Podcasts about Ronald Dworkin

Preview: Conversation with Dr. Ronald Dworkin re the modern trend of overdiagnosis and overmedicalization. More later.  1961

1/2: #M.D: OVERDIAGNOSIS.  OVERMEDICALIZATION RONALD DWORKIN, CIVITAS INSTITUTE 1931

2/2: #M.D: OVERDIAGNOSIS. OVERMEDICALIZATION.  RONALD DWORKIN, CIVITAS INSTITUTE 1960

Good evening. The show begins at the frozen Federal Reserve... 1904 NYC CBS EYE ON THE WORLD WITH JOHN BATCHELOR FIRST HOUR 9:00-9:15 #Markets: Frozen Fed. Liz Peek, The Hill, Fox News and Fox Business 9:15-9:30 #POTUS: Whither Harris? Liz Peek, The Hill, Fox News and Fox Business 9:30-9:45 #Yemen: Bombing Sana'a. Jonathan Schanzer, FDD 9:45-10:00 #Syria: Al Sharaa Jihadist Massacres Druze. Jonathan Schanzer, FDD SECOND HOUR 10:00-10:15 #Yemen: Bombing Infrastructure. Bridget Toomey and Bill Roggio, FDD 10:15-10:30#Yemen: Bombing Infrastructure. Bridget Toomey and Bill Roggio, FDD 10:30-10:45 #Africa: Recruiting in Somalia. Caleb Weiss and Bill Roggio, FDD 10:45-11:00 #Africa: PRC Everywhere. Caleb Weiss and Bill Roggio, FDD THIRD HOUR 11:00-11:15 #Canada: "Not For Sale." Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs 11:15-11:30 #Yemen: What Peace? Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs 11:30-11:45 #Australia: Losing an Election. Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs 11:45-12:00 #King Charles: The King's Speech. Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs FOURTH HOUR 12:00-12:15 1/2: #M.D: Overdiagnosis. Overmedicalization. Ronald Dworkin, Civitas 12:15-12:302/2: #M.D: Overdiagnosis. Overmedicalization. Ronald Dworkin, Civitas 12:30-12:45 #Berlin: Disappointing Merz. Judy Dempsey, Senior Scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Berlin 12:45-1:00 AM #Berlin: EU Distrusts PRC. Judy Dempsey, Senior Scholar, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Berlin

Doctors are expected to make high-stakes decisions quickly and often. And while plenty of medical guidelines exist, sometimes finding the right answer relies on intuition as much as logic. So what happens when suddenly that intuition is … gone? Retired anesthesiologist Dr. Ronald Dworkin tells Anita about the day he lost his intuition and how he got it back. She also talks to one of her favorite medical minds (her brother-in-law, Dr. Amit Gupta) about training intuition in the next generation of doctors.Meet the guests:- Dr. Ronald Dworkin is a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and a retired anesthesiologist- Dr. Amit Gupta is a gastroenterologist, assistant professor of medicine at UNC-Chapel Hill and Anita's brother-in-lawRead the transcript | Review the podcast on your preferred platformFollow Embodied on Instagram Leave a message for EmbodiedYou can check out Climbing the Walls here.

Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett is the author of A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist, a new memoir about his remarkable legal career. He joins Jeffrey Rosen to discuss his role in the evolution of originalism from a philosophy of judicial restraint to one of constitutional conservatism dedicated to restoring “the lost Constitution.” Resources: Randy Barnett, A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist (2024)  Randy Barnett, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (2014)  Randy Barnett, “Two Conceptions of the Ninth Amendment,” (1989)   Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (1978)  Antonin Scalia, “Originalism: The Lesser Evil,” (1989)   National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012)  “Originalism: A Matter of Interpretation,” NCC America's Town Hall Program (2022)  Stay Connected and Learn More: Questions or comments about the show? Email us at podcast@constitutioncenter.org.   Continue today's conversation on Facebook and Twitter using @ConstitutionCtr.   Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate, at bit.ly/constitutionweekly.  You can find transcripts for each episode on the podcast pages in our Media Library. Donate

La philosophie nord-américaine contemporaine a donné au monde un certain nombre de grands penseurs tels que John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Michael Sandel ou encore Martha Nussbaum et Charles Taylor. À cette liste, nous pouvons ajouter Michael Walzer. Auteur influent des dernières décennies, Walzer a beaucoup travaillé sur des questions relatives à la société juste, à la guerre juste, l'universalisme et le multiculturalisme, la justice distributive ou encore la tolérance. Il reste pourtant assez peu connu en France. Cécile Renouard, docteure en philosophie et autrice de l'ouvrage Michaël Wazer ou l'art libéral du civisme, nous fait découvrir ce philosophe et sa pensée. Entretien réalisé par Parnel Ledaga, Doctorant en philosophie politique aud Facultés Loyola Paris. Lien de l'ouvrage de Cécile Renouard : https://www.temps-present.fr/ouvrage/michael-walzer-ou-lart-liberal-du-civisme/ Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Recebemos a professor Delamar Dutra para uma conversa sobre Ronald Dworkin.   Leia mais → O post 202 – Ronald Dworkin, com Delamar Dutra apareceu primeiro em filosofia pop.

In this episode of Searching for Medicine's Soul, Aaron was joined by Dr. Ronald Dworkin, a 30-year practicing anesthesiologist, professor of political philosophy at George Washington University, and author of Medical Catastrophe: Confessions of an Anesthesiologist. Aaron and Ronald discuss the importance of medical physicians having a liberal arts education and the consequences of a lack thereof. 

Ep. 82 (Part 2 of 2) | Constitutional law expert and criminal justice professor Mark Fischler has a thirst for justice and a gift for teaching. With cogency and passion, Mark explains that law is not the absolute that we perhaps thought, but an ever changing reflection of the values we hold as a society. Law is a developmental process, and will benefit from our own dedication to inner moral development. Mark shows how the law can (and has) become ever more inclusive, with the potential to serve and uphold the dignity of all peoples, all beings. Because of its abstract clauses, there is room in the Constitution to interpret the law in ways that are attuned with our pluralistic society. Mark calls on us to come together and decide what we value as a people—there is no mandate in democracy that all decision making power must reside in the hands of the Supreme Court, which has only had the sort of unilateral power it enjoys today since the 1950s.This is no dry, legalistic conversation, but a truly illuminating vision of the potential of the law to embody justice, inclusivity, compassion. It is also a solid overview of where we have come from and where we are now, referencing many landmark rulings of the Supreme Court. Finally, this is spiritually inspiring as well—Mark tells the story of the transformational epiphany he had as a young man that led to his career as a public defender, onto the spiritual path, and eventually to become a well-respected, award-winning professor of criminal justice. Mark's perspective on the law is far ranging, embracing human rights, animal rights, the rights of all beings. It comes from a place of deep care and compassion: “What is the happiness that the Declaration of Independence talks about, what is suffering?” Be inspired by Mark's wise and knowledgeable teachings and the potential of the law to create a just society for all. Recorded January 4, 2023.“Law is our collective coming together and deciding what we value as a people.”(For Apple Podcast users, click here to view the complete show notes on the episode page.)Topics & Time Stamps – Part 2The 4th branch of government: administrative agencies like the EPA that implement policies are now under very specific guidelines from the legislature (01:40)Abstract language in the Constitution requires interpretation and the challenge of finding balance between restrictively specific guidelines and abstract directives (06:45)The history of the Supreme Court and how the Court is 10–20 years behind the rest of the culture's center of gravity (09:44)The doctrine of originalism: is the Constitution a fixed document? (12:36)Ronald Dworkin, primary legal philosopher of his generation: “The law is absolutely an act of interpretation.” (15:55)Originalism's effect on Brown v. Board of Education, the Equal Protection Clause, and Plessis v. Ferguson (16:35)Abraham Lincoln was competing with the courts on slavery—his point of view was far more holistic, respecting the equal dignity of all people (20:47)We all need to be involved in the determination of fundamental human rights and not leave it up to the Supreme Court (24:24)Our Constitution, because of the abstract clauses, allows us ways to start to relate differently to our environment and all beings (26:00)The law is a social institution embodying the ways we agree to relate to each other as a society (28:09)We need to become...

A new project, the Undisciplined Reading Series, starts here! Every two weeks, I will upload a video discussing one chapter of a canonical legal theory text from the 20th century. The four books in the series will be by Hans Kelsen, HLA Hart, Ronald Dworkin and Niklas Luhmann.

Continuing on Ronald Dworkin's "Unenumerated Rights: Whether and How Roe Should be Overruled" (1992) and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2021) decision featuring guest Robin Linsenmayer. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion including the supporter-exclusive part three to this episode. Sponsors: Visit StoryWorth.com/pel to save $10 making it easy for your loved one to write their story. Get a highly effective donation of up to $100 matched at Givewell.org, pick PODCAST and enter THE PARTIALLY EXAMINED LIFE at checkout.

Does the U.S. Constitution guarantee the right to an abortion? We discuss Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2021) and Ronald Dworkin's "Unenumerated Rights: Whether and How Roe Should be Overruled" (1992). With guest Robin Linsenmayer. Get more at partiallyexaminedlife.com. Visit partiallyexaminedlife.com/support to get ad-free episodes and tons of bonus discussion. Sponsor: Check out the Conversations with Coleman podcast.

Indian society, the Indian state and the Indian economy are all complex beasts that defy simple narratives. Suyash Rai joins Amit Varma in episode 307 of The Seen and the Unseen to describe how he has tried to make sense of it all -- and how he tries to make a difference. (For full linked show notes, go to SeenUnseen.in.) Also check out: 1. Suyash Rai at Carnegie India, Twitter and The Print. 2. Ideas and Institutions -- The Carnegie India newsletter co-written by Suyash Rai. 3. Interpreting India -- The Carnegie India podcast sometimes hosted by Suyash Rai. 4. Carnegie India's YouTube Channel. 5. Demonetisation -- Episode 2 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Suyash Rai). 6. Religion and Ideology in Indian Society — Episode 124 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Suyash Rai). 7. Suyash Rai on GDP growth: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 8. Suyash Rai on public finance: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 9. Suyash Rai on the financial system: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 10. Suyash Rai on changes in state-capital relations in recent years: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 11. Suyash Rai on the judiciary: 1, 2. 12. Suyash Rai on utopian laws that do not work in practice: 1, 2, 3. 13. Suyash Rai on Demonetisation: 1, 2, 3, 4. 14. Paper Menagerie — Ken Liu. 15. Natasha Badhwar Lives the Examined Life -- Episode 301 of The Seen and the Unseen. 16. Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan -- Shahid Amin. 17. Understanding Gandhi. Part 1: Mohandas — Episode 104 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 18. Understanding Gandhi. Part 2: Mahatma — Episode 105 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Ram Guha). 19. The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society -- CG Jung. 20. A Memoir of Mary Ann -- By Dominican Nuns (introduction by Flannery O'Connor). 21. Nathaniel Hawthorne on Amazon and Wikipedia. 22. Flannery O'Connor and “A Memoir of Mary Ann” -- Daniel J Sundahl. 23. GK Chesterton on Amazon and Wikipedia. 24. Alasdair MacIntyre on Amazon, Wikipedia and Britannica. 25. The Moral Animal -- Robert Wright. 26. Gimpel the Fool -- Isaac Bashevis Singer (translated by Saul Bellow). 27. George Orwell on Amazon and Wikipedia. 28. Frédéric Bastiat on Amazon and Wikipedia. 29. Reflections on Gandhi -- George Orwell. 30. Interview of Harshal Patel in Breakfast With Champions. 31. The Double ‘Thank-You' Moment — John Stossel. 32. The Facts Do Not Matter — Amit Varma. 33. The Hippocratic Oath. 34. Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart -- Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M Todd and the ABC Research Group on 'fast and frugal heuristics'). 35. The Right to Property -- Episode 26 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan). 36. The World of Premchand: Selected Short Stories — Munshi Premchand (translated and with an introduction by David Rubin). 37. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood -- Howard Pyle. 38. Ivanhoe -- Walter Scott. 39. The Swiss Family Robinson -- Johann David Wyss. 40. Treasure Island -- Robert Louis Stevenson. 41. One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 42. Saul Bellow on Amazon and Wikipedia. 43. Dangling Man -- Saul Bellow. 44. Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud on Amazon. 45. Aristotle on Amazon, Britannica and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 46. Plato on Amazon, Britannica and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 47. Gorgias -- Plato. 48. The Dialogues of Plato. 49. Ramayana, Mahabharata and Amar Chitra Katha. 50. Nausea -- Jean-Paul Sartre. 51. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 52. Political Ideology in India — Episode 131 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rahul Verma). 53. Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays -- Marcel Proust. 54. What Have We Done With Our Independence? — Episode 186 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Pratap Bhanu Mehta). 55. The Gentle Wisdom of Pratap Bhanu Mehta — Episode 300 of The Seen and the Unseen. 56.  The Aristocratic Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville -- Suyash Rai.   57. Narendra Modi takes a Great Leap Backwards — Amit Varma. 58. Ronald Dworkin on Amazon and Wikipedia. 59. Immanuel Kant on Amazon, Britannica and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 60. Beware of the Useful Idiots — Amit Varma. 61. Don't Choose Tribalism Over Principles -- Amit Varma. 62. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 63. Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It -- James Q Wilson. 64. The Moral Sense -- James Q Wilson. 65. Karthik Muralidharan Examines the Indian State -- Episode 290 of The Seen and the Unseen. 66. State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century — Francis Fukuyama. 67. The Origins of Political Order — Francis Fukuyama. 68. Political Order and Political Decay — Francis Fukuyama. 69. Going from strong as in scary to strong as in capable -- Suyash Rai and Ajay Shah.   70. The Life and Times of Montek Singh Ahluwalia -- Episode 285 of The Seen and the Unseen. 71. Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy. 72. Utilitarianism on Wikipedia, Britannica and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 73. Practical Ethics -- Peter Singer. 74. Reasons and Persons -- Derek Parfit. 75. The Repugnant Conclusion. 76. Governing the Commons -- Elinor Ostrom. 77. A Pragmatic Approach to Data Protection -- Suyash Rai. 78. Technology and the Lifeworld -- Don Ihde. 79. Postphenomenology -- Don Ihde. 80. Kashi Ka Assi — Kashinath Singh. 81. Looking at Lucas's Question After Seventy-five Years of India's Independence -- Suyash Rai. 82. India's Lost Decade — Episode 116 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Puja Mehra). 83. The Lost Decade — Puja Mehra. 84. The Importance of the 1991 Reforms — Episode 237 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Shruti Rajagopalan and Ajay Shah). 85. The Art and Science of Economic Policy — Episode 154 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah). 86. In Service of the Republic — Vijay Kelkar & Ajay Shah. 87. Douglass North and Albert O Hirschman. 88. The Intellectual Odyssey of Albert Hirschman -- Suyash Rai. 89. India's Problem is Poverty, Not Inequality — Amit Varma. 90. Democracy in America -- Alexis De Tocqueville. 91. Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy -- Pierre Manent. 92. The Populist Century -- Pierre Rosanvallon. 93. The Theory of Populism According to Pierre Rosanvallon -- Suyash Rai. 94. After Virtue -- Alasdair MacIntyre. 95. Philosophy of Technology -- Don Ihde. 96. Technology and the Virtues -- Shannon Vallor. 97. Nihilism and Technology -- Nolen Gertz. 98. Lant Pritchett on Amazon, Google Scholar and his own website. 99. Harnessing Complexity -- Robert Axelrod and Michael D Cohen. 100. Mahabharata, Odyssey, Divine Comedy and Rashmirathi. 101. Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar on Spotify. 102. Andrei Rublev -- Andrei Tarkovsky. 103. Andrei Tarkovsky, Luis Buñuel, Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. 104. Mission Impossible, Bad News Bears and Anand. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. And subscribe to The India Uncut Newsletter. It's free! Episode art: ‘The Past and the Future' by Simahina.

Wnuk otruł dziadka i został skazany za to morderstwo. Jednak pozostał spadkobiercą, wskazanym w ważnym testamencie, a nie ma jeszcze przepisów o tzw. niegodności dziedziczenia z powodu popełnienia przestępstwa przeciwko spadkodawcy. Czy powinien dziedziczyć? Słynna sprawa Elmera stanowi punkt wyjścia do kolejnego wykładu, w którym pytamy: czy moralność powinna mieć wpływ na to, jak stosujemy prawo? Naszym przewodnikiem jest Ronald Dworkin, filozof ducha prawa, który jasno mówi, że nie wolno w stosowaniu prawa ograniczać się tylko do jego litery. Ale czy nie rodzi to ryzyka, że sędziowie zaczną narzucać nam swoją moralność? Że sędzia o konserwatywnych poglądach będzie prawo stosował konserwatywnie, a sędzia o poglądach liberalnych ten sam tekst prawa będzie rozumiał liberalnie? Czy wtedy nadal rządzić będzie nami prawo, czy też czyjeś widzimisię? O tym wszystkim w kolejnym wykładzie z serii “Imperium tekstu kontratakuje”.

