Colloquium in Legal and Political Philosophy
Founded in Fall 2015, the Colloquium is an initiative of 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 on 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 2021, 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.
All sessions of the Colloquium will be hosted in person in Watson 517 from 3:30 pm -5:30 pm. In advance of each workshop with our speakers, an email will be circulated in the Faculty of Law, Department of Philosophy, and Department of Political Studies.
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 19, 2022
The Rule of Law and Respect for Persons
Tom is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law as well as a Tutorial Fellow at St Catherine's College. He works in legal philosophy, with special interest in questions relating to social ontology, as well as theoretical aspects of constitutional and administrative law.
Tom read for the BA in Jurisprudence and BCL at St Peter's College, Oxford. He then went on to complete the DPhil in Law at Balliol College, Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Leslie Green. Prior to coming to St Catherine's Tom was a Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has held visiting positions at New York University School of Law and University of Chicago Law School.
Monday, October 3, 2022
Jonathan Quong (USC Philosophy)
I was previously a lecturer and then senior lecturer at the University of Manchester (2003-13), and I received a D.Phil from Nuffield College, Oxford (2004). I've also held visiting positions at the Australian National University, Princeton University, and Tulane University. I am an associate editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, an associate editor of Ethics, and an area editor of Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.
Monday, October 24, 2022
Absolving God's Laws: Thomas Hobbes's Scriptural Strategies
Alison McQueen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.
McQueen’s book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time.
Her other ongoing research projects explore methods of textual interpretation, the ethics and politics of catastrophe, and treason in the history of political thought.
Monday, October 31, 2022
My research is about how the law (especially the criminal law) can be more fairly and efficiently administered in response to social and economic inequality. Before joining the law school faculty, I was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. I studied for my J.D. and my Ph.D in Philosophy at Stanford.
Monday, November 14, 2022
Erin Pineda teaches courses in the history of political thought, democratic theory, race and politics, social movements and American political thought. Her research interests include the politics of protest and social movements, Black political thought, race and politics, radical democracy and 20th-century American political development. Her book Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press 2021) shows how civil rights activists, in concert with anticolonial movements across the globe, turned to civil disobedience as a practice of decolonization in order to emancipate themselves and others, and in the process transform the racial order.
Pineda received her doctorate in political science from Yale University and her bachelor's degree from Barnard College. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Political Theory, European Journal of Political Thought, and History of the Present, along with the Boston Reviewand the London Review of Books blog. Prior to coming to Smith College in the fall of 2017, she was Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in Political Science at the University of Chicago, and a faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.
Monday, November 28, 2022
Gwen Bradford (Rice University)
I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rice University in Houston TX, where I have been since 2010. I work in value theory and normative ethics. In 2013-2014 I was a Faculty Fellow at the Murphy Institute at Tulane University. I did my graduate work at Yale University, where Shelly Kagan was my primary advisor. Before that, I was an undergraduate at The University of Toronto.
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 2020
- Lucas Stanczyk
- Pablo Gilabert
- Scott Hershovitz
- Kate Greasely
- Catherine Lu
- Seana Shiffrin
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