AVVISO

Si comunica che giorno 30 Aprile 2012

la Biblioteca del Dipartimento

sarà chiusa

per disinfestazione

Seminario

Giovedì 26 Aprile 2012

Ore 10,00

“Le nuove funzioni del carcere”

Relatore

Emilio Santoro

Professore di Filosofia del Diritto

Università di Firenze

Chair: Prof. Fulvio Vassallo Paleologo

Università di Palermo

Dipartimento di Studi su

Politica Diritto e Società “G. Mosca”

Aula Dottorato

Piazza Bologni, 8

Seminario

“LA PROTEZIONE GIURIDICA DEL TITANIC DOPO LA

CONVENZIONE UNESCO DEL 2001:

LA SFIDA PER IL FUTURO”

Mercoledì 18 Aprile 2012

Ore 16,00

Relatore

Prof. Mariano Aznar Gómez

Ordinario di Diritto Internazionale

Universitat Jaume I di Castellón de la Plana

Chair: Prof. Massimo Starita

Università di Palermo

Presentazione del libro

Giovanna Fiume

Le regole del gioco

Liste degli eleggibili e lotta politica a Marineo (1819-1859)

Sabato 14 Aprile, ore 17,30

Castello Beccadelli di Marineo

Interverranno:

Francesco Ribaudo

Antonino Marrone

Rita Loredana Foti

Nino Di Sclafani

Giovanna Fiume

Are human rights for migrants?:

critical reflections on the status

of irregular migrants in Europe

and the UnitedStates

Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, Tobias Kelly

Human rights seemingly offer universal protection. However, irregular migrants have, at best, only problematic access to human rights. Whether understood as an ethical injunction or legally codified norm, the promised protection of human rights seems to break down when it comes to the lived experience of irregular migrants. This book therefore asks three key questions of great practical and theoretical importance. First, what do we mean when we speak of human rights? Second, is the problematic access of irregular migrants to human rights protection an issue of implementation, or is it due to the inherent characteristics of the concept of human rights? Third, should we look beyond human rights for an effective source of protection? Written is an accessible style, with a range of socio-legal and doctrinal approaches, the chapters focus on the situation of the irregular migrant in Europe and the United States. Throughout the book, nuanced theoretical debates are put in the context of concrete case studies. The critical reflections it offers on the limitations and possibilities of human rights protections for irregular migrants will be invaluable for students, scholars and practitioners.

Valuing freedoms:

Sen's capability approach and poverty reduction

Sabina Alkire

Sabina Alkire shows how Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen's capability approach can be coherently--and practically--put to work in poverty reduction activities. Sen argues that economic development should expand "valuable" freedoms. Alkire probes how we identify what is valuable. Foundational issues are addressed critically--dimensions of development, practical reason, culture, basic needs--drawing on Thomist authors who give central place to authentic participation. A participatory procedure for identifying capability change is then developed. Case studies of three Oxfam activities in Pakistan--goat-rearing, female literacy, and rose cultivation--illustrate this novel approach.

Inequality and the global economic crisis

Douglas Dowd, Douglas Fitzgerald Dowd

Inequality has always been with us. With the growth of capitalism across the globe, inequalities of income, wealth and power became increasingly extreme. Written by economist Douglas Dowd, this book shows that the present banking crisis is the result of the growth of inequality across the globe. The expansion of the financial sector has brought incredible riches to a select few, at the expense of the majority. Inequality was ignored, or described as a necessary aspect of a booming global economy. With the collapse of the world markets, the fallacy of this position is clear. Inequality and the Global Economic Crisis shows how it is only by addressing inequality that we can secure the health of our economies in the future.--Publisher.

Les musulmans dans l'histoire de l'Europe 
Une intégration invisible
Jocelyne Dakhlia, Bernard Vincent

Cet ouvrage collectif porte sur l’intégration historique des Musulmans en Europe. Ce premier tome, Une intégration invisible, remet en question nombre d’idées reçues, montrant qu’on ne peut plus s’en tenir au schéma d’une quasi-absence des musulmans en Europe jusqu’au XIXe siècle, qui aurait été suivie de flux de circulation ou d’immigration, tous tributaires de la colonisation. Ce livre établit au contraire que des Musulmans ont bien été intégrés par milliers et dizaines de milliers dans les sociétés d’Europe occidentale, tout en restant le plus souvent invisibles. Il montre également que la présence de l’Islam dans l’espace public, ainsi que d’un culte musulman dans cette partie de l’Europe (mosquées, cimetières…) n’est pas une question neuve ou même contemporaine. À travers des études de cas ou par pays, les auteurs expliquent pourquoi ces réalités n’ont pas été visibles ou bien étudiées jusqu’à présent. Et se référant au récent débat sur les « statistiques ethniques » en France, ils exposent la difficulté qu’il peut y avoir, aujourd’hui comme par le passé, à définir un « musulman » dans un contexte européen, ainsi que les problèmes éthiques et politiques que soulève cette approche. La problématique du livre entre en résonance avec les questions que soulève le débat sur l’entrée de la Turquie dans l’Europe : peut-on être musulman et Européen ? Peut-on être un Européen musulman ? Historienne, Jocelyne Dakhlia est directrice d’études à l’EHESS. Ancien directeur du Centre de recherches historiques, Bernard Vincent est également directeur d’études à l’EHESS

Privacy in America:

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

William Aspray, Philip Doty

In this collection of essays that represent original and interdisciplinary work, respected scholars address a number of privacy issues. These include how governmental and private sectors develop and deploy technologies that can pose serious compromises tothe privacy of individuals and groups; how information and communication system designs pose threats to privacy; how we manage private concerns (child care, job leave, and identity) as public issues amenable to political action and shared awareness; andthe fundamental asymmetry of power that exists between individuals and small groups on the one hand and large governmental and corporate entities on the other. Arranged in three sections-law and policy; information technology; and information studies, history, and sociology-Privacy in America: Interdisciplinary Perspectives will be useful to scholars, practitioners, and students in a variety of fields, including information science, library science, and information systems.

