Search results for ""Author Melissa S. Williams""

Political exclusion and domination are common forms of injustice in democratic societies. What is at stake in choosing one or the other as a way of conceptualizing injustice? Can either concept serve as a master concept for all injustice, or do the phenomena of injustice require a more complex array of analytic categories? The contributors to this volume explore the concepts of exclusion and domination from a wide array of theoretical approaches—liberal and republican, feminist and pluralist. They address topics ranging from racial segregation to criminal sanctions, from the role of the political philosopher to the instruments of genocide. They disagree—sometimes mildly and sometimes profoundly—over how we should construe the forms of exclusion and domination that most command our attention. Ultimately, these authors shed important light on the meaning of justice and injustice in contemporary society. Contributors: Danielle Allen, Michael Blake, Sanford Levinson, Catharine MacKinnon, Martha Nussbaum, Philip Pettit, James Tully, and Miguel Vatter.

Read more less

A collection of essays that unpacks the history, nature, development, and beliefs of American Conservatism The topic of American conservatism is especially timely—and perhaps volatile. Is there what might be termed an “exceptional” form of conservatism that is characteristically American, in contrast to conservatisms found in other countries? Are views that are identified in the United States as conservative necessarily congruent with what political theorists might classify under that label? Or does much American conservatism almost necessarily reflect the distinctly liberal background of American political thought? In American Conservatism, a distinguished group of American political and legal scholars reflect on these crucial questions, unpacking the very nature and development of American conservative thought. They examine both the historical and contemporary realities of arguments offered by self-conscious conservatives in the United States, offering a well-rounded view of the state of this field. In addition to synoptic overviews of the various dimensions of American conservative thought, specific attention is paid to such topics as American constitutionalism, the role of religion and religious institutions, and the particular impact of the late Leo Strauss on American thought and thinkers. Just as American conservatism includes a wide, and sometimes conflicting, group of thinkers, the essays in this volume themselves reflect differing and sometimes controversial assessments of the theorists under discussion.

Read more less

Criminal tribunals, truth commissions, reparations, apologies and memorializations are the characteristic instruments in the transitional justice toolkit that can help societies transition from authoritarianism to democracy, from civil war to peace, and from state-sponsored extra-legal violence to a rights-respecting rule of law. Over the last several decades, their growing use has established transitional justice as a body of both theory and practice whose guiding norms and structures encompasses the range of institutional mechanisms by which societies address the wrongs committed by past regimes in order to lay the foundation for more legitimate political and legal order. In Transitional Justice, a group of leading scholars in philosophy, law, and political science settles some of the key theoretical debates over the meaning of transitional justice while opening up new ones. By engaging both theorists and empirical social scientists in debates over central categories of analysis in the study of transitional justice, it also illuminates the challenges of making strong empirical claims about the impact of transitional institutions. Contributors: Gary J. Bass, David Cohen, David Dyzenhaus, Pablo de Greiff, Leigh-Ashley Lipscomb, Monika Nalepa, Eric A. Posner, Debra Satz, Gopal Sreenivasan, Adrian Vermeule, and Jeremy Webber.

Read more less