scholars have assumed that anyone can back a promise with nominal consideration if they wish to do so. We show how social norms against commodification limit the availability of …

Book Review. When All Else Fails: Government As The Ultimate Risk Manager By David A. Moss, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

What Do We Owe Each Other In The Global Economic Order?: Constructivist And Contractualist Accounts, John Linarelli

Scholarly Works

No legal system deserving of continued support can exist without an adequate theory of justice. A world trade constitution cannot credibly exist without a clear notion of justice upon which to base a consensus. This paper examines two accounts of fairness found in moral philosophy, those of John Rawls and Tim Scanlon. The Rawlsian theory of justice is well-known to legal scholars. Scanlon's contractualist account may be less well-known. The aim of the paper is to start the discussion as to how fairness theories can be used to develop the tools for examining international economic policies and institutions. After elaborating …

Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics (Book Review), Donna A. Cristo

WCBT Faculty Publications

Book review by Donna A. Christo.

Nye, Joseph S. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. ISBN 9781586482251; 9781586483067 (pbk.)

The Politic 2005 Fall, The Politic, Inc.

The Politic

No abstract provided.

Wacana Kearifan Kapitalis Dalam Dunia Postmodern: Tinjauan Atas Kampanye One/Live 8, Musa Maliki

Global: Jurnal Politik Internasional

The tension of postmodern condition creates two distinctive grand-narrative discourses in seeing poverty: modernist and anti-modernist. Even though the discourse of the postmodern condition remains within the regime of grand narrative discourses, there is a little narrative called the wisdom of capitalist discourse. It has been successful in the constructive active and non-violence resistance to make poverty history by ONE/Live 8 campaign. By the discourse's scheme, this study argues that the existence of poverty text is not the epistemological problem that can be solved exogenously by problem solving theory (grand theory), but it is the ontological problem that can be …

Emilian Kavalski On The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory Of Diversity And Freedom By Chandran Kukathas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 292pp., Emilian Kavalski

Human Rights & Human Welfare

No abstract provided.

A New Agenda For The Cultural Study Of Law: Taking On The Technicalities, Annelise Riles

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

This article urges humanistic legal studies to take the technical dimensions of law as a central focus of inquiry. Using archival and ethnographic investigations into developments in American Conflict of Laws doctrines as an example, and building on insights in the anthropology of knowledge and in science and technology studies that focus on technical practices in scientific and engineering domains, it aims to show that the technologies of law - an ideology that law is a tool and an accompanying technical aesthetic of legal knowledge - are far more central and far more interesting dimensions of legal practice than humanists …

The Politic 2005 Summer, The Politic, Inc.

The Politic

No abstract provided.

On Cadava And Levy's Cities Without Citizens, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

What, the editors of this collection ask in their introduction, is the nature of the relationship between cities and the people who inhabit them? And how do the historical situation of cities and their citizens limit the potentiality of new modes of subjectification? These are surely evocative questions, and as the editors remark, increasingly necessary ones, as the city is quickly becoming the organizing principle for global flows (of bodies, capital, law, etc.), but, in the collection that follows, the contributing authors barely scratch the surface of these issues, nor do they properly problematize such latter-day master narratives …

Monitoring And Evaluation In Egypt, Reham Nabil Abdel Hamid

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Whatever Happened To The State?: A Preliminary Analysis Of The Role Of State And Civil Society In Development Discourse, Corrie Blankenbeckler

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The basic research problem of this thesis lies in the conflicting nature of the policies of the international financial system and of non-government organizations with regard to the state. Contemporary discourse in the international aid community manifests a deep mistrust of state institutions' ability to effectively manage developments reforms, but lacks the theoretical foundations and organizational methodologies that would be necessary to develop strategies to build up the state so that it might better perform its duties and minimize corruption.

An Evaluation Of Two Community Based Initiatives, Salma Abdel Rahman Sabri

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Land Value Taxation: Persuasive Theory But Practically Difficult, Tom Dunne

Articles

While the theoretical case for Land Value Taxation is regarded as being very persuasive, most people looking closely at the idea form the view that the practical difficulties of introducing it into an established modern economy are compelling. Nevertheless, in Europe and America the ideas put forward by George continue to influence many people discussing issues around land use planning, urban development and methods of funding infrastructure and local government.

The Politic 2005 Spring, The Politic, Inc.

The Politic

No abstract provided.