How Constitutions Change:
A Comparative Study
Dawn Oliver, Carlo Fusaro

This set of essays explores how constitutions change and are changed in a number of countries, and how the 'constitution' of the EU changes and is changed. For a range of reasons, including internal and external pressures, the constitutional arrangements in many countries are changing. Constitutional change may be formal, involving amendments to the texts of Constitutions or the passage of legislation of a clearly constitutional kind, or informal and organic, as where court decisions affect the operation of the system of government, or where new administrative and other arrangements (eg agencification) affect or articulate or alter the operation of the constitution of the country, without the need to resort to formal change. The countries in this study include, from the EU, a common law country, a Nordic one, a former communist state, several civil law systems, parliamentary systems and a hybrid one (France). Chapters on non EU countries include two on developing countries (India and South Africa), two on common law countries without entrenched written constitutions (Israel and New Zealand), a presidential system (the USA) and three federal ones (Switzerland, the USA and Canada). In the last two chapters the editors conduct a detailed comparative analysis of the jurisdiction-based chapters and explore the question whether any overarching theory or theories about constitutional change in liberal democracies emerge from the study

Extraterritorial Application of
Human Rights Treaties:
Law, Principles, and Policy
Marko Milanović

Questions as to when a state owes obligations under a human rights treaty towards an individual located outside its territory are being brought more and more frequently before both international and domestic courts. Victims of aerial bombardment, inhabitants of territories under military occupation, deposed dictators, suspected terrorists detained in Guantanamo by the United States, and the family of a former KGB spy who was assassinated in London through the use of a radioactive toxin, allegedly at the orders or with the collusion of the Russian government - all of these people have claimed protection from human rights law against a state affecting their lives while acting outside its territory. These matters are extremely politically and legally sensitive, leading to much confusion, ambiguity and compromise in the existing case law.

This study attempts to clear up some of this confusion, and expose its real roots. It examines the notion of state jurisdiction in human rights treaties, and places it within the framework of international law. It is not limited to an inquiry into the semantic, ordinary meaning of the jurisdiction clauses in human rights treaties, nor even to their construction into workable legal concepts and rules. Rather, the interpretation of these treaties cannot be complete without examining their object and purpose, and the various policy considerations which influence states in their behaviour, and courts in their decision-making. The book thus exposes the tension between universality and effectiveness, which is itself the cause of methodological and conceptual inconsistency in the case law. Finally, the work elaborates on the several possible models of the treaties' extraterritorial application. It offers not only a critical analysis of the existing case law, but explains the various options that are before courts and states in addressing these issues, as well as their policy implications.

The atrocity paradigm:
a theory of evil
Claudia Card

What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Is hatred a necessarily evil? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there evils we should tolerate? What can make evils hard to recognize? Are evils inevitable? How can we best respond to and live with evils?

Claudia Card offers a secular theory of evil that responds to these questions and more. Evils, according to her theory, have two fundamental components. One component is reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm -- harm that makes a life indecent and impossible or that makes a death indecent. The other component is culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war rape, torture, and severe child abuse, are Card's paradigms because in them these key elements are writ large. Atrocities deserve more attention than secular philosophers have so far paid them. They are distinguished from ordinary wrongs not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done. Evildoers need not be sadistic: they may simply be negligent or unscrupulous in pursuing their goals.
Card's theory represents a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic alternatives (including Kant's theory of radical evil). Utilitarians tend to reduce evils to their harms; Stoics tend to reduce evils to the wickedness of perpetrators: Card accepts neither reduction. She also responds to Nietzsche's challenges about the worth of the concept of evil, and she uses her theory to argue that evils are more important than merely unjust inequalities. She applies the theory in explorations of war rape and violence against intimates. She also takes up what Primo Levi called "the gray zone", where victims become complicit in perpetrating on others evils that threaten to engulf themselves. While most past accounts of evil have focused on perpetrators, Card begins instead from the position of the victims, but then considers more generally how to respond to -- and live with -- evils, as victims, as perpetrators, and as those who have become both.

Understanding Wittgenstein's On certainty

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock

This radical reading of Wittgenstein's third and last masterpiece, On Certainty, has major implications for philosophy. It elucidates Wittgenstein's ultimate thoughts on the nature of our basic beliefs and his demystification of skepticism. Our basic certainties are shown to be nonepistemic, nonpropositional attitudes that, as such, have no verbal occurrence but manifest themselves exclusively in our actions. This fundamental certainty is a belief-in, a primitive confidence or ur-trust whose practical nature bridges the hitherto unresolved catagorial gap between belief and action.

