Colloquium in Legal and Political Philosophy
Founded in Fall 2015, the Colloquium is an initiative by the Faculty of Law, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of Political Studies. It consists of a series of seminars and workshops within the broad ambit of the Colloquium’s mandate. Students registered with the course meet with the Colloquium convenors to discuss a recent paper by a leading scholar. The following week, the students meet with the author, along with other faculty members and invited guests, for a workshop about the paper.
The Colloquium’s aim is to promote closer collaboration between legal, philosophical, and political studies, by bringing together students and faculty from these overlapping disciplines to engage in rigorous intellectual engagement. The Colloquium contributes to the Queen’s Collaborative Program in Political and Legal Thought.
In Fall 2020, the Colloquium convenors are Professor Jean Thomas and Professor Grégoire Webber. The Colloquium is funded by Professor Webber's Canada Research Chair in Public Law and Philosophy of Law.
Further to decision of the University that the Fall 2020 semester be held remotely for the majority of students, all Colloquium sessions listed below will be hosted remotely.
All members of the Queen's community are welcome to attend the workshops and are invited to communicate with the convenors in order to receive information on how to do so.
Monday September 21, 2020 (3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.)
Lucas Stanczyk (Harvard University)
Climate Change and the Structure of Intergenerational Justice
Lucas Stanczyk works on topics at the intersection of political philosophy and political economy. His book manuscript develops a theory of justice in production. His other research and teaching is focused on ethical problems in global energy policy, and the ethics of growing inequality. He has been assistant professor of political science and affiliated faculty of philosophy at MIT. In 2017 he joined the philosophy department at Harvard.
Monday October 5, 2020 (3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.)
I am a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). I am a native of Argentina. My areas of specialization are ethics and social and political philosophy. Within these areas, I am currently doing research on social justice, human rights, and the role of the concept of feasibility in moral and political reasoning (including the consequences for the relation between “ideal” and “nonideal theory”). My research and teaching interests also include topics in global justice, distributive justice, democratic theory, contractualist theories in normative ethics, the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, Kant’s practical philosophy, Marxism and socialism, and the history of moral and political philosophy. (with Phil Parvin, Hodder, 2012); and numerous articles and chapters on feminist and liberal political philosophy.
Monday October 19, 2020 (3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.)
Scott Hershovitz (University of Michigan)
Scott Hershovitz is the Thomas G. and Mabel Long Professor of Law and a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. He also directs the Law and Ethics Program. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, he was an attorney-adviser on the appellate staff of the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He also served as a law clerk for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Hon. William A. Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Professor Hershovitz earned an AB in political science and philosophy and an MA in philosophy from the University of Georgia. He also holds a JD from Yale Law School and a DPhil in law from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Professor Hershovitz teaches and writes about jurisprudence and tort law. His publications include "The End of Jurisprudence" (Yale Law Journal, 2015), "The Model of Plans and the Prospects for Positivism" (Ethics, 2014), and "Harry Potter and the Trouble with Tort Theory" (Stanford Law Review, 2010).
Monday November 9, 2020 (3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.)
Seana Valentine Shiffrin is Professor of Philosophy and Pete Kameron Professor of Law and Social Justice at UCLA, where she has taught since 1992. Shiffrin received her B.A. degree from UC Berkeley where she was the University Medalist. She attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar and received the B.Phil. with Distinction and the D.Phil. in Philosophy. She earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She teaches courses on moral and political philosophy as well as contracts, freedom of speech, constitutional rights and individual autonomy, remedies and legal theory. She served for sixteen years as an associate editor of Philosophy and Public Affairs and serves as co-director of the UCLA Law and Philosophy Program. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016, she received the UCLA School of Law's Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Her research addresses issues in moral, political and legal philosophy, as well as matters of legal doctrine, that concern equality, autonomy, and the social conditions for their realization. She has written extensively on the morality of promising and the role of law in facilitating and fostering moral character, with a special emphasis on the connection between contracts and promises. Her recent book, Speech Matters, explored the ethics of communication and the connection between the prohibition on lying, freedom of speech, and moral progress.
Monday November 16, 2020 (3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.)
Catherine Lu is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, and Coordinator of the Research Group on Global Justice of the Yan P. Lin Centre. Her research and teaching interests intersect political theory and international relations, focusing on critical and normative studies of humanitarianism and intervention in world politics; colonialism, structural injustice, and global justice; alienation and reconciliation; and cosmopolitanism and the world state. She is the author of Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which won four book awards, and Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Monday November 30, 2020 (3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.)
Kristen Rundle (University of Melbourne)
Kristen Rundle joined Melbourne Law School in 2015 and teaches in the areas of administrative law and legal theory. She became the Co-Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies in December 2016. Kristen previously held appointments at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney, as well as adjunct, visiting and honorary appointments at the University of Toronto, Erasmus University, the University of Ottawa, and the Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University.
Kristen's research is located at the intersection of legal theory and public law in its effort to trace the conditions necessary for law to act as a limitation on power. Led by her work in legal philosophy on the intellectual legacy of the legal philosopher, Lon Fuller, Kristen's interest in interactions between legal forms and human agency has also informed her research into the connections between law and the Holocaust, her work on the legal and institutional attributes of the British child migration program, and her ongoing inquiry into questions of theory and practice arising from the neoliberal redesign of the administrative state, especially with respect to contracted-out public functions.
Course Requirements
Students enrolled in the Colloquium also meet separately with Professors Thomas and Webber for an additional two-hour seminar on alternate Mondays. Part of the seminar is devoted to a review of the preceding week’s Colloquium discussion and the greater part is devoted to preparing for the following week’s Colloquium workshop. Students are asked to write short papers and a final term paper, in addition to being active participants during the seminars and workshops.
Students Interested in Applying for Credit
Admission to the seminar is by application to the student’s department. Students in the Faculty of Law who wish to take the Colloquium for credit should express their interest to Professors Thomas and Webber further to the call for applications circulated in the summer. Students in the Department of Philosophy and in the Department of Political Studies should express their interest in their course selections. Priority will be awarded to graduate students in the Political and Legal Thought program.
Past Speakers
Fall 2019
- Daniel Wodak
- Clare Chambers
- Frederick Schauer
- Larissa Katz
- Dale Turner
- Arash Abizadeh
Fall 2018
- Lea Ypi
- Julie Dickson
- Barbara Herman
- Niko Kolodny
- Luis Duarte d'Almeida
- Tim Scanlon
Fall 2017
- Leslie Green
- Kristi Olson
- Sophia Moreau
- John Tasioulas
- Daniel Viehoff
- Jacob Levy
Fall 2016
- Cheshire Calhoun
- Anna Stilz
- Brian Tamanaha
- Michelle Dempsey
- Liam Murphy
- Wil Waluchow
Fall 2015
- Kimberley Brownlee
- John Gardner
- Sherry Colb
- Michael Dorf
- David Miller
- John Oberdiek
- Thomas Christiano