Books in the Just Ideas series

Tracks the development of the concept of human dignity in post-war ethics and politics, focusing on the Vatican, the United Nations, and U.S. Federal Bioethics.

From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today's most influential thinkers consider the challenge that contingent life poses to the broad claims of ethics. In doing so, they reshape the most debated concepts of moral philosophy.

From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today's most influential thinkers consider the challenge that contingent life poses to the broad claims of ethics. In doing so, they reshape the most debated concepts of moral philosophy.

Peter Goodrich (Edited By) Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law and Director of the Program of Law and Humanities, Cardozo School of Law.Michel Rosenfeld (Edited By) Michel Rosenfeld is University Professor of Law and Comparative Democracy and Justice and Sydney L. Robins Professor of Human Rights at Cardozo School of Law.

Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and Anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, the essays move from the translation and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. The book brings contemporary critique to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake.Contributors: Giovanna Borradori, Marinos Diamantides, Allen Feldman, Stanley Fish, Pierre Legrand, Bernadette Meyler, Michel Rosenfeld, Bernhard Schlink, Jeanne Schroeder, Laurent de Sutter, Katrin Trüstedt, Marco Wan

This book brings together the uBuntu jurisprudence of South Africa, as well as the most cutting-edge critical essays about South African jurisprudence on uBuntu. Can indigenous values be rendered compatible with a modern legal system? This book raises some of the most pressing questions in cultural, political, and legal theory.

Challenging the notion of theory as white and experience as black, Lewis Gordon here offers a philosophical portrait of the thought and life of the Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an example of "living thought" against the legacies of colonialism and racism, and thereby shows the continued relevance and importance of his ideas.

This book gives a theoretical and historical account of felon disenfranchisement, showing deep connections between punishment and citizenship practices in the United States. These connections are deployed quietly and yet perniciously as part of a political system of white supremacy, shaping contemporary regimes of punishment and governance.

Asking whether it is possible to develop an approach to studying political life that reflects its heterogeneity, Jane Anna Gordon offers the creolization of political theory as a response. Offering a critique of mere comparison, Gordon demonstrates the generative capacity of creolization through bringing together across time and place the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon.

Makes a contribution to contemporary aesthetic discourses through conversations on the borderlines of philosophy and literature, literature and the law, law and politics, politics and justice, justice and art in post -apartheid South Africa.

Examines the debate on forgiveness in relation to the Holocaust. Discusses Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower, Jean Ameiry's At the Mind's Limits, Vladimir Jankeileivitch's Forgiveness, Robert Antelme's The Human Race and Forgiving Doctor Mengele on Eva Mozes Kor in the light of Jacques Derrida's concept of forgiveness of the unforgivable.

Argues that Michel Foucault's account of power provides a inescapable framework for ethics. Traces Foucault's analyses of power and ancient and contemporary ethical practices. Articulates a Foucauldian ethics constituted by a critical attitude, with substantive but revisable values grounded in a practice of freedom.

The relation between law and revolution is one of the most pressing questions of our time. As one country after another has faced the challenge that comes with the revolutionary overthrow of past dictatorships, how one reconstructs a new government is a burning issue.

Fugitive Rousseau explores slavery and primitivism in Rousseau's political writings by contextualizing them in modern European empire and Roman imperial philosophy. Fugitive Rousseau argues against seeing Rousseau as either a nativist or cosmopolitan, either communitarian or liberal, and instead reconstructs a radical conception of freedom based in fugitive political resistance.

Through a series of literary and cultural analyses, this book examines current theories of resistance and their impact on contemporary Latin American cultural discourse, developing a cultural theory of "illiteracy."

Advancing the Enlightenment draws upon John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan to present a vision for progressive politics. Rather than defend Kant's ideas, heirs of the Enlightenment should create concepts such as overlapping consensus, rhizome, and space of testimony to facilitate alliances across religious and philosophical differences.

After situating sanctuary law within early Christian and late Roman traditions, this book explores a range sources, with special attention to the early English common law, and concludes by examining the legal arguments that led to the abolition of sanctuary privileges and ushered in state-centered age of criminal deterrence and social control.

The vociferous appetite of colonialism and its insatiable devouring of modern life has taken its toll on this world. This book shows that there has even been a colonization of critical theory, fitting it with prejudices that would limit knowledge to analytic reductions commensurate with Western metaphysics.

The front pages of our newspapers and the chatter on the blogs bear witness to the divorce of law from justice. Moving from the scientific revolution to the rise of law and economics, this title tells the story of how lawyers invented a science of law to preserve law's claim to moral authority.

Presents a plea that we rethink democracy not as one political regime or form among others but as that which opens up the very experience of being in common.

This book brings together the first sixteen years of constitutional jurisprudence addressing the meaning, role, and reach of dignity in the law of South Africa as a multi-racial democracy. The case law is coupled with analysis from a range of selected contributors.

This is the first book to review Ronald Dworkin's entire body of work in its relevance to constitutional dispensations in the Global South.