Readings of Wittgenstein's On certainty
William H. Brenner

This collection offers new essays by eminent scholars on Wittgenstein's third masterpiece, On Certainty. Although Wittgenstein's language, and the problems he deals with--the nature of basic beliefs, epistemic foundationalism, knowledge, certainty, skepticism--are here much closer to traditional philosophy, the exploratory and nonlinear character of On Certainty make it a difficult work to penetrate. These essays probe deep into the work from four different approaches: the framework reading; the transcendental reading; the therapeutic reading; and the epistemic reading. This is the first collection ever devoted to On Certainty, and will prove an invaluable tool to scholars and students of Wittgenstein who have thus far only fleetingly ventured beyond Philosophical Investigations.

The Justice Cascade:

How Human Rights Prosecutions Are Changing World Politics
Kathryn Sikkink

Acclaimed scholar Kathryn Sikkink examines the important and controversial new trend of holding political leaders criminally accountable for human rights violations.

Grawemeyer Award winner Kathryn Sikkink offers a landmark argument for human rights prosecutions as a powerful political tool. She shows how, in just three decades, state leaders in Latin America, Europe, and Africa have lost their immunity from any accountability for their human rights violations, becoming the subjects of highly publicized trials resulting in severe consequences. This shift is affecting the behavior of political leaders worldwide and may change the face of global politics as we know it.

Drawing on extensive research and illuminating personal experience, Sikkink reveals how the stunning emergence of human rights prosecutions has come about; what effect it has had on democracy, conflict, and repression; and what it means for leaders and citizens everywhere, from Uruguay to the United States. The Justice Cascade is a vital read for anyone interested in the future of world politics and human rights.

Rethinking Criminal Law Theory:

New Canadian Perspectives in the Philosophy of Domestic, Transnational,

and International Criminal Law

In the last two decades, the philosophy of criminal law has undergone a vibrant revival in Canada. The adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has given the Supreme Court of Canada unprecedented latitude to engage with principles of legal, moral, and political philosophy when elaborating its criminal law jurisprudence. Canadian scholars have followed suit by paying increased attention to the philosophical foundations of domestic criminal law. Because of Canada's leadership in international criminal law, both at the level of the International Criminal Court and of specific war crimes tribunals, they have also begun to turn their attention to international criminal law per se. This collection seeks to bring all these Canadian voices together for the first time, and evidence the fact that criminal law theory is no longer to be associated exclusively with the older British, German, and American traditions. The topics covered include the legitimate scope of domestic and international criminalisation, rationales for criminal law defenses in both domestic and international law, the philosophical underpinnings of specific crimes and forms of joint responsibility, as well as the theorisation of criminal procedure and evidence law.

Imagining Legality:
Where Law Meets Popular Culture

Austin Sarat

Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture is collection of essays on the relationship between law and popular culture that posits, in addition to the concepts of law in the books and law in action, a third concept of law in the image—that is, of law as it is perceived by the public through the lens of public media.

Imagining Legality argues that images of law suggested by television and film are as numerous as they are various, and that they give rise to a potent and pervasive imaginative life of the law. The media’s projections of the legal system remind us not only of the way law lives in our imagination but also of the contingencies of our own legal and social arrangements.

Contributors to Imagining Legality are less interested in the accuracy of the portrayals of law in film and television than in exploring the conditions of law’s representation, circulation, and consumption in those media. In the same way that legal scholars have taken on the disciplinary perspectives of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology in relation to the law, these writers bring historical, sociological, and cultural analysis, as well as legal theory, to aid in the understanding of law and popular culture.

The Constrained Court:
Law, Politics, and the Decisions Justices Make
Michael A. Bailey, Forrest Maltzman

How do Supreme Court justices decide their cases? Do they follow their policy preferences? Or are they constrained by the law and by other political actors? The Constrained Court combines new theoretical insights and extensive data analysis to show that law and politics together shape the behavior of justices on the Supreme Court.

Michael Bailey and Forrest Maltzman show how two types of constraints have influenced the decision making of the modern Court. First, Bailey and Maltzman document that important legal doctrines, such as respect for precedents, have influenced every justice since 1950. The authors find considerable variation in how these doctrines affect each justice, variation due in part to the differing experiences justices have brought to the bench. Second, Bailey and Maltzman show that justices are constrained by political factors. Justices are not isolated from what happens in the legislative and executive branches, and instead respond in predictable ways to changes in the preferences of Congress and the president
The Constrained Court shatters the myth that justices are unconstrained actors who pursue their personal policy preferences at all costs. By showing how law and politics interact in the construction of American law, this book sheds new light on the unique role that the Supreme Court plays in the constitutional order.

Fear:

the history of a political idea

Corey Robin

For many commentators, September 11 inaugurated a new era of fear. But as Corey Robin shows in his unsettling tour of the Western imagination--the first intellectual history of its kind--fear has shaped our politics and culture since time immemorial. From the Garden of Eden to the Gulag Archipelago to today's headlines, Robin traces our growing fascination with political danger and disaster. As our faith in positive political principles recedes, he argues, we turn to fear as the justifying language of public life. We may not know the good, but we do know the bad. So we cling to fear, abandoning the quest for justice, equality, and freedom. But as fear becomes our intimate, we understand it less. In a startling reexamination of fear's greatest modern interpreters--Hobbes, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Arendt--Robin finds that writers since the eighteenth century have systematically obscured fear's political dimensions, diverting attention from the public and private authorities who sponsor and benefit from it. For fear, Robin insists, is an exemplary instrument of repression--in the public and private sector. Nowhere is this politically repressive fear--and its evasion--more evident than in contemporary America. In his final chapters, Robin accuses our leading scholars and critics of ignoring "Fear, American Style," which, as he shows, is the fruit of our most prized inheritances--the Constitution and the free market. With danger playing an increasing role in our daily lives and justifying a growing number of government policies, Robin's Fear offers a bracing, and necessary, antidote to our contemporary culture of fear.