Professor Başak Çalı (Hertie School) joins us to talk about the authority of international law, Ronald Dworkin's interpretivism, and human rights. Publications referred to in the episode: Çalı, Başak. The Authority of International Law: Obedience, Respect, and Rebuttal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Çalı, Başak. ‘On Interpretivism and International Law', European Journal of International Law 20, No. 3 (2009): 805–822. Dworkin, Ronald. ‘A New Philosophy for International Law'. Philosophy & Public Affairs 41, no. 1 (2013): 2–30 (posthumous). Gorobets, Kostiantyn. ‘Solidarity as a Practical Reason: Grounding the Authority of International Law'. Netherlands International Law Review 69, no. 1 (2022): 3–27. If you wish to help Ukraine to stand up against the Russian aggression, here are some trusted charities that you can donate to: Come Back Alive – the biggest military-oriented charity foundation that helps the Ukrainian army with almost anything; Prytula Foundation – another large charity that works in a close association with the military and the Ministry of Defence; United24 – a governmental fundraiser with different funds for defining and defence, medical aid, and rebuilding of Ukraine.

No episódio de hoje conversamos com Cristina Consani, professora na UFPR, sobre a atividade filosófica que toma o Direito, a Ciência Jurídica, como objeto de sua análise. Falamos acerca da possibilidade de uma definição para o Direito a partir de Herbert Hart, Ronald Dworkin e Joseph Raz. A Filosofia do Direito de Jeremy Waldron bem como seu debate com Dworkin e os limites da tolerância tratando mais detidamente do discurso de ódio. Cristina analisa também o descompasso entre os âmbitos normativo e descritivo da relação entre poder judiciário e política. Por fim, falamos sobre a sua pesquisa atual a respeito do consenso e conflito na política internacional, pensando os modelos propostos por Habermas e Chantal Mouffe.

On this episode I am joined by Professor Daniel Farber to discuss originalism, its flaws, and the role "history and tradition" plays in constitutional adjudication. Professor Farber explains why "foundationalists," including originalists, frequently get constitutional interpretation wrong.  In Desperately Seeking Certainty: The Misguided Quest for Constitutional Foundations, he and his co-author, Professor Suzanna Sherry, don't pull any punches: "We believe that foundationalism is doomed to failure no matter how brilliant the theorist or how important the foundational idea."In the book, the Professors critique the constitutional theories espoused by Robert Bork, Justice Antonin Scalia, Richard Epstein, Akhil Amar, Bruce Ackerman, and Ronald Dworkin. Professor Farber is the Sho Sato Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.  He has authored more than 20 books and more than 100 articles on topics ranging from Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Environmental Law, and Presidential Power.Listen. Enjoy. Share.E-mail your questions, comments, and suggestions to summarilypod@gmail.com.  

Editor R. R. Reno is joined by Ronald Dworkin to discuss his article from the May print edition, “The Politics of Unhappiness.” They discuss the ways in which cognitive therapy, mood stabilizing drugs, and virtual reality have infiltrated our psychic lives and transformed American politics.

Editor R. R. Reno is joined by Ronald Dworkin to discuss his article from the May print edition, “The Politics of Unhappiness.” They discuss the ways in which cognitive therapy, mood stabilizing drugs, and virtual reality have infiltrated our psychic lives and transformed American politics.

In this episode I talk about the cases two prominent philosophers -- Thomas Nagel and Ronald Dworkin -- make for "equality," and discuss some of the difficulties they encounter. Sponsor: CrowdHealth - - Enter promo code: WOODS.

Ronald Dworkin, ein berühmter Wissenschaftler des amerikanischen Verfassungsrechts, sagte einmal: „Wir sind Untertanen des juristischen Imperiums, Gefolgsleute seiner Methoden und Ideale, im Geiste gebunden, während wir über das debattieren, was wir folglich tun müssen.“ Das hebräische Wort für Richter (shofet) trägt gleichzeitig auch die Bedeutung vonRonald Dworkin, ein berühmter Wissenschaftler des amerikanischen Verfassungsrechts, sagte einmal: „Wir sind Untertanen des juristischen Imperiums, Gefolgsleute seiner Methoden und Ideale, im Geiste gebunden, während wir über das debattieren, was wir folglich tun müssen.“ Das hebräische Wort für Richter (shofet) trägt gleichzeitig auch die Bedeutung von...

Mit dieser Folge von «Ausgeglaubt» haben wir uns in die analoge Öffentlichkeit gewagt: Die Aufnahme ist an einem live-Anlass im Studentencafé «Hirschli» entstanden, mit einem engagierten Publikum im Hintergrund. Stephan und Manuel diskutieren über das Buch des atheistischen Rechtsphilosophen Ronald Dworkin «Religion ohne Gott». Dworkin entwirft ein faszinierendes Programm einer atheistischen Religiosität, welche mit den Gottesgläubigen zentrale Werte teilt, aber eben auf den Gottesbegriff verzichtet. Gerade auf dem Hintergrund des letzten Gesprächs über den Religionsverächter Richard Dawkins setzt diese Folge einen spannenden Kontrapunkt. Im Blick auf die Begründbarkeit universaler ethischer Normen werden sich Stephan und Manuel gar nicht einig – wie es doch noch zu einem versöhnlichen Ende kommt, könnt ihr selber nachhören…;-)

A long edition for your leisurely Sunday. Thanks for your patienceIndia Policy Watch #1: Call Of Duty Insights on burning policy issues in India- RSJMany among you of a particular age might remember a familiar trope from old Hindi films. A key protagonist, grievously injured or sick, is wheeled into the operation theatre. There’s a small red bulb on top of the door that turns on. Grim music plays in the background. After a while, the surgeon steps out, take off his gloves and looks at the assorted mix of anxious relatives with resignation. Then he says, “ab inhe dawa ki nahin dua ki zaroorat hai” (he needs prayers now; not umm… paracetamol). That’s how I feel when I hear public discourse in any democracy get tangled up between rights and duties. Not a lot of good has come out of exhorting people to do their duty in the history of this world. So pardon my anxiety when I find constitutional functionaries conflate rights and duties, or worse, seem to privilege duties over rights. But that’s exactly what I have been coming across in the past two months. Two examples will suffice. Last week the PM made these remarks in an event organised by Brahma Kumaris Sanstha:At the same time, we also have to admit that in the 75 years after Independence, a malaise has afflicted our society, our nation and all of us. It is that we turned away from our duties and did not give them primacy. In the last 75 years, we only kept talking about rights, fighting for rights and wasting our time. The issue of rights may be right to some extent in certain circumstances, but neglecting one's duties completely has played a huge role in keeping India vulnerable.India lost considerable time because duties were not accorded priority. We can make up for the gap which has been created due to primacy about rights while keeping duties at bay in these 75 years by discharging duties in the next 25 years.A few days later, the President had this to say in his address to the nation on the eve of the Republic Day:Rights and duties are two sides of the same coin. The observance of the Fundamental Duties mentioned in the Constitution by the citizens creates the proper environment for enjoyment of Fundamental Rights.….Patriotism strengthens the sense of duty among citizens. Whether you are a doctor or a lawyer, a shopkeeper or office-worker, a sanitation employee or a labourer, doing one’s duty well and efficiently is the first and foremost contribution you make to the nation.There are many, and their numbers are probably rising in India, who might wonder what’s remotely problematic with this kind of framing of rights and duties? Isn’t it true that we, Indians, don’t do enough for our country? Or, is this not what JFK meant when uttered those famous lines - “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Isn’t a call for public service and invoking a spirit of self-sacrifice for nation-building important? This is what leaders are supposed to do, they might say. I won’t disagree so long as there’s clarity on the nature of rights and duties and where they are placed in relation to one another. This is often misunderstood in India where duty or its nearest equivalent Sanskrit term, dharma, has great civilisational and cultural significance. Rights are often seen as some kind of a western enlightenment imposition on our society which otherwise knew its dharma and its karma. Unfortunately, this as we will see, reflects both a shallow understanding of rights and of dharma.Rights Aren’t EarnedThe first notion to appreciate is that regardless of social, ethnic or temporal differences, an individual is born with certain rights. You could call them fundamental or inalienable. That she is endowed with these rights is prior to any other knowledge about her. This privilege of rights is what creates a corresponding set of duties among others. For instance, the right to life places the onus on others to not kill her. This can be of a legal nature which is enforceable by laws of the society. Or, in case of other rights, the onus on others could be a moral one which is then protected by a code of living together that’s understood by all. This onus then is the duty that an individual has towards rest of the community. It stems from accepting that others have rights. In other words, rights are ontologically prior to duties. This is the basis for the creation of any community. You respect individual rights, you create codes to protect them and living by that code becomes the duty of the members of the community. This is how societies are built. Ronald Dworkin, the American philosopher, in his book Taking Rights Seriously, calls rights as ‘trumps’ that can be used to overturn any justification of collective imposition on an individual:“Individual rights are political trumps held by individuals. Individuals have rights when, for some reason, a collective goal is not a sufficient justification for denying them what they wish, as individuals, to have or to do, or not a sufficient justification for imposing some loss or injury upon them.We may therefore say that justice as fairness rests on the assumption of a natural right of all men and women to equality of concern and respect, a right they possess not by virtue of birth or characteristic or merit or excellence but simply as human beings with the capacity to make plans and give justice.”Between Rights And DutiesBut is being a rights absolutist enough to have a functioning and effective society? What’s the kind of interplay between rights and duties? Are there any grounds to limit the definition of a right to serve a larger public benefit? This is particularly tricky territory. A useful framework to think about this is to use what’s called “the Hohfeldian incidents” in jurisprudence. Named after the American legal theorist, Wesley Hohfeld, it explains the internal structure of any right to have four components or ‘elements’, namely, privilege, claim, power and immunity. Understanding this ‘molecular structure’ of a right is key to understanding its interplay with duty.Privilege: You have the right to sleep on a weekend afternoon. This right is a privilege. You have no duty not to do it. No one can say it is your duty not to sleep on a weekend afternoon. Claim: You have an employment contract with your employer and this gives you the right to be paid your salary. This right is a claim. That is you have a claim on your employer to pay you a salary. And your employer has the duty to pay you the wages. So, a claim-right always comes with a duty for someone who is the bearer of that duty (in this case the employer). The direction of the duty is often debated. For instance, you could argue that the employer has the claim-right that you do a certain amount of work based on the contract and you have the duty to do that work. Anyway, claim-right is critical to understand the relation between the citizen and the government as well. Take taxes as an example. The government has the claim-right to collect taxes from citizens to fund its work. The citizen bears the duty to pay taxes. Privileges and Claims are often called the primary rules in Hohfeldian analysis. They define what activities can or cannot be performed by individuals. Power and Immunity are the secondary rules which explain how someone can change the primary rules.Power: Power allows an individual to change his own or someone else’s primary rules (privilege or claim). So, the CEO of a firm may order someone to work on a weekend afternoon and take away the privilege of sleeping. Or, your friend may waive the claim that you do not drive away with his car by allowing you to borrow it during the weekend. This waiver endows you with a privilege that you otherwise didn’t have. Immunity: When you don’t have the power to change someone else’s primary rules, then that person has immunity. For example, you have immunity from the Indian state forcing you to change your religion. Opposites and Correlatives:What Hohfeld did following this was to arrange these incidents in a logical structure of “opposites” and “correlatives”. He also added a few other terms: ‘no-claim’ which is the opposite of claim; and, ‘liability’ and ‘disability’ that correlate with someone having power or immunity respectively. In a simple form this can be shown as:OppositesIf A has a Claim, then A lacks a No-claimIf A has a Privilege, then A lacks a DutyIf A has a Power, then A lacks a DisabilityIf A has an Immunity, then A lacks a Liability.CorrelativesIf A has a Claim, then some person B has a DutyIf A has a Privilege, then some person B has a No-claimIf A has a Power, then some person B has a LiabilityIf A has an Immunity, then some person B has a Disability.As stated here:A privilege is the opposite of a duty; a no-right is the opposite of a right. A disability is the opposite of a power; an immunity is the opposite of a liability.‘Correlatives’ signifies that these interests exist on opposing sides of a pair of persons involved in a legal relationship. If someone has a right, it exists with respect to someone else who has a duty. If someone has a privilege, it exists with respect to someone else who has no-right. If someone has a power, it exists with respect to someone else who has a liability. If someone has an immunity, it exists with respect to someone else who has a disability.A right can be enforced by a lawsuit against the person who has the correlative duty. A privilege negates that right and duty, and typically would be asserted as an affirmative defense in the lawsuit. A power is the capacity to create or change a legal relationship.Simply put, there’s an interplay between rights and duties but in no circumstance are rights and duties ‘two sides of the same coin’ or ‘upholding of duties lead to a downstream privilege of enjoying rights’. Our Civilisation Is No ExceptionLastly, there’s always a call to some kind of civilisational value among Indians where we apparently held our duty above everything else. The idea of maryada purushottam or various kinds of dharma - saadharan dharma, vishesh dharma and swadharma - are invoked to suggest we placed the adherence to our duties as the highest form of self-realisation and as the basis for organising our lives. Is this true? There’s, of course, the usual challenge of understanding the context of Indian scriptures. These concepts are variously described with a lack of coherence because what we are left with fragments of metatexts with no clear interpretation of why and how these ideas have come about. As commonly understood, dharma is about doing the right thing. A simple definition is that it is a code of doing the right things at a universal level that ‘holds all of us together’. It is a necessary condition for a functioning society but is it ontologically prior to individual rights? It is not clear. The fact that dharma is invoked to hold us together already presupposes we are together in some form. And it can be argued that coming together can only be on the basis of respecting the individual rights of one another in the first place. On that, we must have built an architecture of dharma to make sure public-spiritedness and working for the collective is codified in our way of life. In some ways, I can agree we might have figured out Hohfeldian logic in our scriptures much earlier than the West. But it is a far stretch to claim some kind of exceptionalism about being a society where duties came before rights. The Emphasis On DutyThe reason I get anxious when I hear the discourse on duties is that it has a terrible past. Even in India, the founding fathers and mothers in all their wisdom didn’t include the idea of duties in our constitution. The bizarre idea of fundamental duties was included in the Constitution by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency through the 42nd amendment. There it has remained since. And it isn’t as if the post-enlightenment thinkers weren’t taken in by the idea of duties. Mazzini, whose thoughts and essays were instrumental in the creation of the Italian state, wrote about duties extensively. The exhortation to a people to think of themselves as different and better than that of the other and begetting proto-nationalism in the late 19th century Europe were his key contributions. Sample this:…. Wherever you may be, into the midst of whatever people you have been driven by circumstances, fight for the liberty of that people if the moment calls for it; but fight as Italians, so that the blood which you shed may win honor and love, not for you only, but for your Country. And may the constant thought of your soul be for Italy, may all the acts of your life be worthy of her, and may the standard beneath which you range yourselves to work for Humanity be Italy's. Do not say I; say we. Be every one of you an incarnation of your Country, and feel himself and make himself responsible for his fellow-countrymen; let each one of you learn to act in such a way that in him men shall respect and love his Country. Your Country is one and indivisible. As the members of a family cannot rejoice at the common table if one of their number is far away, snatched from the affection of his brothers, so you should have no joy or repose as long as a portion of the territory upon which your language is spoken is separated from the Nation. As you will notice, while Mazzini begins his famous essay The Duties of Man (1844-58) by claiming the first duty of man is to humanity, he gradually sinks into ideas that had terrible consequences for humanity half a century later in the form of two world wars. There’s a reason why there have been no recorded instance in history when people have agitated for their duties. All uprisings and rebellions are about the fights for rights. People understand their duties both intuitively and as part of the social compact. It is part of traditions in communities. Rights are often trampled in the name of duty by establishment and authoritarian figures to perpetuate power. There are temporary occasions when an overemphasis on duties is valid. During a war (like that Kennedy line on country during the peak of the cold war) or during an internal crisis (Gandhi often invoked it). But those exceptions aside, it is otherwise brought in by establishment to explain underperformance or to shift the blame on to citizens from the shoulders of the state. It is equivalent to gaslighting the citizens in a democracy.India Policy Watch #2: Buy Now Pay Later ft. GovernmentInsights on burning policy issues in India- Pranay KotasthaneThe finance minister will present the union budget in Parliament next week. A related news item flagging the rising debt commitments caught my attention:"Interest burden is likely to stay around Rs 9.30 lakh crore for FY23," a finance ministry official told ET.This is an increase of 15 percent on the Rs 8.1 lakh crore which has been budgeted for interest payments in the current fiscal. The amount is also 16.9 percent higher than the revised estimate for FY21.”If government finances don’t interest you, these numbers may sound meaninglessly large. Nevertheless, let me try and explain why you should care.To the question “what is the single largest expenditure item of the union government?”, the two most common answers I get are defence or salaries. Both answers are wrong. The biggest expenditure item is the interest paid by the union government to borrowers on past loans. The chart below from the previous year’s budget tells us that roughly a fifth of the government’s total expenditure is being spent on interest payments. The news report from earlier this week suggests that this interest payment is set to increase further this year. The single most important reason we should care is because of intergenerational inequity — the more that governments live beyond their present means today, the less money they leave for future governments and citizens to decide their own spending priorities. That’s what a real debt-trap looks like. Of course, many governments across the world run deficits and the Indian government is not an exception. Most often, governments take loans to finance physical and social infrastructure. If that is the case, intergenerational inequity is mitigated to the extent that the outputs continue to be used by future generations. However, that is not the case in India. The union government still runs a sizable revenue deficit, meaning that a part of government borrowing is being used merely to keep the government running today. In other words, we are snatching money from future generations to meet the demands of the current generation’s citizens and government employees. This tells us why the rampant expansion of government expenditure is not just irresponsible but also unethical. I’ll end this section with a quote by Martin Feldstein from his LK Jha Memorial Lecture at RBI:“Unfortunately, it is easy to ignore budget deficits and postpone dealing with them because the adverse effects of budget deficits are rarely immediate. Fiscal deficits are like obesity. You can see your weight rising on the scale and notice that your clothing size is increasing, but there is no sense of urgency in dealing with the problem. That is so even though the long-term consequences of being overweight include an increased risk of a sudden heart attack as well as of various chronic conditions like diabetes. Like obesity, government deficits are the result of too much self-indulgent living as the government spends more than it collects in taxes. And, also like obesity, the more severe the problem, the harder it is to correct: the overweight man has a harder time doing the exercise that could reduce his weight and the economy with a large deficit and debt is trapped by increasing interest payments that cause the deficit and debt to rise more quickly. I emphasize the analogy to stress the point that budget deficits need attention now even when their adverse effects may not be obvious.”India Policy Watch #3: The Great Indian ExitInsights on burning policy issues in India- Pranay KotasthaneIndia has long been a leading outlier as a source for out-migration. Further, thanks to a Lok Sabha question in December 2021, we know that more than 1 lakh people have been renouncing their Indian citizenship every year over the last several years.Emigration is an important consideration if not an important life goal for many Indians. At one end of the income spectrum, it is a ticket out of poverty. On the other end, it leads to a step-up in one’s quality of life. But how should we see emigration from the lens of public policy? Beyond facile “brain drain vs brain gain” discussions, how do we understand the impact of emigration on India? Let’s establish the boundary conditions first. Because emigration is a voluntary act by an individual, it is a force of immense good. As emigration is one of the partial answers for achieving yogakshemah, the Indian State must make it easier for Indians who want to leave India. There is no justification in a liberal democracy for moralising Indians on staying back just because, for instance, they received subsidised education in a government college.Going beyond individual choices, what’s the aggregate effect of emigration on India? Turns out, there’s no good empirical answer. While states generally pay close attention to immigrants, the country of origin has little incentive to keep track of the lifecycle of emigration. Consequently, this area of research is not exactly a gold mine. And so, for the last comprehensive assessment of India’s emigration, we have to turn to a 2010 book Diaspora, Development, and Democracy: The Domestic Impact of International Migration from India by well-known political scientist Devesh Kapur. Given below is my annotated summary of the book. Kapur remarks that:“one cannot a priori posit whether international migration is “good” or “bad” for a country. The outcomes depend heavily on the policies of the country of origin—which of course can (and do) change over time.”Coming to India’s case, he contends that the economic effects of emigration have been mixed while the political effects of emigration are largely positive. The Economic Impact of EmigrationLet’s take the economic effects first. The migration of less-skilled labour to West Asia has had a positive effect not just for those who emigrated but also for those who were left behind as the decrease in labour supply has led to more domestic migration and rising wages. Further, incoming remittances have played a big role in stabilising India’s macroeconomic situation.In contrast, the economic effects of the emigration of high-skilled labour to the West are more ambiguous. On the positive side, the success of these Indians has improved the reputation of India and Indians worldwide. Moreover, some of them have acted as bridges for the flow of ideas, technologies, and information back to India. On the negative side, the exit of professionals has contributed to making institutions that were globally competitive at the time of independence, mediocre organisations with low ambition and drive. Kapur also suggests a reason as to why the famed Indian diaspora has not been able to make India a manufacturing hub:“India’s economically successful diaspora has developed a comparative advantage in white-collar skilled services such as information technology (IT) and tertiary medical services. Consequently, the investments they have influenced into India have also been in these sectors, rather than blue-collar labor-intensive manufacturing sectors (the diamond industry is an exception). The Indian example illustrates a broader point about how the sectoral expertise acquired by emigrants overseas diffuses back to the country of origin. Parallels can be draw with the Chinese example, where the economically successful Chinese diaspora (especially in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan) made its wealth (and acquired relevant capabilities) in labor-intensive manufacturing, and therefore its investments into China were in related sectors as well.”The Political Impact of EmigrationThe political effects of emigration, Kapur argues, are positive in two ways. One, returning emigres and international exposure have helped in strengthening the commitment to liberal democratic politics. Twelve years after the book was published, this claim appears weaker. Liberal democratic politics in the west itself has been battered. Moreover, the role of the Indian diaspora in furthering majoritarian anti-liberal politics has grown at a much faster rate than its antidote.Two, Kapur suggests that the exit possibilities of emigration served an important social function. It acted as a pressure relief valve for the dominant upper-caste elites, making them less opposed to the political ascendancy of the marginalised social groups. In the absence of emigration opportunities, the contestation over job reservations and education quotas would’ve been much sharper. Here again, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that the possibility of emigration hasn’t been an entirely effective pressure-releasing mechanism, as evidenced by the new legislation for reservations to economically backward but upper-caste sections.The book’s conclusion resonated with me. Ultimately, where diasporas become sources of power or areas of weaknesses principally depends on domestic policy and politics. First, forty years of socialist thinking, directly and indirectly, made emigrants distant. Illustrating this point, Kapur writes:“In those years, when the Indian community was thrown out of East Africa, socialist India pressed the United Kingdom to admit them, seeing little benefit in attracting the community’s commercial skills and capital back to India. And when the British government finally gave in to pressure from India, it was seen as a major foreign policy achievement.”Second, poor policy and business environments continue to make India less lucrative for emigrants:“The well-known infrastructural and policy weaknesses in manufacturing have steered the diaspora’s role in IT more toward the software side, rather than developing the hardware sector. The decades of migration from Kerala have made it a remittance dependent economy, but one that has been unable to capitalize on this any further because of political and policy constraints in the state.”And third, while India and Indians love to celebrate its emigrants who make it big in other countries, it does not allow the same opportunities for its immigrants. In short, emigration from India does have a few negative political and economic effects. But mitigating these effects ultimately requires doing the tough job of improving the domestic social, economic, and business environment. There’s no shortcut. Matsyanyaaya: Who’s Arm-twisting Whom?Big fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action— Pranay Kotasthane(Cross-posted from Technopolitik — Takshashila Institution’s High Tech Geopolitics Newsletter)This story has it all: geopolitics, anti-trust, national pride, future of technology, and capital markets.The PreludeARM (mentioned as “Arm” from here on) licenses its CPU designs to customers such as Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and MediaTek. For a long time, it has been trying to break into the data centre CPU market, dominated by Intel and AMD’s x86 designs. Despite an impressive list of customers, Arm’s financial fortunes haven’t been great — revenues through licensing fees and royalties have been on the decline since 2016.Even though Arm is the sole supplier for mobile companies, why would this happen? Primarily due to four reasons. First, the mobile phone market is already saturating. Second, customers such as Broadcom, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Samsung, and Apple have an expansive Arm architecture license (as against implementation licenses), allowing them to design their customised Arm-compatible processors. So, Arm has little leverage over the sales from these companies. Third, Arm’s big bet on another market — datacentres — hasn’t worked out. And fourth, Arm cannot increase its license fee to compensate for sagging revenues because it faces a new challenge in the form of RISC-V technology.The PlayersIn September 2020, Nvidia announced a deal to buy Arm. Since then, Nvidia’s shares have almost doubled. But after months of being blocked by four regulators — in China, the US, the EU, and the UK — reports suggest that Nvidia is planning to abandon the deal.Let’s have a look at all the perspectives first.In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is opposing the deal because the deal would “distort Arm’s incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia’s rivals.” Unsurprisingly, many high-flying competitors of Nvidia such as Qualcomm and Intel are staunchly opposed to this deal as they feel Nvidia might partially delay or block their access to Arm CPU blueprints. The EU antitrust regulators also have similar objections to the deal.In contrast, the dominant narrative in the UK is that the deal would hurt national pride. In ordinary times, such a narrative wouldn’t have carried far. But when the entire world looks at semiconductors from a strategic lens, this view has policy relevance. So, even though Arm is already owned and controlled by a Japanese investment firm, Softbank, the UK has renewed calls to list it back on the London Stock Exchange.Next, Arm and Nvidia’s joint submission to the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) comprehensively captures the two companies' viewpoints. Their main argument is that Arm faces an uncertain future without a takeover. The submission explicitly says:Deal opponents romanticize Arm’s past and either ignore or disparage Arm’s most powerful competition. But if Arm had market power, it would have sizable revenue growth and would be enormously profitable.The submission further claims why this deal would increase competition instead of reducing it.For China, the concerns are entirely different. This deal would mean a more potent lever in the hands of the US to constrain China’s semiconductor sector. The US has already demonstrated that it could deploy wide-ranging export controls to block access to chips to geopolitical adversaries. With Nvidia controlling Arm, China fears that the US can easily prohibit Arm from selling to Chinese customers. As a result, China has been staunchly opposing this deal.To be sure, the US can still pressurise Arm to not sell to customers in the absence of a deal. Just like it prevented the Dutch semiconductor manufacturing equipment star ASML from selling cutting-edge Extreme Ultra-Violet lithography machines to Chinese companies. Nevertheless, getting the UK — for whom this has become a national pride issue — to comply with such restrictions is far more complicated.The ResultThe deal opponents have their unique reasons. There’s no concrete evidence to suggest that the opponents are collaborating. Regardless, the net geopolitical effect is that China would be immensely relieved if the deal fails. At the same time, China would want to get RISC-V further up to speed with Arm so that this geopolitical weakness is taken out of the question over the long term.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Podcast] On Puliyabaazi, Pranay and Saurabh have an in-depth conversation on India’s newly announced semiconductor policies. [Speech] A speech on regulating capital markets by CB Bhave — one of the best takes you’ll find on the subject. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit publicpolicy.substack.com

Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule joins Aimee and Oliver to discuss and at times debate the merits of common-good constitutionalism (which he explains in greater detail in his forthcoming book from Polity Press), "pretty-good" constitutionalism, originalism, the administrative state, and much more. To listen to the full episode, become a patron at patreon.com/whatsleft Suggested reading Vermeule, "Beyond Originalism," https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/ "Local Wisdom," https://newrepublic.com/article/98607/henry-friendly-supreme-court-david-dorsen "Rules, Commands and Principles in the Administrative State," https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3660026 "Conspiracy Theories" (with Cass Sunstein), https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/119/ Adrian's entire SSRN article catalog, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=231075 Ronald Dworkin, "The Moral Reading of the Constitution," https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1996/03/21/the-moral-reading-of-the-constitution/ Dworkin, "The Arduous Virtue of Fidelity," https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3328&context=flr "The Code of Justinian ," https://web.archive.org/web/20130727022718/http://www.freewebs.com/vitaphone1/history/justinianc.html

Dr. Ingo Venzke, Professor of Public International Law at the University of Amsterdam, joins us to talk about semantics in international law, semantic authority, and struggle for meaning. Publications mentioned in the episode: Ingo Venzke, How Interpretation Makes International Law: On Semantic Change and Normative Twists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Joseph Raz, Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Joseph Raz, ‘The Problem of Authority: Revisiting the Service Conception', Minnesota Law Review 90 (2006): 1003–44. Rudolf von Jhering, The Struggle for Law (Chicago: Callaghan and Company, 1915). Ingo Venzke and Kevin Jon Heller (eds.), Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Mohammed Bedjaoui, Towards a New International Economic Order (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979).

