Jeremy Waldron on Respectful Coercion: How Law Can Maintain Human Dignity
Law is forceful and coercive; it seems to achieve its ends by constraining human agency. People are pushed around, punished, forced to do things they don’t want to do, beaten, expropriated, ruined and sometimes killed. Does that mean that law is inherently disrespectful, inherently at odds with the dignity of human agency? Maybe not. Without abandoning the connection between law and force, perhaps we can distinguish between modes of coercion that are respectful and modes of coercion that are not.
Respectful coercion sounds like a contradiction in terms, but in this lecture Professor Jeremy Waldron will explore a number of dimensions in which coercion can be more or less respectful, and he will associate the rule of law with the respectful end of those spectrums or spectra. This is part of a wider project forging a connection between the rule of law and the value of human dignity.
A native of New Zealand, Jeremy Waldron received his doctorate at the University of Oxford. He has held numerous academic appointments in prominent philosophy departments and law schools, including Edinburgh, University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall School of Law), Princeton and Columbia Law School. Waldron is currently a university professor at the New York University School of Law and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford.
Friday, September 19, 2014 at 7:30 pm
Joe Crowley Student Union, Ballroom A
1500 North Virginia Street
- Event Type
- Departments
- Pricing
- Cost
-
Free, open to the public
- Subscribe
- Google Calendar (opens in new window) iCal (opens in new window) Outlook (opens in new window)
Recent Activity
No recent activity