New Essays on the Normativity of Law

Stefano Bertea, George Pavlakos

An important part of the legal domain has to do with rule-governed conduct, and is expressed by the use of notions such as norm, obligation, duty, and right. These require us to acknowledge the normative dimension of law. Normativity is, accordingly, to be regarded as a central feature of law lying at the heart of any comprehensive legal-theoretical project. The essays collected in this book are meant to further our understanding of the normativity of law. More specifically, the book stages a thorough discussion of legal normativity as approached from three strands of legal thought that are particularly influential and which play a key role in shaping debates on the normative dimension of law: the theory of planning agency, legal conventionalism and the constitutivist approach. While the essays presented here do not aspire to give an exhaustive picture of these debates--an aspiration that would be, by its very nature, unrealistic--they do provide the reader with some authoritative statements of some widely discussed families of views of legal normativity. In pursuing this objective, these essays also encourage a dialogue between different traditions of study of legal normativity, stimulating those who would not otherwise look outside their tradition of thought to engage with new ideas and, ultimately, to arrive at a more comprehensive account of the normativity of law.--Provided by publisher.

Living Originalism
Jack M. Balkin

Originalism and living constitutionalism, so often understood to be diametrically opposing views of our nation’s founding document, are not in conflict—they are compatible. So argues Jack Balkin, one of the leading constitutional scholars of our time, in this long-awaited book. Step by step, Balkin gracefully outlines a constitutional theory that demonstrates why modern conceptions of civil rights and civil liberties, and the modern state’s protection of national security, health, safety, and the environment, are fully consistent with the Constitution’s original meaning. And he shows how both liberals and conservatives, working through political parties and social movements, play important roles in the ongoing project of constitutional construction.

By making firm rules but also deliberately incorporating flexible standards and abstract principles, the Constitution’s authors constructed a framework for politics on which later generations could build. Americans have taken up this task, producing institutions and doctrines that flesh out the Constitution’s text and principles. Balkin’s analysis offers a way past the angry polemics of our era, a deepened understanding of the Constitution that is at once originalist and living constitutionalist, and a vision that allows all Americans to reclaim the Constitution as their own.

Political thought and political thinkers

Judith N. Shklar, Stanley Hoffmann

Ethicsdescribed Judith Shklar as "a towering presence" at Harvard for decades, an "influential teacher and mentor to many of the best known political theorists working today in the United States." One of this century's most important liberal scholars, she is remembered for her "sharp intellect, forceful personality, and passionate intellectual honesty and curiosity." Political Thought and Political Thinkersmakes startlingly clear her role in the reinvigoration of liberal theory that has been taking place over the last two decades. This second volume of Shklar's workwhich follows the 1997 publication of Redeeming American Political Thoughtbrings together heretofore uncollected (and several unpublished) essays on a number of themes, including the place of the intellect in the modern political world and the dangers of identity politics. While many of these essays have been previously published, they remain far from accessible. In collecting the work scattered over the past forty years in journals and other publications, noted political theorist Stanley Hoffmann provides an essential guide to Shklar's thought, complemented by George Kateb's comprehensive introduction to her work. Hoffmann's selection, which includes Shklar's classic essay "The Liberalism of Fear," showcases her distinctive defense of liberalism and follows her explorations in this history of moral and political thought as she engages with Bergson, Arendt, and Rousseau. Political Thought and Political Thinkersdisplays one of the century's most compelling and flexible intellects in action and is the definitive collection of her work on European history and thinkers. "Shklar's legacy is an inspiring example of liberal thought at its arresting best, unflinchingly courageous and unmoved by the dreary and unmeaning harmonies conjured up by theories of justice and rights."John Gray, Times Literary Supplement Judith N. Shklar (1928-1992) was Cowles Professor of Government at Harvard University and the author of nine books in political theory.

The State Versus the Individual:

The Unresolved Dilemma of Humanitarian Intervention
Katariina Simonen

Whether States, coalitions of States or inter-governmental organizations can engage in humanitarian intervention lawfully without the UN Security Council s authorization has been debated at length. Following NATO s intervention in Kosovo in 1999, the international lawgiver had to act. The result was the concept of the responsibility to protect. But the fundamental question of the legality of humanitarian intervention remained. This book takes a new approach by combining legal theory and international law. Legal theory enables the concept of legal validity to be better understood and permits the question to be evaluated thoroughly in international law. The outcome is that the international lawgiver has to confront the hard problem whether or not there is enough interest for human rights protection.