The problem of the rule of law is inescapable in any society - and even more especially in the context of economic development. Policies that promote prosperity cannot be devoid of considerations for the rights of people who make up the society and the economy, regardless of all technocratic pretensions otherwise. Adam Smith himself stated that economic prosperity thus requires ''a tolerable administration of justice''. Some readers might already start objecting to my treatment of the rule of law as merely an ''instrumental variable'' of a more desirous economic end-state, whereas the more familiar treatment is that of a society governed by the rule of law as an end-state in itself. There are merits to such quibbles, but there is also plenty of evidence in modern history that the rule of law is an essential cog in the wheel of prosperity.WHAT IS ''RULE OF LAW''?''Rule of law'' is the generally accepted description for how well a political system conforms to formal rules - rather than functioning through the whims of the most powerful social or political agents. For a society to be described as one functioning under rule of law - there must be rules and those rules must be equally applied to everyone in the society. Let us call this Letter of the Law. These rules are usually expressed through the constitution of a country and enforced through the courts. But simply having rules and enforcing them does not suffice in the making of the rule of law - and it is an incomplete (however accurate) conception of it. Some rules can be drafted in bad faith or with the express purpose of protecting the interest of the political elites responsible for governance. This is why many scholars have argued that the rule of law can only be said to exist in a state that functions under rules designed to protect the civil liberties (individual rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc.) of the people living within its territory. Let us call this the Character or Spirit of the Law. The character of the law understood as the fulfilment of constitutionally-guaranteed civil liberties is the most common standard by which governance is judged to conform or deviate from the rule of law. For example, countries that routinely violate the rights of citizens in whatever form cannot be said to be governed by the rule of law, even if it has a written constitution. Consideration of the character of the law is the context to understanding the work of my guest on this episode, Paul Gowder.He is a professor of law at NorthWestern university with a broad research interest and expertise. Paul departs from this common derivation of the character of the law as rooted in liberty - and argued that for the rule of law to be broadly applicable in different societies (not dependent on the political institutions and ethical ideals of any specific society) with varying cultures and traditions of governance, it must be rooted in Equality. To understand Paul's argument, I will briefly state two important aspects that set the tone for our conversation - this should not be taken as an exhaustive summary of his work and I encourage you to check out his website and book. The first is that the rule of law as a principle regulates the actions of the state (government), and it is not to be conflated with other rules that regulate the actions of citizens. This is such an important point because one of the most egregious expressions of the law is when a government uses it to oppress citizens. Secondly, Paul outlines three components of the rule of law based on equality as 1) regularity - the government can only use coercion when it is acting in ''good faith'' and under ''reasonable interpretation'' of rules that already exist and are specific to the circumstances. 2) publicity - the law has to be accessible to everyone without barriers (''officials have a responsibility to explain their application of the law, ...failure to do so commits hubris and terror against the public"). 3) generality - the law must be equally applicable to all. Putting all these elements together gives us a rule of law regime where everyone is equal before the law, and the state does not wantonly abuse citizens or single out particular groups for systematic abuse.I enjoyed this conversation very much, and I want to thank Paul for talking to me. Thank you guys too for always listening, and for the other ways you support this project.TRANSCRIPTTobi; I greatly enjoyed your work on the rule of law. I've read your papers, I've read your book, and I like it very much. I think it's a great public service if I can say that because for a lot of time, I am interested in economic development and that is mostly the issue that this podcast talks about. And what you see in that particular conversation is there hasn't really been that much compatibility between the question of the rule of law or the laws that should regulate the actions of the state, and its strategy for economic development. Most of the time, you often see even some justification, I should say, to trample on rights in as much as you get development, you get high-income growth for it. And what I found in your work is, this does not have to be so. So what was your eureka moment in coming up with your concept, we are going to unpack a lot of the details very soon, but what motivated you to write this work or to embark on this project?Paul; Yeah, I think for me, part of the issue that really drives a lot of how I think about the rule of law and you know, reasons behind some of this work is really a difference between the way that those of us who think about human freedom and human equality, right? I think of it as philosophers, right. So they're philosophers and philosophers think about the ability of people to live autonomous lives, to sort of stand tall against their government, to live lives of respect, and freedom and equality. And that's one conversation. And so we see people, like, you know, Ronald Dworkin, thinking about what the rule of law can deliver to human beings in that sense. And then, you know, there's this entire development community, you know, the World Bank, lots of the US foreign policy, all of the rest of those groups of people and groups of ideas, talk about the rule of law a lot and work to measure the rule of law and invest immense amounts of money in promoting what they call the rule of law across the world. But mostly, it seems to be protecting property rights for multinational investment. And I mean, that makes some kind of sense, if you think that what the rule of law is for is economic development, is increasing the GDP of a country and integrating it into favourable international networks of trade. But if you think that it's about human flourishing, then you get a completely different idea of what the rule of law can be, and should be. And so this sort of really striking disjuncture between the two conversations has driven a lot of my work, especially recently, and especially reflecting even on the United States, I think that we can see how domestic rule of law struggles - which we absolutely have, I mean, look at the Trump administration, frankly, as revolving around this conflict between focusing on economics and focusing on human rights and human wellbeing.Tobi; It's interesting the polarization you're talking about. And one way that I also see it play out is [that] analyst or other stakeholders who participate in the process of nation-building in Africa, in Nigeria… a lot of us that care about development and would like to see our countries grow and develop and become rich, are often at opposite ends with other people in the civil society who are advocating for human rights, who are advocating for gender equality, who are advocating for so many other social justice issues. And it always seems like there's no meeting ground, you know, between those set of views, and I believe it does not have to be so. So one thing I'm going to draw you into quite early is one of the distinctions you made in so many of your papers and even your book is the difference between the conception of the rule of law that you are proposing versus the generally accepted notion of the rule of law based on individual liberty in the classical liberal tradition. I also think that's part of the problem, because talking about individual liberty comes with this heavy ideological connotation, and giving so many things that have happened in Africa with colonialism and so many other things, nobody wants any of that, you know. So you are proposing a conception of the rule of law that is based on equality. Tell me, how does that contrast with this popularly accepted notion of the rule of law [which is] based on individual liberty?Paul; So I think the way to think about it is to start with the notion of the long term stability of a rule of law system. And so here is one thing that I propose as a fact about legal orders. Ultimately, any kind of stable legal order that can control the powerful, that is, that can say to a top-level political leader, or a powerful multinational corporation, or whomever, no, you can't do this, this violates the law and make that statement stick depends on widespread collective mobilization, if only as a threat, right. And so it's kind of an analytic proposition about the nature of power, right? If you've got a top-level political leader who's in command of an army, and they want to do something illegal, it's going to require very broad-based opposition, and hence very broad-based commitment to the idea of leaders that follow the law in order to prevent the person in charge of an army from just casually violating it whenever they want. Okay, accept that as true, what follows from that? Well, what follows from that is that the legal system has to actually be compatible with the basic interests of all. And what that tends to mean and I think this is true, both historically, and theoretically, is leaving aside the philosophical conceptual difference between liberty and equality, which I'm not sure is really all that important. Like I think, ultimately, liberty and equality as moral ideas tend to blur together when you really unpack them. But practically speaking, any stable legal order that can control the powerful has to be compatible with the interests of a broad-based group of the human beings who participate in that legal order. And what that entails is favouring a way of thinking about the rule of law that focuses on being able to recruit the interests of even the worst off. In other words, one that's focused on equality, one that's focused on protecting the interests of the less powerful rather than a laissez-faire libertarian conception of the rule of law that tends to be historically speaking, compatible with substantial amounts of economic inequality, hyper-focus on ideas - like property rights, that support the long-standing interests of those who happen to be at the top of the economy, often against the interests of those that happened to be at the bottom of the economy, right. That's simply not a legal order that is sustainable in the long run. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the way that this has played out in [the] United States history, in particular. I might have a book that's coming out in December that focuses on a historical account of the development of the rule of law, particularly in the United States. I mean, it's my own country. And so at some point, I had to get talked into writing that book. And we can see that in our history right at the get-go, you know, in the United States, at the very beginning, the rule of law dialogue tended to be focused on protecting the interests of wealthy elite property holders. And this actually played a major part, for example, in the United States' most grievous struggle, namely the struggle over slavery, because slaveholders really relied on this conception of the Rule of Law focusing on individual freedom and property rights to insist on a right to keep holding slaves against the more egalitarian idea that “hey, wait a minute, the enslaved have a right to be participants in the legal system as well.” And so we can see these two different conceptions of legality breaking the United States and breaking the idea of legal order in the United States right at the get-go. And we see this in country after country after country. You know, another example is Pinochet's Chile, which was the victim of [the] United States' economics focused rule of law promotion efforts that favoured the interests of property holders under this libertarian conception over the interests of ordinary citizens, democracy and mass interests. In other words, over the egalitarian conception, and again, you know, devolved into authoritarianism and chaos.Tobi; Yeah, nice bit of history there, but dialling all the way, if you'll indulge me... dialling all the way to the present, or maybe the recent past, of course; where I see another relevance and tension is development, and its geopolitical significance and the modernization projects that a lot of developed countries have done in so many poor and violent nations, you know, around the world. I mean, at the time when Africa decolonized, you know, a lot of the countries gravitated towards the communist bloc, socialism [and] that process was shunted, failed, you know, there was a wave of military coups all over the continent, and it was a really dark period.But what you see is that a lot of these countries, Nigeria, for example, democratized in 1999, a lot of other countries either before then or after followed suit. And what you see is, almost all of them go for American-style federal system, and American-style constitutional democracy, you know. And how that tradition evolved... I mean, there's a lot you can explain and unpack here... how that tradition evolved, we are told is the law has a responsibility to treat people as individuals. But you also find that these are societies where group identities are very, very strong, you know, and what you get are constitutions that are weakly enforced, impractical, and a society that is perpetually in struggle. I mean, you have a constitution, you have rules, and you have a government that openly disregards them, because the constitutional tradition is so divorced from how a lot of our societies evolve. And what I see you doing in your work is that if we divorce the rule of law from the ideal society, you know [like] some societies that we look up to, then we can come up with a set of practical propositions that the rule of law should fulfil, so walk me through how you resolve these tensions and your propositions?Paul; Well, so it's exactly what you just said, right? I mean, we have to focus on actual existing societies and the actual way that people organize their lives, right. And so here's the issue is, just like I said a minute ago, the rule of law fundamentally depends on people. And when I say people, I don't just mean elites. I don't just mean the wealthy, I don't just mean the people in charge of armies, and the people in charge of courthouses, right? Like the rule of law depends, number one, on people acting collectively to hold the powerful to the law. And number two, on people using the institutions that we say are associated with the rule of law. And so just as you describe, one sort of really common failure condition for international rule of law development efforts - and I don't think that this is a matter of sort of recipient countries admiring countries like the US, I think this is a matter of international organizations and countries like the US having in their heads a model of what the law looks like and sort of pressing it on recipient countries.But you know, when you build institutions that don't really resemble how the people in a country actually organize their social, political and legal lives, you shouldn't be surprised when nobody uses them. You shouldn't be surprised when they're ineffective. But I mean, I think that it's been fairly compared to a kind of second-generation colonialism in that sense where countries like the US and like Germany, attempt to export their legal institutions to other countries, without attending to the ways that the people in those countries already have social and legal resources to run their lives. And so I'll give you an example that's interesting from Afghanistan. So in Afghanistan, sort of post the 2000s invasion, and so forth, some researchers, mostly affiliated with the Carnegie Institution, found that the really effective rule of law innovations, the really effective interventions were ones that relied on existing social groups and existing structures of traditional authority. And so, you know, you could build a courthouse and like, ask a formal centralized state to do something, maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't, maybe people would use it, maybe they wouldn't. But if you took local community leaders, local religious leaders, gave them training, and how to use the social capital they already have to help do things like adjudicate disputes, well, those would actually be effective, because they fit into the existing social organization that already exists. So I'll give you another example. I have a student who... I had… I just graduated an S.J.D student from Uganda who wrote a dissertation on corruption in Uganda. And one of the things that he advocated for I think, really sensibly was, “ okay, we've got this centralized government, but we've also got all of these traditional kingdoms, and the traditional kingdoms, they're actually a lot more legitimate in the sociological sense than the centralized government.People trust the traditional kingdoms, people rely on the traditional kingdoms for services, for integrating themselves into their society. And so one useful way of thinking about anti-corruption reforms is to try and empower the traditional kingdoms that already have legitimacy so that they can check the centralized government. And so that kind of work, I think, is where we have real potential to do global rule of law development without just creating carbon copies of the United States. Tobi; The process you describe, I will say, as promising as it may sound, what I want to ask you is how then do you ensure that a lot of these traditional institutions that can be empowered to provide reasonable checks to the power of the central government also fulfil the conditions of equality in their relation to the general public? Because even historically, a lot of these institutions are quite hierarchical...Paul; Oh, yeah... and I think in particular, women's rights are a big problem.Tobi; Yeah, yeah and there's a lot of abuses that go on locally, even within those communities, you know. We have traditional monarchies who exercise blanket rights over land ownership, over people's wives, over so many things, you know, so how then does this condition of equality transmit across the system?Paul; Yeah, no, I think that's the really hard question. I tell you right now that part of the answer is that those are not end-state processes. By this I mean that any realistic conception of how we can actually build effective rule of law institutions, but also genuinely incorporate everyone's interests in a society is going to accept that there's going to be a kind of dynamic tension between institutions.You know, sometimes we're going to have to use the centralized state to check traditional institutions. Sometimes we're going to have to use traditional institutions to check the centralized state. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize-winning political scientist and her sort of the Bloomington School of Political Economy, emphasized for many years this idea that they called Polycentrism. That is the idea that multiple, overlapping governance organizations that are sort of forced to negotiate with one another, and forced to learn from one another, and really integrate with one another in this sort of complex tension-filled kind of way, actually turns out to be a really effective method of achieving what we might call good governance. And part of the reason is because they give a lot of different people, in different levels of [the] organization, ways to challenge one another, ways to demand inclusion in this decision, and let somebody else handle that decision, and participate jointly in this other decision. And so I think that neither the centralized state alone, nor traditional institutions alone is going to be able to achieve these goals. But I think efforts to integrate them have some promise. And India has done a lot of work, you know, sort of mixed record of success, perhaps, but has done a lot of work in these lines. I think, for example, of many of the ways that India has tried to promote the growth of Panchayats, of local councils in decision making, including in law enforcement, but at the same time, has tried to do things like promote an even mandate, the inclusion of women, the inclusion of Scheduled Castes, you know, the inclusion of the traditionally subordinated in these decision making processes. And as I said, they haven't had complete success. But it's an example of a way that the centralized state can both support traditional institutions while pushing those institutions to be more egalitarian.Tobi; Let's delve into the three conditions that you identified in your work, which any rule of law state should fulfil. And that is regularity, publicity, and generality. Kindly unpack those three for me.Paul; Absolutely. So regularity is...we can think of it as just the basic rule of law idea, right? Like the government obeys the law. And so if you think about this notion of regularity, it's... do we have a situation where the powerful are actually bound by legal rules? Or do we have a situation where, you know, they just do whatever they want? And so I'd say that, you know, there's no state that even counts as a rule of law state in the basic level without satisfying that condition, at least to some reasonable degree. The idea of publicity really draws on a lot of what I've already been saying about the recruitment of broad participation in the law. That is, when I say publicity, what I mean is that in addition to just officials being bound by the law, ordinary people have to be able to make use of the law in at least two senses. One, they have to be able to make use of the law to defend themselves. I call this the individualistic side of publicity, right? Like if some police officer wants to lock you up, the decision on whether or not you violated the law has to respond to your advocacy, and your ability to defend yourself in some sense. And then there's also the collective side of this idea of publicity, which is that the community as a whole has to be able to collectively enforce the boundaries of the legal system. And you know, we'd talk a lot more about that, I think that's really the most important idea. And then the third idea of generality is really the heart of the egalitarian idea that we've been talking about, which is that the law has to actually treat people as equals. And one thing that I think is really important about the way that I think about these three principles is that they're actually really tightly integrated. By tightly integrated, I mean you're only going to get in real-world states, regularity (that is, officials bound by the law) if you have publicity (that is, if you have people who aren't officials who actually can participate in the legal system and can hold officials to the law). We need the people to hold the officials in line. You're only going to get publicity if you have generality. That is, the people are only going to be motivated to use the legal system and to defend the legal system if the legal system actually treats them as equals. And so you really need publicity to have stable regularity, you really need generality to have stable publicity.Tobi; Speaking of regularity, when you say what constrains the coercive power of the state is when it is authorised by good faith and reasonable interpretation of pre-existing reasonably specific rules. That sounds very specific. And it's also Scalonian in a way, but a lot of people might quibble a bit about what is reasonable, you know, it sounds vague, right? So how would you condition or define reasonable in this sense, and I know you talked about hubris when you were talking about publicity. But is there a minimum level of responsibility for reasonability on the part of the citizen in relation to a state?Paul; That's, in a lot of ways, the really hard philosophical question, because one of the things that we know about law is that it is inherently filled with disagreement, right? Like our experience of the legal system and of every state that actually has something like the rule of law is that people radically disagree about the legal propriety of actions of the government. And so in some sense, this idea of reasonableness is kind of a cop-out. But it's a cop-out that is absolutely necessary, because there's no, you know, what [Thomas] Nagel called a view from nowhere. There's no view from nowhere from which we can evaluate whether or not on a day to day basis, officials are actually complying with the law in some kind of correct sense. But again, I think, you know, as you said, to some extent, that implies that some of the responsibility for evaluating this reasonableness criterion falls down to day to day politics, falls down to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Like, my conception of the rule of law is kind of sneakily a deeply democratic conception, because it recognizes given the existence of uncertainty as to what the law actually requires of officials both on a case by case basis. And, broadly speaking, the only way that we're ever going to be able to say, Well, you know, officials are more or less operating within a reasonable conception of what their legal responsibilities are, is if we empower the public at large to make these judgments. If we have institutions like here in the US, our jury trials, if we have an underlying backstop of civil society and politics, that is actively scrutinizing and questioning official action.Tobi; So speaking of publicity, which is my favorite...I have to say...Paul; Mine too. You could probably tell. Tobi; Because I think that therein lies the power of the state to get away with abusive use of its legitimacy, or its power, so to speak. When you say that officials have a responsibility to explain their application of the law, and a failure to do so commits hubris and terror against the public. So those two situations - hubris and terror, can you explain those to me a bit?Paul; Yeah. So these are really, sort of, moral philosophy ideas at heart, particularly hubris. The idea is there's a big difference, even if I have authority over you, between my exercising that authority in the form of commands and my exercising that authority in the form of a conversation that appeals to your reasoning capacity, right. So these days, I'm thinking about it in part with reference to... I'm going to go very philosophical with you here... but in reference to Kant's humanity formulation of the categorical imperative, sorry. But that is a sense in which if I'm making decisions about your conduct, and your life and, you know, affecting your fundamental interests, that when I express the reasons to you for those decisions, and when I genuinely listen to the reasons that you offer, and genuinely take those into account in my decision making process, I'm showing a kind of respect for you, which is consistent with the idea of a society of equals.As opposed to just hi, I'm wiser than you, and so my decision is, you know, you go this way, you violated the law, right? Are we a military commander? Or are we a judge? Both the military commander and the judge exercise authority, but they do so in very different ways. One is hierarchical, the other I would contend is not.Tobi; Still talking about publicity here, and why I love it so much is one important, should I say… a distinction you made quite early in your book is that the rule of law regulates the action of the state, in relation to its citizens.Paul; Yes.Tobi; Often and I would count myself among people who have been confused by that point as saying that the rule of law regulates the action of the society in general. I have never thought to make that distinction. And it's important because often you see that maybe when dealing with civil disobedience, or some kind of action that the government finds disruptive to its interests, or its preferences, the rule of law is often invoked as a way for governments to use sometimes without discretion, its enforcement powers, you know.So please explain further this distinction between the rule of law regulating the state-citizen relation versus the general law and order in the society. I mean, you get this from Trump, you get this from so many other people who say, Oh, we are a law and order society, I'm a rule of law candidate.Paul; Oh, yeah.Tobi; You cannot do this, you cannot do that. We cannot encourage the breakdown of law and order in the society. So, explain this difference to me.Paul; Absolutely, then this is probably the most controversial part of my account of the rule of law. I think everybody disagrees with this. I sort of want to start by talking about how I got to this view. And I think I really got to this view by reflecting on the civil rights movement in the United States in particular, right. Because, you know, what we would so often see, just as you say about all of these other contexts, is we would see officials, we would see judges - I mean, there are, you know, Supreme Court cases where supreme court justices that are normally relatively liberal and sympathetic, like, you know, Justice Hugo Black scolding Martin Luther King for engaging in civil disobedience on the idea that it threatens the rule of law. It turns out, and this is something that I go into in the book that's coming out in December... it turns out that King actually had a sophisticated theory of when it was appropriate to engage in civil disobedience and when it wasn't. But for me, reflecting on that conflict in particular, and reflecting on the fact that the same people who were scolding peaceful lunch-counter-sit-ins for threatening the rule of law and, you know, causing society to descend into chaos and undermining property rights and all the rest of that nonsense, were also standing by and watching as southern governors sent police in to beat and gas and fire hose and set dogs on peaceful protests in this sort of completely new set of like, totally unbounded explosions of state violence. And so it seems to me sort of intuitively, like these can't be the same problem, right, like ordinary citizens, doing sit-ins, even if they're illegal, even if we might have some reason to criticize them, it can't be the same reason that we have to criticize Bull Connor for having the cops beat people. And part of the reason that that's the case, and this is what I call the Hobbesian property in the introduction to the rule of law in the real world...part of the reason is just the reality of what states are, right? Like, protesters don't have tanks and police dogs, and fire hoses, right? Protesters typically don't have armies. If they do, then we're in a civil war situation, not a rule of law situation, the state does have all of those things. And so one of the features of the state that makes it the most appropriate site for this talk about the rule of law is this the state has, I mean, most modern states have, at least on a case by case basis, overwhelming power. And so we have distinct moral reasons to control overwhelming power than we do to control a little bit of legal disobedience, right, like overwhelming power is overwhelming. It's something that has a different moral importance for its control. Then the second idea is at the same time what I call the [...] property... is the state makes claims about its use of power, right? Like ordinary people, when they obey the law or violate the law, they don't necessarily do so with reference to a set of ideas that they're propagating about their relationship to other people. Whereas when modern states send troops in to beat people up, in a way what they're doing is they're saying that they're doing so in all of our names, right, particularly, but not exclusively in democratic governments. There's a way in which the state represents itself as acting on behalf of the political community at large. And so it makes sense to have a distinctive normative principle to regulate that kind of power.Tobi; I know you sort of sidestepped this in the book, and maybe it doesn't really fit with your overall argument. But I'm going to push you on that topic a bit. So how does the rule of law state as a matter of institutional design then handles... I know you said that there are separate principles that can be developed for guiding citizen actions, you know...Paul; Yes. Tobi; I mean, let's be clear that you are not saying that people are free to act however they want.Paul; I'm not advocating anarchy.Tobi; Exactly. So how does the rule of law state then handle citizens disagreements or conflicting interests around issues of social order? And I'll give you an example. I mentioned right at the beginning of our conversation what happened in Nigeria in October 2020. There's a unit of the police force that was created to handle violent crimes. Needless to say that they went way beyond their remit and became a very notoriously abusive unit of the police force. Picking up people randomly, lock them up, extort them for money. And there was a situation where a young man was murdered, and his car stolen by this same unit of the police force and young people all over the country, from Lagos to Port Harcourt to Abuja, everywhere, felt we've had enough, right, and everybody came out in protest. It was very, very peaceful, I'd say, until other interests, you know, infiltrated that action. Paul; Right. Tobi; But what I noticed quite early in that process was that even within the spirits of that protests, there were disagreements between citizens - protesters blocking roads, you know, versus people who feel well, your protest should not stop me from going to work, you know, and so many other actions by the protesters that other people with, maybe not conflicting interests, but who have other opinions about strategy or process feel well, this is not right. This is not how to do this. This is not how you do this, you know, and I see that that sort of provided the loophole, I should say, for the government to then move in and take a ruthlessly violent action. You know, there was a popular tollgate in Lagos in the richest neighbourhood in Lagos that was blocked for 10 days by the protesters. And I mean, after this, the army basically moved in and shot people to death. Today, you still see people who would say, Oh, well, that's tragic. But should these people have been blocking other people from going about their daily business? So how does the rule of law regulate issues of social order vis-a-vis conflict of interest?Paul; So I think this is actually a point in favour of my stark distinction between state action and social action as appropriate for thinking about the rule of law. Because when you say that the state used...what I still fundamentally think of as like minor civil disobedience...so, like blocking some roads, big deal! Protesters block roads all the time, right, like protesters have blocked roads throughout human history, you know, like, sometimes it goes big, right? Like they love blocking roads in the French Revolution. But oftentimes, it's just blocking... so I blocked roads.I participated in, you know, some protests in the early 2000s. I participated in blocking roads in DC, right, like, fundamentally "big deal!" is the answer that the state ought to give. And so by saying to each other and to the government, when we talk about the rule of law, we mean, the state's power has to be controlled by the law, I think that gives us a language to say... even though people are engaging in illegal things, the state still has to follow legal process in dealing with it, right.The state still has to use only the level of force allowed by the law to arrest people. The state can't just send in the army to shoot people. And the principle that we appeal to is this principle of the rule of law. Yeah, maintaining the distinction between lawbreaking by ordinary people and law-breaking by the state helps us understand why the state shouldn't be allowed to just send in troops whenever people engage in a little bit of minor lawbreaking and protests.Tobi; So how does the law... I mean, we are entering a bit of a different territory, how does the law in your conception handles what... well, maybe these are fancy definitions, but what some people will call extraordinary circumstances. Like protests with political interests? Maybe protesters that are funded and motivated to unseat an incumbent government? Or in terrorism, you know, where you often have situations where there are no laws on paper to deal with these sort of extraordinary situations, you know, and they can be extremely violent, they can be extremely strange, they're usually things that so many societies are not equipped to handle. So how should the rule of law regulate the action of the state in such extraordinary circumstances?Paul; Yeah, so this is the deep problem of the rule of law, you know, this is why people still read Carl Schmitt, right, because Carl Schmitt's whole account of executive power basically is, hey, wait a minute emergencies happen, and when emergencies happen, liberal legal ideas like the rule of law dropout, and so fundamentally, you just have like raw sovereignty. And that means that the state just kind of does what it must. Right. So here's what I feel about Schmitt. One is, maybe sometimes that's true, right? And again, I think about the US context, because I'm an American and you know, I have my own history, right? And so in the US context, I think, again, about, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, right.Like Abraham Lincoln broke all kinds of laws in the Civil War. Like today, we'd call some of the things that he did basically assuming dictatorial power in some respects. I mean, he did that in the greatest emergency that the country had ever faced and has ever faced since then. And he did it in a civil war. And sometimes that happens, and I think practically speaking, legal institutions have a habit of not standing in the way in truly dire situations like that. But, and here's why I want to push back against Carl Schmitt... but what a legal order can then do is after the emergency has passed...number one, the legal order can be a source of pressure for demanding and accounting of when the emergency has passed, right. And so again, I think of the United States War on Terror, you know, we still have people in United States' custody imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.September 11 2001, was almost 20 years ago. It's actually 20 years ago and a month, and we still have people locked up in Guantanamo Bay. That's insane. That's completely unjustifiable. And one of the jobs of the legal system is to pressure the executive to say, okay, buddy, is the emergency over yet? No, really, we think that the emergency is over yet. I want reasons, right, publicity again, I want an explanation from you of why you think the emergency is still ongoing. And the legal system can force the executive to be accountable for the claim that the emergency is still ongoing. That's number one. Number two is that law tends to be really good at retroactively, sort of, retrofitting things into legal order, right. And so again, I think about the Civil War. You know, after the US Civil War, lots of civil wars, sorry. American-centric person trying to fight against it. But after the US Civil War, you know, the courts took a pause. And then we have a lot of cases where they took a lot of the things that Lincoln did, they said, okay, some of them at least were illegal, some of them were legal, but only under very specific circumstances. And so they actually built legal doctrine that took into account the emergency that Lincoln faced, and then later wars, such as in the Second World War, the courts took the lessons from the experience in the American Civil War, and used that to impose more constraints. So to bring it about that the emergency actions that Franklin Roosevelt took in the Second World War weren't completely sui generis, sort of like right acts of sovereignty, but were regulated by legal rules created during the Civil War, and after the Civil War. And again, they weren't perfect, right? You know, during the Second World War, the United States interned Japanese Americans, you know, again, sort of completely lawless, completely unjustifiable, but you know, it's an ongoing process. The point is that the legal system is always... the law is always reactive in emergencies. But the reactive character of the law can nonetheless be used as a way to control and channel sovereign power, even in these sort of Schmittian emergency situations.Tobi; So two related questions, your work is interdisciplinary, because you try to blend a lot of social science into legal philosophy. But speaking of legal order and your primary profession, I mean.. for the sake of the audience parties into a lot of other cool stuff, I'm going to be putting up his website in the show notes. But speaking of legal order, and the legal profession, why is so much of the legal profession fascinated with what I would say the rule by law, as opposed to the rule of law. A lot of what you get from lawyers, even some law professors in some situations is [that] the law is the law, and you have to obey it. And even if you are going to question it, however unjustified it may seem, you still have to follow some processes that maybe for ordinary citizens are not so accessible or extremely costly, you know, which I think violate regularity, right, the way you talk about it retrospective legislation, and so many other things. So why is the legal profession so fascinated with the law, as opposed to justification for the law?Paul; Yeah, I think that question kind of answers itself, right. It's unfortunate... I mean, it's sort of natural but it's unfortunate that the people who most influence our dialogue about the way that we, you know, live in [the] society together with a state, namely by organizing ourselves with law happen to be people who are the specialists who find it easiest, right? And so I think the simple answer is right on this one, at least in countries like the United States, I'm not sure how true this is in other countries. But in the United States, the domination of legal discourse by lawyers necessarily means that the sort of real practical, real-world ways in which ordinary people find interacting with anything legal to be difficult, oppressive, or both just aren't in view, right? This is hard for them to understand.But I think in the US, one of the distortions that we've had is that we have an extremely hierarchical legal profession, right. So we have very elite law schools, and those very elite law schools - one of which I teach at - tend to predominantly produce lawyers who primarily work for wealthy corporations and sort of secondarily work for the government. Those lawyers tend to be the ones that end up at the top of the judiciary, that end up in influential positions in academia, that end up, you know, in Congress. The lawyers that, you know, see poor people, see people of subordinated minority groups and see the very different kinds of interactions with the legal system that people who are worse off have, that see the way that the law presents itself, not as a thing that you can use autonomously to structure your own life. But as a kind of external imposition, that sort of shows up and occasionally inflicts harm on you. Those lawyers aren't the ones who end up in our corridors of power. And it's very unfortunate, it's a consequence of the hierarchical nature of, at least in the US, our legal profession. And I suspect it's similar in these other countries as well.Tobi; In your opinion, what's the... dare I say the sacrosanct and objective - those are rigid conditions sorry - expression of the rule of law? The current general conception of the rule accedes to the primacy of the Constitution, right. I've often found that problematic because in some countries you find constitutional provisions that are egregious, and in other cases, you find lawyers going into court to challenge certain actions that they deem unjust, or that are truly unjust on the basis of the same constitution. Right. So what do you think is the most practical expression of the rule of law? Is it written laws? Is it the opinion of the judges? Is it how officials hold themselves accountable? What's the answer?Paul; So I think I'm gonna like sort of twist this a little bit and interpret that question is like, how do you know the extent to which the rule of law exists in a particular place? And my answer is, can ordinary people look officials in the eye, right, you know... if you're walking down the street, and you see a police officer, you know, are you afraid? Or can you walk past them and confidently know you're doing nothing wrong so there's nothing really effectively but they can do to you, right? If you're called in to deal with some kind of bureaucratic problem, like the tax office, can you trust that you exist in a relationship of respect? You know, can you trust that when you show them, actually here are my receipts, I really did have that expense, that that's going to be taken seriously? You know, if people, everybody, feels like they can stand tall, and look government officials in the eye, then to that extent, I think that the rule of law exists in a society.Tobi; Final question, what's the coolest idea you're working on right now?Paul; Oh, gosh. So like I said, I've got two books under contract right now. The first book is a history/theoretical constitutional law account of the development and existing state of the rule of law in the United States. The second book, which I'm more excited about, because it's the one that I plan to write this year, but it's also a lot harder, is I'm trying to take some of the governance design ideas that we see from the notion of rule of law development, and others such as governance development things and apply them to Private Internet platforms, right? Like, basically to Facebook. Um, I was actually involved in some of the work, not at a super high level, but I was involved in some of the work in designing or doing the research for designing Facebook's oversight board. And I'm kind of trying to expand on some of those ideas and think about, you know, if we really believe that private companies, especially in these internet platforms are doing governance right now, can we take lessons from how the rest of the world and how actual governments and actual states have developed techniques of governing behaviour in highly networked, large scale super-diverse environments and use those lessons in the private context? Maybe we can maybe we can't I'm not sure yet. Hopefully, by the time I finish the book, I'll know.Tobi; That's interesting. And I'll ask you this, a similar, I'll say a related situation is currently happening in Nigeria right now, where the President's Twitter handle or username, tweeted something that sounded like a thinly veiled threat to a particular ethnic group. And lots of people who disagreed with that tweet reported the tweet, and Twitter ended up deleting the tweet in question, which high-level officials in Nigeria found extremely offensive, and going as far as to assert their sovereign rights over Twitter and say, well, it may be your platform, but it is our country and we are banning you. How would you adjudicate such a situation? I mean, there's the question of banning Donald Trump from the platform and so many other things that have come up.Paul; Yeah, I mean, it's hard, right? So there are no easy answers to these kinds of problems. I think, ultimately, what we have to do is we have to build more legitimate ways to make these decisions. I mean, here are two things that we cannot do, right?Number one is we can't just let government officials, especially when, you know, as with the Donald Trump example, and so many others, the government officials are the ones who are engaging in the terrible conduct make these decisions. Number two is we also just can't let a bunch of people sitting in the Bay Area in California make those decisions. Like, ultimately, this is on, you know, property in some abstracted sense of like the shareholders of these companies. But we cannot simply allow a bunch of people in San Francisco, in Menlo Park, and you know, Cupertino and Mountain View, and all of those other little tech industry cities that have no understanding of local context to make the final decisions here. And so what we need to do is we need to build more robust institutions to include both global and local and affected countries, grassroots participation, in making these decisions. And I'm trying to sort of sketch out what the design for those might look like. But, you know, talk to me in about a year. And hopefully, I'll have a book for you that will actually have a sketch.Tobi; You bet I'm going to hold you to that. So, a year from now. So still on the question of ideas, because the show is about ideas. What's the one idea you'd like to see spread everywhere?Paul; Oh, gosh, you should have warned me in advance... that... I'm going to go back to what I said at the very beginning about the rule of law. Like I think that the rule of law depends on people, right? Like there is no such thing as the rule of law without a society and a legal system that genuinely is equal and advantageous to ordinary people enough to be the kind of thing that people actually support. Like ordinary people... if you cannot recruit the support of ordinary people for your legal political and social system, you cannot have the rule of law. That's true whether you're a developing country, that's true whether you're the United States, right. Like I think, you know, part of the reason that we got Donald Trump in the United States, I think, is because our legal system and with it our economy, and all the rest are so unequal in this country, that ordinary voters in the United States didn't see any reason to preserve it. Right and so when this lunatic and I mean, I'm just going to be quite frank here and say Donald Trump is a complete lunatic, right... when this lunatic is running for office who shows total disregard for existing institutions, like complete willingness to casually break the law. An electorate that actually was full of people who felt (themselves) treated respectfully and protected and supported by our legal and political institutions would have sent that guy packing in a heartbeat. But because the American people don't have that experience right now, I think that's what made us vulnerable to somebody like Donald Trump.Tobi; Thank you so much, Paul. It's been so fascinating talking to you.Paul; Thank you. This has been a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm happy to come back in a year when I've got the platform thing done.Tobi; Yeah, I'm so looking forward to that. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

