Law 210.2 – Spring Semester 2022
All sessions for Spring 2022 will be held in person and online via Zoom. Students enrolled in the course will be attending the seminar in person in room 141 Law Building. (unless otherwise noted*), Fridays from 12:15 pm-2:00 pm. Papers for upcoming talks are available to download in the table below. Alternatively, copies of papers may be requested by contacting Rawan Mohsen at rmohsen@berkeley.edu.
The full Spring 2022 workshop schedule is available for download here.
Course description:
This course is a workshop for discussing works in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The workshop creates a space for students to engage directly with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions toward the goal of fostering critical thinking about concepts of value and developing analytical thinking and writing skills. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines and perspectives who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues philosophers and theorists should know something about.
For Spring 2022, the workshop will focus on the theme of “law and politics.” The broad question is whether and how we can understand law as political. Arguments may concern the relative autonomy of law from politics, law’s relation to organized political power (as well as other forms of power), law and partisanship, and the question of law’s possible rationality (‘legal reason,’ ‘legality’) and how it is to be distinguished from conventional forms of political will-formation. In the United States (as in many other jurisdictions) these questions are often entangled with questions about the nature and justification of judicial review of legislation, and the basis of political legitimacy in a constitutional democracy.
Jan. 14 |
Introduction (Enrolled Students Only) |
Instructors: Professor David Grewal david.grewal@berkeley.edu |
Jan. 21 | Jonathan Gould, Law, Berkeley Law |
Puzzles of Progressive Constitutionalism |
Jan. 28 | Cary Franklin, Law, UCLA Law |
Living Textualism |
Feb. 4 | Lea Ypi, Political Theory, LSE Government |
On Dominated Dominators |
Feb. 11 | Keith E. Whittington, Politics, Princeton University |
When Does Abuse of Power Justify Impeachment? |
Feb. 18 | Martin Loughlin, Public Law, LSE Law School |
On the Law/Politics Relationship |
Feb. 25 | Duncan Kennedy, Jurisprudence, Harvard Law |
Authoritarian Constitutionalism in Liberal Democracies |
Mar. 4 | Madhav Khosla, Law, Columbia Law |
Is a Science of Comparative Constitutionalism Possible? |
Mar. 11 | Paul Gowder, Law, Northwestern Law School |
Wigs for the Whigs: An Apology for E.P. Thompson on the Social Epistemology of the Non-Mystified Legal Subject |
Mar. 18 | Justin Desautels-Stein, Law, Colorado Law |
The Critique of Legal Ideology |
Mar. 25 | Spring Break | |
Apr. 1 | Melissa Ann Schwartzberg, Politics, NYU |
The Scope of Legislative Bargaining |
Apr. 8 | Amanda Greene, Philosophy, University College London |
Democratic Legitimacy for Skeptics |
Apr. 15 | Johann Frick, Philosophy, UC Berkeley |
Risk, Responsibility, and Aggregate Effects or, How Injustice Aggregates |
Apr. 22 | Sophia Moreau, Law and Philosophy, University of Toronto |
Morality and Institutional Role Obligations |