The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences

Ian Shapiro

In this captivating yet troubling book, Ian Shapiro offers a searing indictment of many influential practices in the social sciences and humanities today. Perhaps best known for his critique of rational choice theory, Shapiro expands his purview here. In discipline after discipline, he argues, scholars have fallen prey to inward-looking myopia that results from--and perpetuates--a flight from reality.In the method-driven academic culture we inhabit, argues Shapiro, researchers too often make display and refinement of their techniques the principal scholarly activity. The result is that they lose sight of the objects of their study. Pet theories and methodological blinders lead unwelcome facts to be ignored, sometimes not even perceived. The targets of Shapiro's critique include the law and economics movement, overzealous formal and statistical modeling, various reductive theories of human behavior, misguided conceptual analysis in political theory, and the Cambridge school of intellectual history.As an alternative to all of these, Shapiro makes a compelling case for problem-driven social research, rooted in a realist philosophy of science and an antireductionist view of social explanation. In the lucid--if biting--prose for which Shapiro is renowned, he explains why this requires greater critical attention to how problems are specified than is usually undertaken. He illustrates what is at stake for the study of power, democracy, law, and ideology, as well as in normative debates over rights, justice, freedom, virtue, and community. Shapiro answers many critics of his views along the way, securing his position as one of the distinctive social and political theorists of our time.

Life before birth:
the moral and legal status of
embryos and fetuses
Bonnie Steinbock

Life Before Birth provides a coherent framework for addressing bioethical issues in which the moral status of embryos and fetuses is relevant. It is based on the "interest view" which ascribes moral standing to beings with interests, and connects the possession of interests with the capacity for conscious awareness or sentience. The theoretical framework is applied to ethical and legal topics, including abortion, prenatal torts, wrongful life, the crime of feticide, substance abuse by pregnant women, compulsory cesareans, assisted reproduction, and stem cell research. Along the way, difficult philosophical problems, such as identity and the non-identity problem are thoroughly explored. The book will be of interest not only to philosophers, but also physicians, lawyers, policy makers, and anyone perplexed by the many difficulties surrounding the unborn

Ministers of the law:
a natural law theory of legal authority
Jean Porter

Ministers of the Law is an argument for the importance of the history of Western legal thought for the jurisprudence of political authority. Jean Porter demonstrates that European jurists before the age of legal positivism had placed clear and absolute boundaries on the authority and power of rulers and magistrates. These boundaries were defined by the rights of human beings that transcended the 'rule of law' and constitutions.-Kenneth Pennington Catholic University of America

This book is a theological account of a vital element of human flourishing: authority-natural, political, and legal. Porter argues that positive law, national and international, possesses an authority that may trump anti-terrorist expedients and even general humanitarian considerations.-Nigel Biggar University of Oxford
The author presents an original account of natural law as a 'basis of legitimization' that can validate a variety of political systems and structures of positive law."-Brian Tierney Cornell University

Why political liberalism?:
on John Rawls's political turn
Paul J. Weithman

In WHY POLITICAL LIBERALISM?, Paul Weithman offers a fresh, rigorous, and compelling interpretation of John Rawls's reasons for taking his so-called "political turn". Weithman takes Rawls at his word that justice as fairness was recast as a form of political liberalism because of an inconsistency Rawls found in his early treatment of social stability. He argues that the inconsistency is best seen by identifying the threats to stability with which the early Rawls was concerned. One of those threats, often overlooked by Rawls's readers, is the threat that the justice of a well-ordered society would be undermined by a generalized prisoner's dilemma. Showing how the Rawls of "A Theory of Justice" tried to avert that threat shows that the much-neglected third part of that book is of considerably greater philosophical interest, and has considerably more unity of focus, than is generally appreciated.

Weithman painstakingly reconstructs Rawls's attempts to show that a just society would be stable, and just as carefully shows why Rawls came to think those arguments were inconsistent with other parts of his theory. Weithman then shows that the changes Rawls introduced into his view between "Theory of Justice" and "Political Liberalism" result from his attempt to remove the inconsistency and show that the hazard of the generalized prisoner's dilemma can be averted after all. Recovering Rawls's two treatments of stability helps to answer contested questions about the role of the original position and the foundations of justice as fairness. The result is a powerful and unified reading of Rawls's work that explains his political turn and shows his enduring engagement with some of the deepest concerns of human life.
"Weithman has written a masterful work of Rawls scholarship. This book will deepen our understanding of how and why Rawls restructured his theory, and illuminate this fascinating transition in the history of political philosophy." Leif Wenar, Chair of Ethics, Kings College London
"Weithman's reconstruction of Rawls's arguments is masterful, convincing and in many ways revelatory. Readers will find that the text provides compelling answers to a lot of puzzling questions about Rawls's project that have lingered for some time. Perhaps most importantly, Weithman gives the best explanation to date of exactly why Rawls felt compelled to revise his theory as he did." Colin Bird, Department of Politics, University of Virginia

Law and Religion in Europe:
A Comparative Introduction
Norman Doe

Each state in Europe has its own national laws which affect religion and these are increasingly the subject of political and academic debate. This book provides a detailed comparative introduction to these laws with particular reference to the states of the European Union. A comparison of national laws on religion reveals profound similarities between them. From these emerge principles of law on religion common to the states of Europe and the book articulates these for the first time. It examines the constitutional postures of states towards religion, religious freedom, and discrimination, and the legal position, autonomy, and ministers of religious organizations. It also examines the protection of doctrine and worship, the property and finances of religion, religion, education, and public institutions, and religion, marriage, and children, as well as the fundamentals of the emergent European Union law on religion.

The existence of these principles challenges the standard view in modern scholarship that there is little commonality in the legal postures of European states towards religion - it reveals that the dominant juridical model in Europe is that of cooperation between State and religion. The book also analyses national laws in the context of international laws on religion, particularly the European Convention on Human Rights. It proposes that national laws go further than these in their treatment and protection of religion, and that the principles of religion law common to the states of Europe may themselves represent a blueprint for the development of international norms in this field. The book provides a wealth of legal materials for scholars and students. The principles articulated in it also enable greater dialogue between law and disciplines beyond law, such as the sociology of religion, about the role of religion in Europe today. The book also identifies areas for further research in this regard, pointing the direction for future study.

