The University of Chicago Law School presents a lecture in the Chicago's Best Ideas series: Bernard Harcourt, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law & Criminology and Professor of Political Science, will speak on "Neoliberal Penality: A Genealogy of Excess."
The Enlightenment took us from a world of Empire to an Age of Reason and equality in the public sphere. But it left the private spheres of culture and religion in the Dark Ages of imposition and unreason. In the Enlightenment worldview, freedom in the public sphere is freedom itself.
What will the election of Barack Obama mean for the Supreme Court of the United States? To answer this question, it is necessary to understand the current make-up of the Court and its direction. What are the predispositions of the current Justices? What do we mean today by the terms "liberal" and "conservative"?
In this talk, subtitled "A Dialogue about Political Philosophy and the Judge's Role," Professor Nussbaum discussed her "capabilities approach," a normative approach to basic political principles that has implications for how constitutions should be both written and interpreted.
Labor relations consists of two broad areas—unions and employment discrimination. Both areas have been stable for some time. The last major labor law reform was in 1959. The employment discrimination law dates back to 1991. The new Obama administration is, however, ramping up tough legislation in both these areas.
Law often allocates risk, as through tort doctrines. Should people be able to undo or "reverse" such risk allocations by, for example, selling their rights to any claims that may later develop? Scholars have interestingly examined this question, as well as many other innovative ideas for rearranging risk outside of traditional insurance markets.
There is the well known problem, or reality, of juvenile and destructive communication on the Internet, normally engaged in behind the protective cover of anonymity. Is this somehow a different problem on the Internet than it is elsewhere and, if so, are there solutions that are effective and justifiable?
In the absence of pre-cognitive superbeings and Tom Cruise, how are police and policy makers supposed to allocate scarce crime-fighting resources? There is a vibrant academic literature on predicting crime, with models of various types offered as the best way of estimating future crime rates.
It has become commonplace in American political discourse for Christian evangelicals to assert that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation" and that in recent decades secularists have gained control and distorted our nation's founding traditions and values. In this lecture, Professor Geoffrey Stone examines the beliefs of the Framers on this question.
Without question, the most distinctive feature of the modern social democratic state is the rise of administrative agencies, which at the federal level function as a shadowy Fourth Branch of government that fits uneasily into our constitutional scheme of separation of powers, and which at the state level oversee vast swaths of economic activity.
