[SydPhil] Julius Stone Institute Jurisprudence seminars

[Kristie Miller]

>  
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> From: Kevin Walton 
> Sent: Tuesday, 23 October 2012 9:18 AM
> To: sydphil at arts.usyd.edu.au
> Subject: JSI Seminars
>  
> Please find below information about the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence’s next two seminars, which you are most welcome to attend. You can register for them here.
>  
> Best wishes,
> Kevin
>  
> 6pm Thursday 25 October
> Professor Paul Patton
> Historical normativity and the basis of rights
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> This paper aims to outline a historical concept of rights. By this, Paul Patton means one that does not depend on any transcendent conception of the moral basis of rights or of the human nature in which they are supposedly grounded. He argues that the only plausible basis for rights lies in the public political culture, history and institutions of existing societies. However, if we view rights in this way, there remains the problem of explaining how rights can maintain their normative force and critical function in relation to existing institutions and practices. Patton argues that John Rawls’s political liberalism can help resolve this problem and support a historical and critical conception of rights. Political liberalism draws a sharp distinction between moral, legal and political rights, while insisting that political normativity ultimately rests on the considered judgments of a people and the possibility of reasonable consensus among them. He argues that Rawls is committed to the historical character of such a consensus and therefore of the rights associated with a particular political conception of justice.
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> Paul Patton is Professor of Philosophy at The University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (Routledge, 2000) and Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford, 2010). He is editor of Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Blackwell 1996), (with Duncan Ivison and Will Sanders) Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples(Cambridge, 2000), (with John Protevi) of Between Deleuze and Derrida, (Continuum, 2003) and (with Simone Bignall) Deleuze and the Postcolonial (Edinburgh 2010). He has translated work by Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy and Baudrillard. His recent publications deal with aspects of French poststructuralism and a variety of topics in contemporary political philosophy.
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> 6pm Thursday 1 November
> Dr Michael Sevel
> Obedience to Law: Reasons, Intentions, and Doing the Right Thing
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> What is it to obey the law?  Michael Sevel begins to develop an answer to this neglected question.  It has long been debated whether there is a general duty to obey the law, though little attention has been given to what that duty is a duty to do.  At the same time, there is a large and growing literature that assumes that a person is sometimes justified in engaging in civil disobedience, though little attention has been given to what disobedience is.  The prevailing view among legal theorists, more often assumed than argued for, is that obedience consists in acting for a certain sort of reason – for the reason that an authority requires that one so act.  That view has recently come in for criticism, but Sevel thinks both the view and the criticisms are misguided.  Obedience to law (or to any other putative practical authority, e.g., a corporate manager, parent, religious leader, and so on) requires acting with a certain sort of knowledge of the action one is required to do, as specified by the authority, regardless of one’s reasons for doing it.  This view makes salient the fact that authorities, whether or not they create reasons for action, nonetheless specify (and sometimes create) actions for their subjects to do, and further require that those actions, and not others, are to be done.  Seeing the matter this way helps us avoid certain philosophical puzzles about how authorities can ever make a difference in the thought and action of their subjects.
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> Michael Sevel joined Sydney Law School in 2012 as Lecturer in Jurisprudence. Previously he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Miami School of Law (2011-12), where he taught jurisprudence, torts, and admiralty law, and Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Law of the European University Institute (2010-11).  He received a J.D. with honours and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, in 2008 and 2010, respectively.  His research interests include jurisprudence, the rule of law, and maritime law.
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> KEVIN WALTON
> 
> Sydney Law School | Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence 
> THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
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> T +61 2 9351 0286  | F +61 2 9351 0200
> E kevin.walton at sydney.edu.au  | W http://sydney.edu.au
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Dr. Kristie Miller
University of Sydney 
Senior Research Fellow
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and
The Centre for Time
The University of Sydney
Sydney Australia
Room 407, A 14

kmiller at usyd.edu.au
kristie_miller at yahoo.com
Ph: +612 9036 9663
http://www.kristiemiller.net/KristieMiller2/Home_Page.html









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