Liberty of conscience:

in defense of America's tradition

of religious equality

Martha Craven Nussbaum

In one of the great triumphs of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, the founders of the future United States overcame religious intolerance in favor of a constitutional order dedicated to fair treatment for people’s deeply held conscientious beliefs. It granted equal liberty of conscience to all and took a firm stand against religious establishment. This respect for religious difference, acclaimed scholar Martha Nussbaum writes, formed our democracy. Yet today there are signs that this legacy is misunderstood. The prominence of a particular type of Christianity in our public life suggests the unequal worth of citizens who hold different religious beliefs, or no beliefs. Other people, meanwhile, seek to curtail the influence of religion in public life in a way that is itself unbalanced and unfair. Such partisan efforts, Nussbaum argues, violate the spirit of our Constitution. Liberty of Conscience is a historical and conceptual study of the American tradition of religious freedom. Weaving together political history, philosophical ideas, and key constitutional cases, this is a rich chronicle of an ideal of equality that has always been central to our history but is now in serious danger.

Linguistic Justice for Europe

and for the World

Philippe Van Parijs

In Europe and throughout the world, competence in English is spreading at a speed never achieved by any language in human history. This apparently irresistible growing dominance of English is frequently perceived and sometimes indignantly denounced as being grossly unjust. Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World starts off arguing that the dissemination of competence in a common lingua franca is a process to be welcomed and accelerated, most fundamentally because it provides the struggle for greater justice in Europe and in the world with an essential weapon: a cheap medium of communication and of mobilization.

However, the resulting linguistic situation can plausibly be regarded as unjust in three distinct senses. Firstly, the adoption of one natural language as the lingua franca implies that its native speakers are getting a free ride by benefiting costlessly from the learning effort of others. Secondly, they gain greater opportunities as a result of competence in their native language becoming a more valuable asset. And thirdly the privilege systematically given to one language fails to show equal respect for the various languages with which different portions of the population concerned identify. Linguistic Justice for Europe and for the World spells out the corresponding interpretations of linguistic justice as cooperative justice, distributive justice and parity of esteem, respectively. And it discusses systematically a wide range of policies that might help achieve linguistic justice in these three senses, from a linguistic tax on Anglophone countries to the banning of dubbing or the linguistic territoriality principle.

Against this background, the book argues that linguistic diversity is not valuable in itself but it will nonetheless need to be protected as a by-product of the pursuit of linguistic diversity as parity of esteem.
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Highest Courts and Globalisation

Sam Muller, Sidney Richards

This volume is concerned with exploring the theoretical and practical consequences of globalisation for national highest courts. Many traditional assumptions pertaining to these institutions, for example that national highest courts stand at the apex of a unified and coherent legal order or that national courts have no autonomous role as international or transnational actors, have come under increasing scrutiny over the last few years. The authors in this book - comprising both leading scholars and distinguished judges - explore the various dimensions of this issue and offer novel perspectives on the role of highest courts in an internationalising world. This book is therefore highly recommended to judges and practitioners in national and international courts, academics, parliamentarians and civil servants of national ministries of justice and the interior.

The development of the Chinese legal system:

change and challenge

Guanghua Yu

In recent years the Chinese legal system has undergone many reforms and this book brings the literature up to date, offering a contemporary account of the law and administration in China. This book is the result of collective efforts in analysing the political, economic and social factors which affect the development of Chinese law. The volume contains contributions from a number of experts and scholars of Chinese law who examine some of the most important areas of Chinese law. The book covers constitutional law, criminal law, property law, mortgage law, intellectual property law, corporate law, securities regulation, banking regulation, civil procedural law, arbitration law, environmental law, and the regulation of telecommunications services. Whilst the book addresses a number of diverse legal areas all the contributions look to explain the factors which led to the development of the law and the consequences of such developments, as well as the progress made by developing legal institutions and the possible obstacles to future development.

Confronting Evils:
Terrorism, Torture, Genocide
Claudia Card

In this new contribution to philosophical ethics, Claudia Card revisits the theory of evil developed in her earlier book The Atrocity Paradigm (2002), and expands it to consider collectively perpetrated and collectively suffered atrocities. Redefining evil as a secular concept and focusing on the inexcusability - rather than the culpability - of atrocities, Card examines the tension between responding to evils and preserving humanitarian values. This stimulating and often provocative book contends that understanding the evils in terrorism, torture and genocide enables us to recognise similar evils in everyday life: daily life under oppressive regimes and in racist environments; violence against women, including in the home; violence and executions in prisons; hate crimes; and violence against animals. Card analyses torture, terrorism and genocide in the light of recent atrocities, considering whether there can be moral justifications for terrorism and torture, and providing conceptual tools to distinguish genocide from non-genocidal mass slaughter"--Provided by publisher.

http://books.google.it/books?id=ToLovMfcl4sC&printsec=frontcover&hl=it&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

The Real World of Democratic Theory

Ian Shapiro

In this book Ian Shapiro develops and extends arguments that have established him as one of today's leading democratic theorists. Shapiro is hardheaded about the realities of politics and power, and the difficulties of fighting injustice and oppression. Yet he makes a compelling case that democracy's legitimacy depends on pressing it into the service of resisting domination, and that democratic theorists must rise to the occasion of fashioning the necessary tools. That vital agenda motivates the arguments of this book.

