2008 Faculty Fellows Conference:
Sovereignty, Justice and the Law Across Disciplines

Friday, April 11th
Alumni House
Free and open to the public!

Click here to download the updated conference schedule!
(as of March 10, 2008)

Keynote Speakers:

Jeremy Waldron(Law, New York University)
He is the author of several books, including the forthcoming Toleration and Its Limits (NOMOS Series) with Melissa Williams (NYU Press, March 2008), God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations of Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, November 2003).The Dignity of Legislation (Cambridge University Press, 1999),Law and Disagreement (Oxford University Press, 1999).
"Sovereign States and the Rule of International Law"
Should we apply the requirements of the Rule of Law to law in the international realm? Are the requirements the same in this context as they are in the law of a particular country? We usually associate the Rule of Law with a demand for certainty, predictability and settlement in legal affairs, with requirements of clarity and prospectivity, with generality and legal equality, and with principles of institutional regularity and natural justice. Do these requirements make sense in the international context? That’s the first set of questions that will be addressed in the lecture.
The second part of the lecture will address some issues about the Rule of Law and sovereignty in the international arena. There is no world government; there is no overarching sovereign in the international arena. Does this make the Rule of Law easier or harder? It might make it harder because the absence of a sovereign—the absence of centralized authority generally—means it is more difficult to subject law-making and legal administration to Rule-of-Law discipline: non-centralized law-making is haphazard and effectively uncontrolled. At the same time the absence of an international sovereign might make the Rule of Law easier, because we are not faced with the Hobbesian problem of subjecting the sovereign to his own laws. It might even make the Rule of Law unnecessary. If the Rule of Law is conceived in the ordinary way as a check on governmental power, then it may be redundant in this context because there is no international government to limit.
That analysis, however, involves a misleading picture of international law, which treats individual sovereign states simply as sovereigns and aims to give them protections analogous to those needed by individuals at the level of national law. Formally that picture is correct, but it ignores a couple of important points: (i) sovereign states are also law-makers and officials of the international system; (ii) they need to be protected from one another in these capacities (as well as in more obvious ways, such as protection form one another’s aggression); and (iii) ultimately the point or purpose of international law is not the protection of sovereign states but the protection of the populations committed to their charge. The Rue of Law in the international realm, just as much as the Rule of Law at the national level, is designed to offer protection (directly or indirectly) to ordinary men and women against the various things that may be done to them by those who hold any sort of political power.

Wayne State Speakers include:

Ollie Johnson, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
"Affirmative Action and Racial Justice in Brazil"
Affirmative action has been one of the most significant developments in contemporary Brazilian politics. Governments, universities, and private institutions throughout the country have proposed, debated, and in many cases implemented policies to include members of the national population who had been excluded, underrepresented or simply absent. Women, Afro-descendants, public high school graduates, indigenous people, the poor, and the disabled have often been the target beneficiary groups. Despite the good intentions of its earliest sponsors, affirmative action has become an intensely polarizing public policy issue. This lecture will emphasize that affirmative action is a step on the path to racial justice in Brazil.

Denver Brunsman, Assistant Professor of History
"The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World"
British naval impressment, or forced service, was one of the greatest controversies in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Even as the practice helped the Royal Navy to control the seas against its imperial rivals, it tore sailors from their families, destabilized Atlantic seaports, and played crucial roles in both the American Revolution and War of 1812. At the heart of the controversy over impressment was a simple question: was it legal? If so, was it just, or did it violate traditional British liberty? A diverse group of Enlightenment thinkers, including Voltaire, David Hume, and Benjamin Franklin, all weighed in on these questions. Ultimately, legal arguments that impressment was a state necessity satisfied British courts, but the defense never silenced the institution’s many critics.

Christopher Peters, Associate Professor of Law
"Popular Sovereignty and Legality"
Popular sovereignty and legality – in particular, legal rights entrenched in a constitution – often are thought to conflict with each other in a way that mirrors the supposed tension between individual autonomy and legal authority. Both perceived conflicts, however, rest in part upon the problematic idea that law knows better than legal subjects what to do in particular cases. In fact, legal authority is best justified as a means of resolving disputes about what to do in particular cases. This dispute-resolving account of law dissolves the autonomy-authority dichotomy, and it suggests a way to accommodate popular sovereignty and constitutional rights: Judicially enforced constitutional rights might serve as a relatively neutral means of settling disagreements about the relationship between political majorities and political minorities.

Brad Roth, Associate Professor of Political Science and Law
"Sovereign Equality and Moral Disagreement"
For those who impute to the international legal order an inherent purpose to establish a universal justice that transcends the boundaries of territorial communities, the legal prerogatives associated with state sovereignty represent impediments to the global advance of legality. Sovereignty thus appears as the unconquered domain: a realm of lawlessness that must recede for international law to advance. This view, however, tends to neglect persistent and profound, albeit bounded, disagreement within the international community as to the requirements of justice. An alternative conception of international order predicates peace and cooperation on continued respect for each political unit's capacity to make and enforce the ineluctably contentious decisions needed to structure social life.

The international order's pluralism should never be confused with the "gorgeous mosaic" pluralism of the liberal imagination, in which an overarching unity as to "the right" renders inoffensive, and even enriching, the persistence of differences over "the good." A duty not to intervene in a foreign political community's internal conflict, so far as that duty extends, is a duty to respect patterns of coercion, and even violence, within a collectivity of which one is not a member. As long as profound disagreement about justice remains part of the human condition, an international pluralism, even in its ideal form, will at moments be a tense and even ugly pluralism, an accommodation among political communities dominated by incompatible positions on matters of justice and injustice, freedom and tyranny, and, ultimately, life and death.