''Rule of law'' is the generally accepted description for how well a political system conforms to formal rules - rather than functioning through the whims of the most powerful social or political agents. For a society to be described as one functioning under rule of law - there must be rules and those rules must be equally applied to everyone in the society. Let us call this Letter of the Law. These rules are usually expressed through the constitution of a country and enforced through the courts. But simply having rules and enforcing them does not suffice in the making of the rule of law - and it is an incomplete (however accurate) conception of it. Some rules can be drafted in bad faith or with the express purpose of protecting the interest of the political elites responsible for governance. This is why many scholars have argued that the rule of law can only be said to exist in a state that functions under rules designed to protect the civil liberties (individual rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc.) of the people living within its territory. Let us call this the Character or Spirit of the Law. The character of the law understood as the fulfilment of constitutionally-guaranteed civil liberties is the most common standard by which governance is judged to conform or deviate from the rule of law. For example, countries that routinely violate the rights of citizens in whatever form cannot be said to be governed by the rule of law, even if it has a written constitution. Consideration of the character of the law is the context to understanding the work of my guest on this episode, Paul Gowder.He is a professor of law at NorthWestern university with a broad research interest and expertise. Paul departs from this common derivation of the character of the law as rooted in liberty - and argued that for the rule of law to be broadly applicable in different societies (not dependent on the political institutions and ethical ideals of any specific society) with varying cultures and traditions of governance, it must be rooted in Equality. To understand Paul's argument, I will briefly state two important aspects that set the tone for our conversation - this should not be taken as an exhaustive summary of his work and I encourage you to check out his website and book. The first is that the rule of law as a principle regulates the actions of the state (government), and it is not to be conflated with other rules that regulate the actions of citizens. This is such an important point because one of the most egregious expressions of the law is when a government uses it to oppress citizens. Secondly, Paul outlines three components of the rule of law based on equality as 1) regularity - the government can only use coercion when it is acting in ''good faith'' and under ''reasonable interpretation'' of rules that already exist and are specific to the circumstances. 2) publicity - the law has to be accessible to everyone without barriers (''officials have a responsibility to explain their application of the law, ...failure to do so commits hubris and terror against the public"). 3) generality - the law must be equally applicable to all. Putting all these elements together gives us a rule of law regime where everyone is equal before the law, and the state does not wantonly abuse citizens or single out particular groups for systematic abuse.I enjoyed this conversation very much, and I want to thank Paul for talking to me. Thank you guys too for always listening, and for the other ways you support this project.TRANSCRIPTTobi; I greatly enjoyed your work on the rule of law. I've read your papers, I've read your book, and I like it very much. I think it's a great public service if I can say that because for a lot of time, I am interested in economic development and that is mostly the issue that this podcast talks about. And what you see in that particular conversation is there hasn't really been that much compatibility between the question of the rule of law or the laws that should regulate the actions of the state, and its strategy for economic development. Most of the time, you often see even some justification, I should say, to trample on rights in as much as you get development, you get high-income growth for it. And what I found in your work is, this does not have to be so. So what was your eureka moment in coming up with your concept, we are going to unpack a lot of the details very soon, but what motivated you to write this work or to embark on this project?Paul; Yeah, I think for me, part of the issue that really drives a lot of how I think about the rule of law and you know, reasons behind some of this work is really a difference between the way that those of us who think about human freedom and human equality, right? I think of it as philosophers, right. So they're philosophers and philosophers think about the ability of people to live autonomous lives, to sort of stand tall against their government, to live lives of respect, and freedom and equality. And that's one conversation. And so we see people, like, you know, Ronald Dworkin, thinking about what the rule of law can deliver to human beings in that sense. And then, you know, there's this entire development community, you know, the World Bank, lots of the US foreign policy, all of the rest of those groups of people and groups of ideas, talk about the rule of law a lot and work to measure the rule of law and invest immense amounts of money in promoting what they call the rule of law across the world. But mostly, it seems to be protecting property rights for multinational investment. And I mean, that makes some kind of sense, if you think that what the rule of law is for is economic development, is increasing the GDP of a country and integrating it into favourable international networks of trade. But if you think that it's about human flourishing, then you get a completely different idea of what the rule of law can be, and should be. And so this sort of really striking disjuncture between the two conversations has driven a lot of my work, especially recently, and especially reflecting even on the United States, I think that we can see how domestic rule of law struggles - which we absolutely have, I mean, look at the Trump administration, frankly, as revolving around this conflict between focusing on economics and focusing on human rights and human wellbeing.Tobi; It's interesting the polarization you're talking about. And one way that I also see it play out is [that] analyst or other stakeholders who participate in the process of nation-building in Africa, in Nigeria… a lot of us that care about development and would like to see our countries grow and develop and become rich, are often at opposite ends with other people in the civil society who are advocating for human rights, who are advocating for gender equality, who are advocating for so many other social justice issues. And it always seems like there's no meeting ground, you know, between those set of views, and I believe it does not have to be so. So one thing I'm going to draw you into quite early is one of the distinctions you made in so many of your papers and even your book is the difference between the conception of the rule of law that you are proposing versus the generally accepted notion of the rule of law based on individual liberty in the classical liberal tradition. I also think that's part of the problem, because talking about individual liberty comes with this heavy ideological connotation, and giving so many things that have happened in Africa with colonialism and so many other things, nobody wants any of that, you know. So you are proposing a conception of the rule of law that is based on equality. Tell me, how does that contrast with this popularly accepted notion of the rule of law [which is] based on individual liberty?Paul; So I think the way to think about it is to start with the notion of the long term stability of a rule of law system. And so here is one thing that I propose as a fact about legal orders. Ultimately, any kind of stable legal order that can control the powerful, that is, that can say to a top-level political leader, or a powerful multinational corporation, or whomever, no, you can't do this, this violates the law and make that statement stick depends on widespread collective mobilization, if only as a threat, right. And so it's kind of an analytic proposition about the nature of power, right? If you've got a top-level political leader who's in command of an army, and they want to do something illegal, it's going to require very broad-based opposition, and hence very broad-based commitment to the idea of leaders that follow the law in order to prevent the person in charge of an army from just casually violating it whenever they want. Okay, accept that as true, what follows from that? Well, what follows from that is that the legal system has to actually be compatible with the basic interests of all. And what that tends to mean and I think this is true, both historically, and theoretically, is leaving aside the philosophical conceptual difference between liberty and equality, which I'm not sure is really all that important. Like I think, ultimately, liberty and equality as moral ideas tend to blur together when you really unpack them. But practically speaking, any stable legal order that can control the powerful has to be compatible with the interests of a broad-based group of the human beings who participate in that legal order. And what that entails is favouring a way of thinking about the rule of law that focuses on being able to recruit the interests of even the worst off. In other words, one that's focused on equality, one that's focused on protecting the interests of the less powerful rather than a laissez-faire libertarian conception of the rule of law that tends to be historically speaking, compatible with substantial amounts of economic inequality, hyper-focus on ideas - like property rights, that support the long-standing interests of those who happen to be at the top of the economy, often against the interests of those that happened to be at the bottom of the economy, right. That's simply not a legal order that is sustainable in the long run. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the way that this has played out in [the] United States history, in particular. I might have a book that's coming out in December that focuses on a historical account of the development of the rule of law, particularly in the United States. I mean, it's my own country. And so at some point, I had to get talked into writing that book. And we can see that in our history right at the get-go, you know, in the United States, at the very beginning, the rule of law dialogue tended to be focused on protecting the interests of wealthy elite property holders. And this actually played a major part, for example, in the United States' most grievous struggle, namely the struggle over slavery, because slaveholders really relied on this conception of the Rule of Law focusing on individual freedom and property rights to insist on a right to keep holding slaves against the more egalitarian idea that “hey, wait a minute, the enslaved have a right to be participants in the legal system as well.” And so we can see these two different conceptions of legality breaking the United States and breaking the idea of legal order in the United States right at the get-go. And we see this in country after country after country. You know, another example is Pinochet's Chile, which was the victim of [the] United States' economics focused rule of law promotion efforts that favoured the interests of property holders under this libertarian conception over the interests of ordinary citizens, democracy and mass interests. In other words, over the egalitarian conception, and again, you know, devolved into authoritarianism and chaos.Tobi; Yeah, nice bit of history there, but dialling all the way, if you'll indulge me... dialling all the way to the present, or maybe the recent past, of course; where I see another relevance and tension is development, and its geopolitical significance and the modernization projects that a lot of developed countries have done in so many poor and violent nations, you know, around the world. I mean, at the time when Africa decolonized, you know, a lot of the countries gravitated towards the communist bloc, socialism [and] that process was shunted, failed, you know, there was a wave of military coups all over the continent, and it was a really dark period.But what you see is that a lot of these countries, Nigeria, for example, democratized in 1999, a lot of other countries either before then or after followed suit. And what you see is, almost all of them go for American-style federal system, and American-style constitutional democracy, you know. And how that tradition evolved... I mean, there's a lot you can explain and unpack here... how that tradition evolved, we are told is the law has a responsibility to treat people as individuals. But you also find that these are societies where group identities are very, very strong, you know, and what you get are constitutions that are weakly enforced, impractical, and a society that is perpetually in struggle. I mean, you have a constitution, you have rules, and you have a government that openly disregards them, because the constitutional tradition is so divorced from how a lot of our societies evolve. And what I see you doing in your work is that if we divorce the rule of law from the ideal society, you know [like] some societies that we look up to, then we can come up with a set of practical propositions that the rule of law should fulfil, so walk me through how you resolve these tensions and your propositions?Paul; Well, so it's exactly what you just said, right? I mean, we have to focus on actual existing societies and the actual way that people organize their lives, right. And so here's the issue is, just like I said a minute ago, the rule of law fundamentally depends on people. And when I say people, I don't just mean elites. I don't just mean the wealthy, I don't just mean the people in charge of armies, and the people in charge of courthouses, right? Like the rule of law depends, number one, on people acting collectively to hold the powerful to the law. And number two, on people using the institutions that we say are associated with the rule of law. And so just as you describe, one sort of really common failure condition for international rule of law development efforts - and I don't think that this is a matter of sort of recipient countries admiring countries like the US, I think this is a matter of international organizations and countries like the US having in their heads a model of what the law looks like and sort of pressing it on recipient countries.But you know, when you build institutions that don't really resemble how the people in a country actually organize their social, political and legal lives, you shouldn't be surprised when nobody uses them. You shouldn't be surprised when they're ineffective. But I mean, I think that it's been fairly compared to a kind of second-generation colonialism in that sense where countries like the US and like Germany, attempt to export their legal institutions to other countries, without attending to the ways that the people in those countries already have social and legal resources to run their lives. And so I'll give you an example that's interesting from Afghanistan. So in Afghanistan, sort of post the 2000s invasion, and so forth, some researchers, mostly affiliated with the Carnegie Institution, found that the really effective rule of law innovations, the really effective interventions were ones that relied on existing social groups and existing structures of traditional authority. And so, you know, you could build a courthouse and like, ask a formal centralized state to do something, maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn't, maybe people would use it, maybe they wouldn't. But if you took local community leaders, local religious leaders, gave them training, and how to use the social capital they already have to help do things like adjudicate disputes, well, those would actually be effective, because they fit into the existing social organization that already exists. So I'll give you another example. I have a student who... I had… I just graduated an S.J.D student from Uganda who wrote a dissertation on corruption in Uganda. And one of the things that he advocated for I think, really sensibly was, “ okay, we've got this centralized government, but we've also got all of these traditional kingdoms, and the traditional kingdoms, they're actually a lot more legitimate in the sociological sense than the centralized government.People trust the traditional kingdoms, people rely on the traditional kingdoms for services, for integrating themselves into their society. And so one useful way of thinking about anti-corruption reforms is to try and empower the traditional kingdoms that already have legitimacy so that they can check the centralized government. And so that kind of work, I think, is where we have real potential to do global rule of law development without just creating carbon copies of the United States. Tobi; The process you describe, I will say, as promising as it may sound, what I want to ask you is how then do you ensure that a lot of these traditional institutions that can be empowered to provide reasonable checks to the power of the central government also fulfil the conditions of equality in their relation to the general public? Because even historically, a lot of these institutions are quite hierarchical...Paul; Oh, yeah... and I think in particular, women's rights are a big problem.Tobi; Yeah, yeah and there's a lot of abuses that go on locally, even within those communities, you know. We have traditional monarchies who exercise blanket rights over land ownership, over people's wives, over so many things, you know, so how then does this condition of equality transmit across the system?Paul; Yeah, no, I think that's the really hard question. I tell you right now that part of the answer is that those are not end-state processes. By this I mean that any realistic conception of how we can actually build effective rule of law institutions, but also genuinely incorporate everyone's interests in a society is going to accept that there's going to be a kind of dynamic tension between institutions.You know, sometimes we're going to have to use the centralized state to check traditional institutions. Sometimes we're going to have to use traditional institutions to check the centralized state. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize-winning political scientist and her sort of the Bloomington School of Political Economy, emphasized for many years this idea that they called Polycentrism. That is the idea that multiple, overlapping governance organizations that are sort of forced to negotiate with one another, and forced to learn from one another, and really integrate with one another in this sort of complex tension-filled kind of way, actually turns out to be a really effective method of achieving what we might call good governance. And part of the reason is because they give a lot of different people, in different levels of [the] organization, ways to challenge one another, ways to demand inclusion in this decision, and let somebody else handle that decision, and participate jointly in this other decision. And so I think that neither the centralized state alone, nor traditional institutions alone is going to be able to achieve these goals. But I think efforts to integrate them have some promise. And India has done a lot of work, you know, sort of mixed record of success, perhaps, but has done a lot of work in these lines. I think, for example, of many of the ways that India has tried to promote the growth of Panchayats, of local councils in decision making, including in law enforcement, but at the same time, has tried to do things like promote an even mandate, the inclusion of women, the inclusion of Scheduled Castes, you know, the inclusion of the traditionally subordinated in these decision making processes. And as I said, they haven't had complete success. But it's an example of a way that the centralized state can both support traditional institutions while pushing those institutions to be more egalitarian.Tobi; Let's delve into the three conditions that you identified in your work, which any rule of law state should fulfil. And that is regularity, publicity, and generality. Kindly unpack those three for me.Paul; Absolutely. So regularity is...we can think of it as just the basic rule of law idea, right? Like the government obeys the law. And so if you think about this notion of regularity, it's... do we have a situation where the powerful are actually bound by legal rules? Or do we have a situation where, you know, they just do whatever they want? And so I'd say that, you know, there's no state that even counts as a rule of law state in the basic level without satisfying that condition, at least to some reasonable degree. The idea of publicity really draws on a lot of what I've already been saying about the recruitment of broad participation in the law. That is, when I say publicity, what I mean is that in addition to just officials being bound by the law, ordinary people have to be able to make use of the law in at least two senses. One, they have to be able to make use of the law to defend themselves. I call this the individualistic side of publicity, right? Like if some police officer wants to lock you up, the decision on whether or not you violated the law has to respond to your advocacy, and your ability to defend yourself in some sense. And then there's also the collective side of this idea of publicity, which is that the community as a whole has to be able to collectively enforce the boundaries of the legal system. And you know, we'd talk a lot more about that, I think that's really the most important idea. And then the third idea of generality is really the heart of the egalitarian idea that we've been talking about, which is that the law has to actually treat people as equals. And one thing that I think is really important about the way that I think about these three principles is that they're actually really tightly integrated. By tightly integrated, I mean you're only going to get in real-world states, regularity (that is, officials bound by the law) if you have publicity (that is, if you have people who aren't officials who actually can participate in the legal system and can hold officials to the law). We need the people to hold the officials in line. You're only going to get publicity if you have generality. That is, the people are only going to be motivated to use the legal system and to defend the legal system if the legal system actually treats them as equals. And so you really need publicity to have stable regularity, you really need generality to have stable publicity.Tobi; Speaking of regularity, when you say what constrains the coercive power of the state is when it is authorised by good faith and reasonable interpretation of pre-existing reasonably specific rules. That sounds very specific. And it's also Scalonian in a way, but a lot of people might quibble a bit about what is reasonable, you know, it sounds vague, right? So how would you condition or define reasonable in this sense, and I know you talked about hubris when you were talking about publicity. But is there a minimum level of responsibility for reasonability on the part of the citizen in relation to a state?Paul; That's, in a lot of ways, the really hard philosophical question, because one of the things that we know about law is that it is inherently filled with disagreement, right? Like our experience of the legal system and of every state that actually has something like the rule of law is that people radically disagree about the legal propriety of actions of the government. And so in some sense, this idea of reasonableness is kind of a cop-out. But it's a cop-out that is absolutely necessary, because there's no, you know, what [Thomas] Nagel called a view from nowhere. There's no view from nowhere from which we can evaluate whether or not on a day to day basis, officials are actually complying with the law in some kind of correct sense. But again, I think, you know, as you said, to some extent, that implies that some of the responsibility for evaluating this reasonableness criterion falls down to day to day politics, falls down to the judgment of ordinary citizens. Like, my conception of the rule of law is kind of sneakily a deeply democratic conception, because it recognizes given the existence of uncertainty as to what the law actually requires of officials both on a case by case basis. And, broadly speaking, the only way that we're ever going to be able to say, Well, you know, officials are more or less operating within a reasonable conception of what their legal responsibilities are, is if we empower the public at large to make these judgments. If we have institutions like here in the US, our jury trials, if we have an underlying backstop of civil society and politics, that is actively scrutinizing and questioning official action.Tobi; So speaking of publicity, which is my favorite...I have to say...Paul; Mine too. You could probably tell. Tobi; Because I think that therein lies the power of the state to get away with abusive use of its legitimacy, or its power, so to speak. When you say that officials have a responsibility to explain their application of the law, and a failure to do so commits hubris and terror against the public. So those two situations - hubris and terror, can you explain those to me a bit?Paul; Yeah. So these are really, sort of, moral philosophy ideas at heart, particularly hubris. The idea is there's a big difference, even if I have authority over you, between my exercising that authority in the form of commands and my exercising that authority in the form of a conversation that appeals to your reasoning capacity, right. So these days, I'm thinking about it in part with reference to... I'm going to go very philosophical with you here... but in reference to Kant's humanity formulation of the categorical imperative, sorry. But that is a sense in which if I'm making decisions about your conduct, and your life and, you know, affecting your fundamental interests, that when I express the reasons to you for those decisions, and when I genuinely listen to the reasons that you offer, and genuinely take those into account in my decision making process, I'm showing a kind of respect for you, which is consistent with the idea of a society of equals.As opposed to just hi, I'm wiser than you, and so my decision is, you know, you go this way, you violated the law, right? Are we a military commander? Or are we a judge? Both the military commander and the judge exercise authority, but they do so in very different ways. One is hierarchical, the other I would contend is not.Tobi; Still talking about publicity here, and why I love it so much is one important, should I say… a distinction you made quite early in your book is that the rule of law regulates the action of the state, in relation to its citizens.Paul; Yes.Tobi; Often and I would count myself among people who have been confused by that point as saying that the rule of law regulates the action of the society in general. I have never thought to make that distinction. And it's important because often you see that maybe when dealing with civil disobedience, or some kind of action that the government finds disruptive to its interests, or its preferences, the rule of law is often invoked as a way for governments to use sometimes without discretion, its enforcement powers, you know.So please explain further this distinction between the rule of law regulating the state-citizen relation versus the general law and order in the society. I mean, you get this from Trump, you get this from so many other people who say, Oh, we are a law and order society, I'm a rule of law candidate.Paul; Oh, yeah.Tobi; You cannot do this, you cannot do that. We cannot encourage the breakdown of law and order in the society. So, explain this difference to me.Paul; Absolutely, then this is probably the most controversial part of my account of the rule of law. I think everybody disagrees with this. I sort of want to start by talking about how I got to this view. And I think I really got to this view by reflecting on the civil rights movement in the United States in particular, right. Because, you know, what we would so often see, just as you say about all of these other contexts, is we would see officials, we would see judges - I mean, there are, you know, Supreme Court cases where supreme court justices that are normally relatively liberal and sympathetic, like, you know, Justice Hugo Black scolding Martin Luther King for engaging in civil disobedience on the idea that it threatens the rule of law. It turns out, and this is something that I go into in the book that's coming out in December... it turns out that King actually had a sophisticated theory of when it was appropriate to engage in civil disobedience and when it wasn't. But for me, reflecting on that conflict in particular, and reflecting on the fact that the same people who were scolding peaceful lunch-counter-sit-ins for threatening the rule of law and, you know, causing society to descend into chaos and undermining property rights and all the rest of that nonsense, were also standing by and watching as southern governors sent police in to beat and gas and fire hose and set dogs on peaceful protests in this sort of completely new set of like, totally unbounded explosions of state violence. And so it seems to me sort of intuitively, like these can't be the same problem, right, like ordinary citizens, doing sit-ins, even if they're illegal, even if we might have some reason to criticize them, it can't be the same reason that we have to criticize Bull Connor for having the cops beat people. And part of the reason that that's the case, and this is what I call the Hobbesian property in the introduction to the rule of law in the real world...part of the reason is just the reality of what states are, right? Like, protesters don't have tanks and police dogs, and fire hoses, right? Protesters typically don't have armies. If they do, then we're in a civil war situation, not a rule of law situation, the state does have all of those things. And so one of the features of the state that makes it the most appropriate site for this talk about the rule of law is this the state has, I mean, most modern states have, at least on a case by case basis, overwhelming power. And so we have distinct moral reasons to control overwhelming power than we do to control a little bit of legal disobedience, right, like overwhelming power is overwhelming. It's something that has a different moral importance for its control. Then the second idea is at the same time what I call the [...] property... is the state makes claims about its use of power, right? Like ordinary people, when they obey the law or violate the law, they don't necessarily do so with reference to a set of ideas that they're propagating about their relationship to other people. Whereas when modern states send troops in to beat people up, in a way what they're doing is they're saying that they're doing so in all of our names, right, particularly, but not exclusively in democratic governments. There's a way in which the state represents itself as acting on behalf of the political community at large. And so it makes sense to have a distinctive normative principle to regulate that kind of power.Tobi; I know you sort of sidestepped this in the book, and maybe it doesn't really fit with your overall argument. But I'm going to push you on that topic a bit. So how does the rule of law state as a matter of institutional design then handles... I know you said that there are separate principles that can be developed for guiding citizen actions, you know...Paul; Yes. Tobi; I mean, let's be clear that you are not saying that people are free to act however they want.Paul; I'm not advocating anarchy.Tobi; Exactly. So how does the rule of law state then handle citizens disagreements or conflicting interests around issues of social order? And I'll give you an example. I mentioned right at the beginning of our conversation what happened in Nigeria in October 2020. There's a unit of the police force that was created to handle violent crimes. Needless to say that they went way beyond their remit and became a very notoriously abusive unit of the police force. Picking up people randomly, lock them up, extort them for money. And there was a situation where a young man was murdered, and his car stolen by this same unit of the police force and young people all over the country, from Lagos to Port Harcourt to Abuja, everywhere, felt we've had enough, right, and everybody came out in protest. It was very, very peaceful, I'd say, until other interests, you know, infiltrated that action. Paul; Right. Tobi; But what I noticed quite early in that process was that even within the spirits of that protests, there were disagreements between citizens - protesters blocking roads, you know, versus people who feel well, your protest should not stop me from going to work, you know, and so many other actions by the protesters that other people with, maybe not conflicting interests, but who have other opinions about strategy or process feel well, this is not right. This is not how to do this. This is not how you do this, you know, and I see that that sort of provided the loophole, I should say, for the government to then move in and take a ruthlessly violent action. You know, there was a popular tollgate in Lagos in the richest neighbourhood in Lagos that was blocked for 10 days by the protesters. And I mean, after this, the army basically moved in and shot people to death. Today, you still see people who would say, Oh, well, that's tragic. But should these people have been blocking other people from going about their daily business? So how does the rule of law regulate issues of social order vis-a-vis conflict of interest?Paul; So I think this is actually a point in favour of my stark distinction between state action and social action as appropriate for thinking about the rule of law. Because when you say that the state used...what I still fundamentally think of as like minor civil disobedience...so, like blocking some roads, big deal! Protesters block roads all the time, right, like protesters have blocked roads throughout human history, you know, like, sometimes it goes big, right? Like they love blocking roads in the French Revolution. But oftentimes, it's just blocking... so I blocked roads.I participated in, you know, some protests in the early 2000s. I participated in blocking roads in DC, right, like, fundamentally "big deal!" is the answer that the state ought to give. And so by saying to each other and to the government, when we talk about the rule of law, we mean, the state's power has to be controlled by the law, I think that gives us a language to say... even though people are engaging in illegal things, the state still has to follow legal process in dealing with it, right.The state still has to use only the level of force allowed by the law to arrest people. The state can't just send in the army to shoot people. And the principle that we appeal to is this principle of the rule of law. Yeah, maintaining the distinction between lawbreaking by ordinary people and law-breaking by the state helps us understand why the state shouldn't be allowed to just send in troops whenever people engage in a little bit of minor lawbreaking and protests.Tobi; So how does the law... I mean, we are entering a bit of a different territory, how does the law in your conception handles what... well, maybe these are fancy definitions, but what some people will call extraordinary circumstances. Like protests with political interests? Maybe protesters that are funded and motivated to unseat an incumbent government? Or in terrorism, you know, where you often have situations where there are no laws on paper to deal with these sort of extraordinary situations, you know, and they can be extremely violent, they can be extremely strange, they're usually things that so many societies are not equipped to handle. So how should the rule of law regulate the action of the state in such extraordinary circumstances?Paul; Yeah, so this is the deep problem of the rule of law, you know, this is why people still read Carl Schmitt, right, because Carl Schmitt's whole account of executive power basically is, hey, wait a minute emergencies happen, and when emergencies happen, liberal legal ideas like the rule of law dropout, and so fundamentally, you just have like raw sovereignty. And that means that the state just kind of does what it must. Right. So here's what I feel about Schmitt. One is, maybe sometimes that's true, right? And again, I think about the US context, because I'm an American and you know, I have my own history, right? And so in the US context, I think, again, about, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, right.Like Abraham Lincoln broke all kinds of laws in the Civil War. Like today, we'd call some of the things that he did basically assuming dictatorial power in some respects. I mean, he did that in the greatest emergency that the country had ever faced and has ever faced since then. And he did it in a civil war. And sometimes that happens, and I think practically speaking, legal institutions have a habit of not standing in the way in truly dire situations like that. But, and here's why I want to push back against Carl Schmitt... but what a legal order can then do is after the emergency has passed...number one, the legal order can be a source of pressure for demanding and accounting of when the emergency has passed, right. And so again, I think of the United States War on Terror, you know, we still have people in United States' custody imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.September 11 2001, was almost 20 years ago. It's actually 20 years ago and a month, and we still have people locked up in Guantanamo Bay. That's insane. That's completely unjustifiable. And one of the jobs of the legal system is to pressure the executive to say, okay, buddy, is the emergency over yet? No, really, we think that the emergency is over yet. I want reasons, right, publicity again, I want an explanation from you of why you think the emergency is still ongoing. And the legal system can force the executive to be accountable for the claim that the emergency is still ongoing. That's number one. Number two is that law tends to be really good at retroactively, sort of, retrofitting things into legal order, right. And so again, I think about the Civil War. You know, after the US Civil War, lots of civil wars, sorry. American-centric person trying to fight against it. But after the US Civil War, you know, the courts took a pause. And then we have a lot of cases where they took a lot of the things that Lincoln did, they said, okay, some of them at least were illegal, some of them were legal, but only under very specific circumstances. And so they actually built legal doctrine that took into account the emergency that Lincoln faced, and then later wars, such as in the Second World War, the courts took the lessons from the experience in the American Civil War, and used that to impose more constraints. So to bring it about that the emergency actions that Franklin Roosevelt took in the Second World War weren't completely sui generis, sort of like right acts of sovereignty, but were regulated by legal rules created during the Civil War, and after the Civil War. And again, they weren't perfect, right? You know, during the Second World War, the United States interned Japanese Americans, you know, again, sort of completely lawless, completely unjustifiable, but you know, it's an ongoing process. The point is that the legal system is always... the law is always reactive in emergencies. But the reactive character of the law can nonetheless be used as a way to control and channel sovereign power, even in these sort of Schmittian emergency situations.Tobi; So two related questions, your work is interdisciplinary, because you try to blend a lot of social science into legal philosophy. But speaking of legal order and your primary profession, I mean.. for the sake of the audience parties into a lot of other cool stuff, I'm going to be putting up his website in the show notes. But speaking of legal order, and the legal profession, why is so much of the legal profession fascinated with what I would say the rule by law, as opposed to the rule of law. A lot of what you get from lawyers, even some law professors in some situations is [that] the law is the law, and you have to obey it. And even if you are going to question it, however unjustified it may seem, you still have to follow some processes that maybe for ordinary citizens are not so accessible or extremely costly, you know, which I think violate regularity, right, the way you talk about it retrospective legislation, and so many other things. So why is the legal profession so fascinated with the law, as opposed to justification for the law?Paul; Yeah, I think that question kind of answers itself, right. It's unfortunate... I mean, it's sort of natural but it's unfortunate that the people who most influence our dialogue about the way that we, you know, live in [the] society together with a state, namely by organizing ourselves with law happen to be people who are the specialists who find it easiest, right? And so I think the simple answer is right on this one, at least in countries like the United States, I'm not sure how true this is in other countries. But in the United States, the domination of legal discourse by lawyers necessarily means that the sort of real practical, real-world ways in which ordinary people find interacting with anything legal to be difficult, oppressive, or both just aren't in view, right? This is hard for them to understand.But I think in the US, one of the distortions that we've had is that we have an extremely hierarchical legal profession, right. So we have very elite law schools, and those very elite law schools - one of which I teach at - tend to predominantly produce lawyers who primarily work for wealthy corporations and sort of secondarily work for the government. Those lawyers tend to be the ones that end up at the top of the judiciary, that end up in influential positions in academia, that end up, you know, in Congress. The lawyers that, you know, see poor people, see people of subordinated minority groups and see the very different kinds of interactions with the legal system that people who are worse off have, that see the way that the law presents itself, not as a thing that you can use autonomously to structure your own life. But as a kind of external imposition, that sort of shows up and occasionally inflicts harm on you. Those lawyers aren't the ones who end up in our corridors of power. And it's very unfortunate, it's a consequence of the hierarchical nature of, at least in the US, our legal profession. And I suspect it's similar in these other countries as well.Tobi; In your opinion, what's the... dare I say the sacrosanct and objective - those are rigid conditions sorry - expression of the rule of law? The current general conception of the rule accedes to the primacy of the Constitution, right. I've often found that problematic because in some countries you find constitutional provisions that are egregious, and in other cases, you find lawyers going into court to challenge certain actions that they deem unjust, or that are truly unjust on the basis of the same constitution. Right. So what do you think is the most practical expression of the rule of law? Is it written laws? Is it the opinion of the judges? Is it how officials hold themselves accountable? What's the answer?Paul; So I think I'm gonna like sort of twist this a little bit and interpret that question is like, how do you know the extent to which the rule of law exists in a particular place? And my answer is, can ordinary people look officials in the eye, right, you know... if you're walking down the street, and you see a police officer, you know, are you afraid? Or can you walk past them and confidently know you're doing nothing wrong so there's nothing really effectively but they can do to you, right? If you're called in to deal with some kind of bureaucratic problem, like the tax office, can you trust that you exist in a relationship of respect? You know, can you trust that when you show them, actually here are my receipts, I really did have that expense, that that's going to be taken seriously? You know, if people, everybody, feels like they can stand tall, and look government officials in the eye, then to that extent, I think that the rule of law exists in a society.Tobi; Final question, what's the coolest idea you're working on right now?Paul; Oh, gosh. So like I said, I've got two books under contract right now. The first book is a history/theoretical constitutional law account of the development and existing state of the rule of law in the United States. The second book, which I'm more excited about, because it's the one that I plan to write this year, but it's also a lot harder, is I'm trying to take some of the governance design ideas that we see from the notion of rule of law development, and others such as governance development things and apply them to Private Internet platforms, right? Like, basically to Facebook. Um, I was actually involved in some of the work, not at a super high level, but I was involved in some of the work in designing or doing the research for designing Facebook's oversight board. And I'm kind of trying to expand on some of those ideas and think about, you know, if we really believe that private companies, especially in these internet platforms are doing governance right now, can we take lessons from how the rest of the world and how actual governments and actual states have developed techniques of governing behaviour in highly networked, large scale super-diverse environments and use those lessons in the private context? Maybe we can maybe we can't I'm not sure yet. Hopefully, by the time I finish the book, I'll know.Tobi; That's interesting. And I'll ask you this, a similar, I'll say a related situation is currently happening in Nigeria right now, where the President's Twitter handle or username, tweeted something that sounded like a thinly veiled threat to a particular ethnic group. And lots of people who disagreed with that tweet reported the tweet, and Twitter ended up deleting the tweet in question, which high-level officials in Nigeria found extremely offensive, and going as far as to assert their sovereign rights over Twitter and say, well, it may be your platform, but it is our country and we are banning you. How would you adjudicate such a situation? I mean, there's the question of banning Donald Trump from the platform and so many other things that have come up.Paul; Yeah, I mean, it's hard, right? So there are no easy answers to these kinds of problems. I think, ultimately, what we have to do is we have to build more legitimate ways to make these decisions. I mean, here are two things that we cannot do, right?Number one is we can't just let government officials, especially when, you know, as with the Donald Trump example, and so many others, the government officials are the ones who are engaging in the terrible conduct make these decisions. Number two is we also just can't let a bunch of people sitting in the Bay Area in California make those decisions. Like, ultimately, this is on, you know, property in some abstracted sense of like the shareholders of these companies. But we cannot simply allow a bunch of people in San Francisco, in Menlo Park, and you know, Cupertino and Mountain View, and all of those other little tech industry cities that have no understanding of local context to make the final decisions here. And so what we need to do is we need to build more robust institutions to include both global and local and affected countries, grassroots participation, in making these decisions. And I'm trying to sort of sketch out what the design for those might look like. But, you know, talk to me in about a year. And hopefully, I'll have a book for you that will actually have a sketch.Tobi; You bet I'm going to hold you to that. So, a year from now. So still on the question of ideas, because the show is about ideas. What's the one idea you'd like to see spread everywhere?Paul; Oh, gosh, you should have warned me in advance... that... I'm going to go back to what I said at the very beginning about the rule of law. Like I think that the rule of law depends on people, right? Like there is no such thing as the rule of law without a society and a legal system that genuinely is equal and advantageous to ordinary people enough to be the kind of thing that people actually support. Like ordinary people... if you cannot recruit the support of ordinary people for your legal political and social system, you cannot have the rule of law. That's true whether you're a developing country, that's true whether you're the United States, right. Like I think, you know, part of the reason that we got Donald Trump in the United States, I think, is because our legal system and with it our economy, and all the rest are so unequal in this country, that ordinary voters in the United States didn't see any reason to preserve it. Right and so when this lunatic and I mean, I'm just going to be quite frank here and say Donald Trump is a complete lunatic, right... when this lunatic is running for office who shows total disregard for existing institutions, like complete willingness to casually break the law. An electorate that actually was full of people who felt (themselves) treated respectfully and protected and supported by our legal and political institutions would have sent that guy packing in a heartbeat. But because the American people don't have that experience right now, I think that's what made us vulnerable to somebody like Donald Trump.Tobi; Thank you so much, Paul. It's been so fascinating talking to you.Paul; Thank you. This has been a lot of fun. Yeah, I'm happy to come back in a year when I've got the platform thing done.Tobi; Yeah, I'm so looking forward to that. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