Tracing modern democracy's roots to John Locke and the American founders, Shapiro shows that they saw more deeply into the dynamics of democratic politics than have many of their successors. Drawing on Lockean and Madisonian insights, Shapiro evaluates democracy's changing global fortunes over the past two decades. He also shows how elusive democracy can be by exploring the contrast between its successful establishment in South Africa and its failures elsewhere--particularly the Middle East. Shapiro spells out the implications of his account for long-standing debates about public opinion, judicial review, abortion, and inherited wealth--as well as more recent preoccupations with globalization, national security, and international terrorism.

Scholars, students, and democratic activists will all learn from Shapiro's trenchant account of democracy's foundations, its history, and its contemporary challenges. They will also find his distinctive democratic vision both illuminating and appealing.

Work and integrity:

the crisis and promise of professionalism

in America

William M. Sullivan

Work and Integrity is a timely resource that examines the crisis as well as the promise of professionalism in contemporary society. This vital book argues for the importance of a new civic professionalism that reflects the ideals of democracy and public service in our ever more complex economic environment. A publication of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Work and Integrity explores the most current thinking on the various (and often conflicting) ways in which the concept of professional work is understood. Using examples from the United States and Europe, the author describes how the professions evolved from a limited kind of genteel occupation into one of the most widely emulated and sought-after models of work. The book also explores the rise of complex institutions of industrial and postindustrial society, especially the university and the bureaucratic structures of business, government, health care, and education.

Work and Integrity draws on The Carnegie Foundation's comparative study of professional education in medicine, nursing, law, engineering, and the preparation of the clergy. The book explores the relation between the theory and practice and the technical and moral aspects of professional training and examines the key issues and controversies about professionalism from an historical perspective and from the analysis of contemporary scholarly debates. In conclusion, the book proposes a new model for professionalism which aims at humanizing modern work and improving the equity and quality of contemporary life.

This important book offers a key resource for educators of professionals and makes a powerful argument for renewing the social contract between the professions and the wider public they serve--an argument that will resonate across a broad spectrum of readers, including professionals, academics, and policy makers.

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A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation

Colleen Murphy

Following extended periods of conflict or repression, political reconciliation is indispensable to the establishment or restoration of democratic relationships and critical to the pursuit of peacemaking globally. In this important new book, Colleen Murphy offers an innovative analysis of the moral problems plaguing political relationships under the strain of civil conflict and repression. Focusing on the unique moral damage that attends the deterioration of political relationships, Murphy identifies theprecise kinds of repair and transformation that processes of political reconciliation ought to promote. Building on this analysis, she proposes a normative model of political relationships. A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation delivers an original account of the failure and restoration of political relationships, which will be of interest to philosophers, social scientists, legal scholars, policy analysts, and all those who are interested in transitional justice, global politics, and democracy

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The Imperative of Integration

Elizabeth Anderson

More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, but The Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy.

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La corona española y el tráfico de negros:
del monopolio al libre comercio
Reyes Fernández Durán

Durante el siglo XVII el tráfico de esclavos negros a la América española se monopolizó. Solo una empresa llevaba los esclavos a las Indias pagando una cantidad a la corona por cada esclavo que introducía. Al comienzo del siglo XVIII este monopolio lo obtuvo una empresa francesa, la Real Compañía de Guinea y del Asiento, con sede en Paris, entre sus accionistas figuraban el monarca francés y el español. Por el Tratado de Utrecht el monopolio pasó a Inglaterra, a la Compañía del Mar del Sur (South Sea Company) con sede en Londres, creada para solucionar el problema del pago de los intereses de la deuda pública inglesa. Su principal actividad mercantil era el tráfico de esclavos a la América española. Sus acciones cotizaban en la Bolsa de Londres y fueron objeto del primer crash bursátil. El monarca español también estuvo interesado en esta compañía.A finales del siglo XVIII la corona española decidió liberalizar el tráfico de esclavos negros a la América española, para que todos los españoles que lo deseasen pudiesen dedicarse a él.

The Limits of Constitutional Democracy

Jeffrey K. Tulis, Stephen Macedo

Constitutional democracy is at once a flourishing idea filled with optimism and promise--and an enterprise fraught with limitations. Uncovering the reasons for this ambivalence, this book looks at the difficulties of constitutional democracy, and reexamines fundamental questions: What is constitutional democracy? When does it succeed or fail? Can constitutional democracies conduct war? Can they preserve their values and institutions while addressing new forms of global interdependence? The authors gathered here interrogate constitutional democracy's meaning in order to illuminate its future. The book examines key themes--the issues of constitutional failure; the problem of emergency power and whether constitutions should be suspended when emergencies arise; the dilemmas faced when constitutions provide and restrict executive power during wartime; and whether constitutions can adapt to such globalization challenges as immigration, religious resurgence, and nuclear arms proliferation. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Sotirios Barber, Joseph Bessette, Mark Brandon, Daniel Deudney, Christopher Eisgruber, James Fleming, William Harris II, Ran Hirschl, Gary Jacobsohn, Benjamin Kleinerman, Jan-Werner Müller, Kim Scheppele, Rogers Smith, Adrian Vermeule, and Mariah Zeisberg.

