HARVARD LEGAL THEORY FORUM

The Harvard Graduate Conference in Political Theory would like to invite graduate and law students to the third annual Harvard Graduate Conference in Political Theory next weekend (Oct. 30-31).

The Keynote Address will be given by Prof. Bonnie Honig: “Antigone, Interrupted: Humanism and the Future of Democratic Theory” on Friday Oct. 30 at 3:30pm in the Tsai Auditorium (1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge MA 02138).

The graduate student panels are on Toleration, Liberalism and Legitimacy, Representation and Accountability, Nietzsche, and Politics and Culture. For more information, please look at the conference website or email  theorycon09.harvard at gmail.com for more information.

The Legal Theory Reading Group will meet on Wednesday, October 28, at 7:30 PM in Lewis International Law Center Room 301. We will discuss two sections of Toqueville’s “Democracy in America” and a recent article discussing American judges’ use of Toqueville.

The selections from Tocqueville are:

– Vol. I, Part Two, Ch. 6 [sometimes numbered Ch. 14]–particularly the sections under the headings, “General Tendency of the Laws under American Democracy…” and “Respect for Law in the United States…”

– Vol. I, Part Two, Ch. 8 [sometimes numbered Ch. 16]–particularly the section under the heading, “The Temper of the Legal Profession in the United States…”

Reading some of the surrounding material (e.g., Ch. 7 [sometimes numbered 15], in between the two cited here) would also be helpful, but isn’t necessary.

Jonathan Bruno recommends the translation by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, published by the UChicago Press in 2000. But the free translation posted online and linked above is also good enough for our purposes.

The recent article (which is short, 14 pp. double spaced) to discuss in connection with Toqueville is Christine A. Corcos on “A Man for All Reasons: The Use of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Writing in U.S. Judicial Opinions,” a short article describing how courts in the U.S. have used citations to Tocqueville.

The Legal Theory Reading Group will meet on Wednesday, October 14, at 7:30 PM in Lewis Room 301. We will discuss Muneer A. Malik’s article, “Not Motivated by Politics” in Dawn, and Mort Horwitz’s book review, “The Rule of Law: An Unqualified Human Good,” 86 Yale L.J. 561 (1977). Both articles are short–the Malik piece is a long op-ed and the Horwitz book review is 6 pages. A reading for the next meeting of the reading group will be selected at this meeting.

Jeremy Waldron (NYU), who is delivering the Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School this coming week, will give a talk to the Harvard Legal Theory Forum on the topic “Poverty and Democracy” on Tuesday, October 6 in Pound 332.

Prof. Waldron will speak about the tension between modern, representative capitalist democracy and distributive justice: is it an inherent feature of modern democracy that there be deep structural material and power inequalities? At what point along the continuum do we move from living in a uncomfortably unequal democracy to not living in a democracy at all? How much inequality and poverty is compatible with democracy?

Relevant background reading is Waldron’s short essay in the 15 July 1999 London Review of books on “The Plight of Poor in the Midst of Plenty.”

Lunch will be provided.

If you wish to attend, please RSVP to hltf@law.harvard.edu.