Human autonomyIn this episode, Ezechiel and Andy ask what autonomy really is. What does it mean to be "free"? Are drug addicts free? And what is unique about human beings?Join us for a weekly dose of Daily Philosophy!Brought to you by https://daily-philosophy.com.Music: Nightlife by Michael Kobrin, from: https://pixabay.com/music.00:01:47 What is unique about humans?00:06:39 Is everybody special?00:08:51 Deontological ethics00:09:27 Uniqueness and dignity 00:14:08 Are religious societies better?00:15:59 Is freedom the absence of obstacles? 00:16:50 Meritocracy00:19:08 Protestant work ethic00:20:59 Autonomy00:21:16 Harry Frankfurt (1929-) on autonomy00:22:49 Addiction and freedom 00:26:47 Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013)00:28:06 Autonomy as the capacity to question one's will00:28:45 Orthonomy (Pettit and Smith 1993)00:32:20 Relational autonomy00:34:50 Autonomy and the technological world00:36:52 Is capitalism the real problem?00:39:20 What is the human brain for?Philosophers and theories mentioned:00:08:51 Deontological ethics00:16:50 Meritocracy00:21:16 Harry Frankfurt (1929-) on autonomy00:26:47 Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013)00:28:45 Orthonomy (Pettit and Smith 1993)00:32:20 Relational autonomyAccented Philosophy - Every Tuesday (or thereabouts :))