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Modus Vivendi Liberalism:

Theory and Practice

David McCabe

A central task in contemporary political philosophy is to identify principles governing political life where citizens disagree deeply on important questions of value and, more generally, about the proper ends of life. The distinctively liberal response to this challenge insists that the state should as far as possible avoid relying on such contested issues in its basic structure and deliberations. David McCabe critically surveys influential defenses of the liberal solution and advocates modus vivendi liberalism as an alternative defense of the liberal state. Acknowledging that the modus vivendi approach does not provide the deep moral consensus that many liberals demand, he defends the liberal state as an acceptable compromise among citizens who will continue to see it as less than ideal. His book will interest a wide range of readers in political philosophy and political theory.

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Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction
Robin West

Normative Jurisprudence aims to reinvigorate normative legal scholarship that both criticizes positive law and suggests reforms for it, on the basis of stated moral values and legalistic ideals. It looks sequentially and in detail at the three major traditions in jurisprudence natural law, legal positivism and critical legal studies that have in the past provided philosophical foundations for just such normative scholarship. Over the last fifty years or so, all of these traditions, although for different reasons, have taken a number of different turns toward empirical analysis, conceptual analysis or Foucaultian critique and away from straightforward normative criticism. As a result, normative legal scholarship scholarship that is aimed at criticism and reform is now lacking a foundation in jurisprudential thought. The book criticizes those developments and suggests a return, albeit with different and in many ways larger challenges, to this traditional understanding of the purpose of legal scholarship.

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Why the Law Is So Perverse

Leo Katz

Conundrums, puzzles, and perversities: these are Leo Katz's stock-in-trade, and in Why the Law Is So Perverse, he focuses on four fundamental features of our legal system, all of which seem to not make sense on some level and to demand explanation. First, legal decisions are essentially made in an either/or fashionguilty or not guilty, liable or not liable, either it's a contract or it's notbut reality is rarely as clear-cut. Why aren't there any in-between verdicts? Second, the law is full of loopholes. No one seems to like them, but somehow they cannot be made to disappear. Why? Third, legal systems are loath to punish certain kinds of highly immoral conduct while prosecuting other far less pernicious behaviors. What makes a villainy a felony? Finally, why does the law often prohibit what are sometimes called win-win transactions, such as organ sales or surrogacy contracts? Katz asserts that these perversions arise out of a cluster of logical difficulties related to multicriterial decision making. The discovery of these difficulties dates back to Condorcet's eighteenth-century exploration of voting rules, which marked the beginning of what we know today as social choice theory. Condorcet's voting cycles, Arrow's Theorem, Sen's Libertarian Paradoxevery seeming perversity of the law turns out to be the counterpart of one of the many voting paradoxes that lie at the heart of social choice. Katz's lucid explanations and apt examples show why they resist any easy resolutions. The New York Times Book Reviewcalled Katz's first book "a fascinating romp through the philosophical side of the law." Why the Law Is So Perverseis sure to provide its readers a similar experience.

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Criminal Justice:
Nomos XXVII
Ronald Pennock, John W. Chapman

This, the twenty-seventh volume in the annual series of publications by the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, features a number of distinguised contributors addressing the topic of criminal justice. Part I considers "The Moral and Metaphysical Sources of the Criminal Law," with contributions by Michael S. Moore, Lawrence Rosen, and Martin Shapiro.

The four chapters in Part II all relate, more or less directly, to the issue of retribution, with papers by Hugo Adam Bedau, Michael Davis, Jeffrie G. Murphy, and R. B. Brandt. In the following part, Dennis F. Thompson, Christopher D. Stone, and Susan Wolf deal with the special problem of criminal responsibility in government—one of great importance in modern society. The fourth and final part, echoing the topic of NOMOS XXIV, Ethics, Economics, and the Law, addresses the economic theory of crime. The section includes contributions by Alvin K. Klevorick, Richard A. Posner, Jules L. Coleman, and Stephen J. Schulhofer.
A valuable bibiography on criminal justice by Andrew C. Blanar concludes this volume of NOMOS.

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What's wrong with a free lunch?
Philippe van Parijs, Joshua Cohen, Joel Rogers

Our politicians insist that we live in a time of unprecedented prosperity, yet more and more Americans are pointing out that the richest 1% of our society holds more wealth than the bottom 90% put together. In this timely book, economist Philippe Van Parijs has a simple plan for addressing not only poverty but other social ills: everyone would be paid a universal basic income (UBI) at a level sufficient for subsistence. Everyone, including "those who make no social contribution—who spend their mornings bickering with their partner, surf off Malibu in the afternoon, and smoke pot all night."

Van Parijs argues that a UBI would reduce unemployment, improve women's lives, and prevent the environmental damage caused by overproduction and fast growth. At the heart of his proposal is the intention to secure real freedom for all, because it offers the greatest possible opportunity to those with the least opportunities. He acknowledges that an idle surfer might not deserve a UBI, but that the surfer's good luck would be no different than the good fortune enjoyed by those who benefit from the current distribution of resources.

Responses to this controversial proposal vary: Some are in favor of a basic income, but only if it's tied to work. Others find the entire proposal unrealistic and unaffordable. Almost all agree, however, that it is time for us to talk about this issue.

NEW DEMOCRACY FORUM

A series of short paperback originals exploring creative solutions to our most urgent national concerns. The series editors (for Boston Review), Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, aim to foster politically engaged, intellectually honest, and morally serious debate about fundamental issues—both on and off the agenda of conventional politics.