Charles Barzun is a law professor at the University of Virginia. His areas of interest include constitutional law, torts, evidence and the history of legal thought. In this episode, we talk about the common law method, Ronald Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and the internal/external divide in legal theory.

Nesse quarto episódio do ABSTRATAMENTE conversaremos com o Professor Pedro Chrismann. Pedro nos trará sugestões de 5 obras sobre Filosofia do Direito.=========Obras citadas no episódio:"O Conceito de Direito", de H.L.A. Hart."Teoria Pura do Direito", de Hans Kelsen."Império do Direito", de Ronald Dworkin."Playing by the Rules", de Frederick Schauer."Razão Prática e Normas", de Joseph Raz.Visitem o Teoria Impura, o podcast do Pedro, do Guilherme e do Danilo!=========Caso queira entrar em contato com o ABSTRATAMENTE utilize o e-mail: abstratamentepodcast@gmail.com=========Siga o ABSTRATAMENTE nas nossas páginas no Instagram e Facebook.=========All audio tracks including the opening theme are under Creative Commons Licence, for mere reference, check the link below: https://creative-commons.org/licences/by/4.0

Nesse segundo episódio do ABSTRATAMENTE conversaremos com o Professor Flávio Pedron. Flávio nos trará sugestões de 5 obras para compreender a Teoria do Direito proposta por Ronald Dworkin, pensador norte-americano que se consolidou como uma das principais referências na Filosofia do Direito Contemporânea.=========Obras citadas no episódio:Capítulos 3 [modelo de regras] e 4 [casos difíceis] do livro "Levando os Direitos a Sério", publicado no Brasil pela editora Martins Fontes.Cap. 6 [de que maneira o Direito se assemelha à Literatura] do livro "Uma Questão de Princípios" publicado no Brasil pela editora Martins Fontes.Cap 2 [conceitos de interpretação] e 7 [integridade do Direito] da obra "O Império do Direito" publicada no Brasil pela editora Martins Fontes.Cap. 2 [a igualdade de recursos] do livro "Virtude Soberana" publicado no Brasil pela editora Martins Fontes.Parte V  [Política] do livro "Justiça para Ouriços" publicado no Brasil pela editora Martins Fontes.=========Caso queira entrar em contato com o ABSTRATAMENTE utilize o e-mail: abstratamentepodcast@gmail.com=========Sigam o ABSTRATAMENTE nas nossas páginas no Instagram e Facebook.=========All audio tracks including the opening theme are under Creative Commons Licence, for mere reference, check the link below: https://creative-commons.org/licences/by/4.0

Danilo Almeida (PUC-Rio), Pedro Chrismann (IBMEC-Rio) e Guilherme de Almeida (FGV-Rio) conversam com Thomas Bustamante (UFMG) a respeito de seu novo artigo "A triste história do juiz que acreditava ser Hércules", em que ele se debruça sobre as teorias da decisão de Ronald Dworkin e do ministro Barroso. O Supremo tem um papel a cumprir liderando o povo brasileiro para o progresso moral, ou não? Além de explicar por que Barroso não é Hércules, o convidado fala sobre ecletismo filosófico, o valor da integridade no direito, interpretação protestante e outras coisas. Por fim, como os anfitriões não reconhecem a dívida histórica dos analíticos com Dworkin, Thomas promete voltar para fazer a cobrança.

Este episodio analiza las ideas básicas que orientan las principales críticas que realizó Ronald Dworkin a la posición de Herbet Hart. Este podcast es hecho desde la cuarentena del COVID-19 por el profesor Claudio Agüero San Juan, para el curso Derecho y Moral de la Licenciatura en Derecho de la Universidad Diego Portales.

Andrés Rosler habla de la relación de la ley con la moral, el interpretativismo, los nazis, Ronald Dworkin, Carlos Nino, el River del 75 y el penal de Gallo en 1968.

Today's episode features a little more about Corey Robin, including the argument addressed on the show that criticisms of Clarence Thomas's competence are a racist echo of similar claims made against Thurgood Marshall.  Find out why Andrew made the mistake he did in Episode 242, and also why Andrew still stands behind his answer to that question. We begin with Robin, winding our way from his blog posts to the jurisprudence of two of Andrew's heroes, Laurence Tribe and Ronald Dworkin!  Ultimately, you'll learn why Andrew continues to defend the proposition that attacks on Thomas's competence are not inherently racist. After that, it's time for some behind-the-scenes news about Attorney General nominee William Barr just in time for his confirmation hearings.  What company does he keep when it comes to interpreting the Founding Fathers?  Listen and find out!  (Hint:  this isn't good.) Finally, it's time for the answer to Thomas Takes The Bar Exam #108 regarding real property.  As always, remember to follow our Twitter feed (@Openargs) and like our Facebook Page so that you too can play along with #TTTBE! Appearances None!  If you'd like to have either of us as a guest on your show, drop us an email at openarguments@gmail.com. Show Notes & Links We first discussed Robin in Episode 242 as part of a listener question.  You can click here to read his Tweet criticizing us for engaging in "tribalism" and playing identity politics. We discuss two Robin blog posts in depth:  (a) "Everything is in the Hands of Heaven Except the Fear of Heaven", and (b) "The Scandal of Democracy" It was, in fact, Elena Kagan who said "we're all textualists now" in 2015. Click here to check out Tribe's 2008 book, The Invisible Constitution, which openly contests originalism (and directly engages Scalia in particular). You should also check out the Ronald Dworkin speech that was turned into an article in the Fordham Law Review. This is the 2001 Keith Whittington law review article that credits Robin with an assist.  This is Whittington's page at the Federalist Society. We engage with this tweet from Robin listing four supposed examples of intellectual laziness leveled against Thurgood Marshall. Some Thurgood Marshall links:  (a) his confirmation as reported by the New York Times; and (b) this lovely retrospective on Thomas's career penned by Juan Williams for the Washington Post. Finally, you can read some more stuff on Clarence Thomas:  (a) the 2014 rates of agreement among Supreme Court justices; and (b) this anecdote reported by attorney Matt Howell. If you have HeinOnline, you can read the Mark Tushnet law review article in the Georgetown Law Review we discuss on the show.  (Otherwise, you're stuck reading the first page only.) Support us on Patreon at:  patreon.com/law Follow us on Twitter:  @Openargs Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/openargs/ Don't forget the OA Facebook Community! For show-related questions, check out the Opening Arguments Wiki And email us at openarguments@gmail.com  

This is episode 20 of the Logos Institute Podcast, the official podcast of the Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology. After a brief break for Christmas & the New Year, we return for the second part of the interview with Professor C. Stephen Evans (Baylor University, Australian Catholic University, and the University of St Andrews). Our hosts (Stephanie Nicole Nordby and Jonathan Rutledge) discuss with him the nature of accountability, various types of accountability (theistic, secular, and transcendence views), how the virtue of accountability connects with the concepts of the fear of the Lord and autonomy, and much more. Here are a few time stamps to help you navigate: 1:25 - Three Types of Accountability 5:37 - Ronald Dworkin on Accountability & the Fear of the Lord 8:18 - The Fear of the Lord and Holy Reverence 10:38 - Kierkegaard on Good Anxiety 13:21 - Lack of Accountability as a Systemic Issue 16:45 - The Corresponding Vices of Accountability 17:45 - Autonomy & Accountability 23:10 - Exemplars of Accountability? 27:02 - Plans for the Accountability Grant If you've enjoyed listening to this interview, please see other content from our guest: 1. C. Stephen Evans - http://www.baylorisr.org/about-isr/distinguished-professors/c-stephen-evans/ 2. Baylor Center for Christian Philosophy - http://bccp.baylorisr.org/ 3. The Virtue of Accountability Project - https://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=198338 4. Professor Evans's Many Books - https://www.amazon.co.uk/C.-Stephen-Evans/e/B001IQX9VC/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1544608173&sr=8-1 To learn more about the Logos Institute, visit our webpage @ http://logos.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk. And don't forget to follow us on our blog where we post content from friends of the Institute @ http://blogos.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk. You can also find us on and Twitter (@TheologyStAs) and Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TheologyStAs/?fb…Oc4Pz4P0qkCrfO_w

We find ourselves in a moment of untruth. Our guest, Brad Wendel, talks with us about political and legal truth and their relation to morality and social roles. This show’s links: Brad Wendel's faculty profile (http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/faculty/bio_bradley_wendel.cfm) and writing (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=247191) W. Bradley Wendel, Truthfulness as an Ethical Form of Life (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3072303) Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (http://stoa.org.uk/topics/bullshit/pdf/on-bullshit.pdf) Bernard Williams, Saint-Just's Illusion (https://www.lrb.co.uk/v13/n16/bernard-williams/saint-justs-illusion-interpretation-and-the-powers-of-philosophy) (also here (https://books.google.com/books?id=AHol9VbeLUYC&pg=PA135&lpg=PA135&dq=%22saint-just%27s+illusion%22&source=bl&ots=nFGDaDyVqd&sig=fQzZzCAnV4GBPnyhGYZ35DMopGc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjn1vK-q9XYAhUq2IMKHTNoAG4Q6AEIQzAF#v=onepage)) Kleindienst v. Mandel (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2384957718526063733) Stephen Colbert, The Word: Truthiness (http://www.cc.com/video-clips/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word---truthiness) (video from the first episode of the Colbert Report, and it's still unbelievably great) International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2110961142700228731) (4th Circuit en banc) Ninth Circuit's denial of en banc consideration in Washington v. Trump (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7212509001957517972) (containing Judge Bybee's dissent) State Bar of Michigan, Informal Ethics Opinion CI-1164 (http://www.michbar.org/opinions/ethics/numbered_opinions/OpinionID=193) Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (https://books.google.com/books/about/Truth_Truthfulness.html?id=2iaFFE54fYkC) Cynthia Farina, et al., Rulemaking in 140 Characters or Less: Social Networking and Public Participation in Rulemaking (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1702501) Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12719084930434459940) W. Bradley Wendel, Sally Yates, Ronald Dworkin, and the Best View of the Law (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2927113) Fireside (https://fireside.fm)

OUC-Ethox Seminar. Steve Clarke discusses Ronald Dworkin's account of sacred values in his work 'Life's Dominion' and furthers the argument that the assertion 'life is sacred' is tenable by both liberals and conservatives. In his Life’s Dominion (1993) Ronald Dworkin developed an original approach to understanding public debates between liberals and conservatives about the morality of abortion and euthanasia. Conservative opponents of abortion and euthanasia usually invoke the ‘sanctity of life doctrine’ and these debates have often been characterized as turning on whether we should accept that that all human life is sacred, as this doctrine implies. However, Dworkin argued that all mainstream participants in public (but not academic) debates about the morality of abortion and euthanasia accept that life is sacred and that these public debates should be characterized as being over the relative merits of competing liberal and conservative accounts of what the assertion ‘life is sacred’ means and what follows from it. When Life’s Dominion appeared in 1993 it attracted a lot of attention, but most who attended to it, were not won over. A sticking point was Dworkin’s account of sacred values, which was idiosyncratic and unrelated to any of the existing treatments of sacred values, due to theologians, anthropologists, or psychologists. Here I offer a qualified defense of Dworkin. I’ll argue that recent work on sacred values, in anthropology, psychology and neuroscience, gives us good grounds for thinking that the view that life is sacred is held by very many liberals, as well as by mainstream conservatives, and that it is plausible to characterize public debates about abortion and euthanasia as turning on the relative plausibility of competing accounts of what the assertion ‘life is sacred’ means.

Nathan and Clinton talk about Clinton's recent debate with Matt Dillahunty in Dallas over whether or not we have a right to die. Here's the link on YouTube where you can watch the debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRlxJxPtYRg&t=1s It's been pointed out to me that I've been saying Denmark, but euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are not legal in Denmark. That's correct. What I've been meaning to say is the Netherlands, not Denmark. An unfortunate mistake, but just substitute in the Netherlands whenever I say Denmark. Books mentioned in this podcast: Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith by Frank Beckwith Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom by Ronald Dworkin

Nathan and Clinton talk about Clinton's recent debate with Matt Dillahunty in Dallas over whether or not we have a right to die. Here's the link on YouTube where you can watch the debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRlxJxPtYRg&t=1s It's been pointed out to me that I've been saying Denmark, but euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are not legal in Denmark. That's correct. What I've been meaning to say is the Netherlands, not Denmark. An unfortunate mistake, but just substitute in the Netherlands whenever I say Denmark. Books mentioned in this podcast: Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith by Frank Beckwith Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom by Ronald Dworkin

In his book The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen: Back to Socialist Basics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), Nicholas Vrousalis (Leiden University) provides a thorough and complex reconstruction of G.A. Cohen’s political philosophical project. Understanding Cohen to be engaged in “secular egalitarian theodicy,” Vrousalis threads together the major dimensions of Cohen’s thought to find unity in Cohen’s philosophy. The book and the interview take up the concepts central to Cohen’s work – historical materialism, freedom, equality, exploitation, community, and socialism – in a way that explores the tensions, resonances, and changes that persist across Cohen’s writings. Along the way, Vrousalis analyzes Cohen’s polemical engagements with other major political philosophers, such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Robert Nozick, and more, all as examples of Cohen’s “immanent” philosophical method. John McMahon is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he has also completed the Women’s Studies Certificate. He is a Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his book The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen: Back to Socialist Basics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), Nicholas Vrousalis (Leiden University) provides a thorough and complex reconstruction of G.A. Cohen’s political philosophical project. Understanding Cohen to be engaged in “secular egalitarian theodicy,” Vrousalis threads together the major dimensions of Cohen’s thought to find unity in Cohen’s philosophy. The book and the interview take up the concepts central to Cohen’s work – historical materialism, freedom, equality, exploitation, community, and socialism – in a way that explores the tensions, resonances, and changes that persist across Cohen’s writings. Along the way, Vrousalis analyzes Cohen’s polemical engagements with other major political philosophers, such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Robert Nozick, and more, all as examples of Cohen’s “immanent” philosophical method. John McMahon is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he has also completed the Women’s Studies Certificate. He is a Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his book The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen: Back to Socialist Basics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), Nicholas Vrousalis (Leiden University) provides a thorough and complex reconstruction of G.A. Cohen’s political philosophical project. Understanding Cohen to be engaged in “secular egalitarian theodicy,” Vrousalis threads together the major dimensions of Cohen’s thought to find unity in Cohen’s philosophy. The book and the interview take up the concepts central to Cohen’s work – historical materialism, freedom, equality, exploitation, community, and socialism – in a way that explores the tensions, resonances, and changes that persist across Cohen’s writings. Along the way, Vrousalis analyzes Cohen’s polemical engagements with other major political philosophers, such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Robert Nozick, and more, all as examples of Cohen’s “immanent” philosophical method. John McMahon is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he has also completed the Women’s Studies Certificate. He is a Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his book The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen: Back to Socialist Basics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), Nicholas Vrousalis (Leiden University) provides a thorough and complex reconstruction of G.A. Cohen’s political philosophical project. Understanding Cohen to be engaged in “secular egalitarian theodicy,” Vrousalis threads together the major dimensions of Cohen’s thought to find unity in Cohen’s philosophy. The book and the interview take up the concepts central to Cohen’s work – historical materialism, freedom, equality, exploitation, community, and socialism – in a way that explores the tensions, resonances, and changes that persist across Cohen’s writings. Along the way, Vrousalis analyzes Cohen’s polemical engagements with other major political philosophers, such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen, Robert Nozick, and more, all as examples of Cohen’s “immanent” philosophical method. John McMahon is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he has also completed the Women’s Studies Certificate. He is a Fellow at the Center for Global Ethics and Politics at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center, which co-sponsors the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The second part of our conversation about the nature of law. Is it murder if, after your group of trapped spelunkers decides, unanimously, to draw lots and eat the loser, it does so? This show’s links: Oral Argument 81: Hymn, Part 1 Lon Fuller, The Case of the Speluncean Explorers ; see also the Wikipedia summary Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Path of the Law Ronald Dworkin, Law’s Empire Scott Shapiro, Legality; see also Scott Shapiro, The "Hart-Dworkin" Debate: A Short Guide for the Perplexed

Con el apoyo de los doctores Ana Saiz y Carlos Pérez tenemos a bien dialogar con el profesor George Letsas del University College London, uno de los últimos tesistas del Dr. Ronald Dworkin, y mejor aún un reconocido especialista en el tema de los Derechos Humanos.

We've collected a range of answers to the question 'Who's the most impressive philosopher you've met?' This includes the late Ronald Dworkin's response along with many others. Some of the answers are expected, but quite a few are suprising. 

Gracias al apoyo del Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas y en particular del Dr. Imer Flores y del Dr. Juan Vega, podemos platicar con el Dr. Kenneth Einar Himma uno de los principales teóricos del Derecho en los Estados Unidos, la conversación se prestó prestó para poder hablar de la interesante obra del Dr. Himma así como del legado del gran pensador norteamericano Ronald Dworkin a un año de su fallecimiento.

Geoffrey Robertson QC joins Anne McElvoy to pay tribute to American philosopher and constitutional law expert Ronald Dworkin, who died on 14th February 2013 aged 81. We hear from award-winning author Andrew Solomon about his monumental study of modern identity - Far From the Tree. Writer and historian Joanna Bourke reviews Complicit, Channel 4's new feature-length drama, which explores an MI5 officer's moral dilemma over the use of torture in the War on Terror. And did brutal conquest rather than political liberation lie at the heart of Italian unification? Historian Lucy Riall discusses.

[close reading] How to read: Ronald Dworkin's idea that we should read a work as the best work it could possibly be.  What would make Roland as good as it could be?  That he's the quester, and that he succeeds, and that the line he succeeds in reaching - hiding in plain sight - he reaches adequately, unlike those fairy tale goals that the hero gets to in the wrong way and must depart from in order to get to them in the magical way.  Adequately here means that it's the best line it could be, as mysterious as in the original.

Is liberty compatible with equality? Many philosophers think it can't be, and that pluralism is the correct response. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Ronald Dworkin argues that there is a fundamental unity of value. Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

People have often referred to conflicts between the concepts we use to understand the best way to live - ideas like Liberty, Equality, Justice, Democracy. You need to suppress one to achieve the other, and this - the argument goes - proves that they are not universal moral concepts. In his engagingly titled new book, Justice for Hedgehogs, the US philosopher Ronald Dworkin seeks to show that there is no incompatibility between these ideas because they are part of a single unified value, they only appear to conflict because of the way we are looking at them. But how do we ascribe this value with a universal role without recourse to God, or some other metaphysical entity? Laurie discusses the idea with Ronald Dworkin and AC Grayling. Also, shinning up the greasy pole: Bill Jones talks about his essay on how Prime Ministers pick their ministers and how to get ahead in politics. Producer: Charlie Taylor.

Philosophy lecturer Chris Belshaw discusses environmental philosophy and distinguishes between ways in which it has been claimed that aspects of the environment can be valuable

Transcript -- Philosophy lecturer Chris Belshaw discusses environmental philosophy and distinguishes between ways in which it has been claimed that aspects of the environment can be valuable

In this Wise Counsel Podcast interview, Dr. Van Nuys interviews author and physician Ronald Dworkin, MD, Ph.D. about the ideas he expressed in his 2006 book Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class. Dr. Dworkin's argument, at least as articulated in this interview, can be easily boiled down to a single premise: Non specialist physicians (primary care doctors mostly) have implicitly entered into an unspoken agreement with patients to medicate ordinary unhappiness, an inevitable and existential aspect of life which is not a medical condition. In Dr. Dworkin's view, ordinary unhappiness is an important and helpful feedback mechanism serving to cause people to pay attention to problems they are experiencing in their environment or relationships which are not working. The use of medication to provide relief from the discomfort of unhappiness (or any other intervention which serves to reduce pain or distract people from non-illness forms of emotional pain) is not in the best long term interests of the patient, as it inhibits the patient from taking corrective actions to actually fix the problems they are experiencing.

An interview with Ronald Dworkin, author of "Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate." Politics in America are polarized and trivialized, perhaps as never before. The result, Dworkin believes, is a deeply depressing political culture, as ill equipped for the perennial challenge of achieving social justice as for the emerging threats of terrorism. Yet this need not be. Dworkin, one the world's leading legal and political philosophers, identifies and defends core principles of personal and political morality that all citizens can share. He shows that recognizing such shared principles can make substantial political argument possible and help replace contempt with mutual respect. Only then can the full promise of democracy be realized in America and elsewhere.