If Theodore Lowi is correct that the Republican Era died in the 1990’s, last week’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee was the equivalent of digging up the corpse and adding further humiliation to a long dead body.
A quick survey of James Madison’s Federalist #10, which presumably every college educated American [...]

Reflecting on a decade of where new scholarship has taken me, I give you ten of the most important works for where my head is now in terms of democratic theory.
In no particular order:

Democracy After Liberalism, Robert B. Talisse. Vanderbilt University.
Democratic Authority, David Estlund. Brown University.
World Poverty and Human Rights, Thomas Pogge.  Yale University.
Tocqueville Between [...]

My friend Robert Talisse has made a foray into the blogosphere in promotion of his new book.  Engaging his article for this post made me want to reflect on two things.  One, I am waiting for the paperback so I can get a free signed copy from the author.  I wouldn’t wait if the Kindle [...]

In case you missed it, Brian Leiter responded on this blog to an earlier post about his take on the potential of the evisceration of democratic institutions by the “know-nothing” wing of the Republican party.  Leiter makes an interesting point:
One quick observation: you state that we have three branches of government, that are separate, not [...]

I’m prepping for my Intro to Political Thought course at St. Thomas, and one of the authors we are reading is…. St. Thomas (what a coincidence!)  
While Aquinas is not a liberal (he advocates that obedience to maintain one’s form of government regardless of what it is counts as virtue because it maintains the excellence [...]

via Public Reason
A new paper from Christopher Freiman and Shaun Nichols at the University of Arizona sheds some empirical light on how humans view issues of moral desert.
The upshot is this: if you ask people to consider moral desert in terms of an abstract question they side with John Rawls.  If you ask them about [...]

I’m co-authoring a paper write now that takes a critical look at the implications of David Estlund’s Democratic Authority (and related papers) on what he calls Fair Epistemic Proceduralism.  There are a number of places when it comes to governance, where FEP is possibly not the most appropriate avenue of decision-making (and I think Estlund [...]

One of the nice discoveries of being in a Derek Parfit reading group - aside from encountering Parfit - is that I am going to stumble upon some other interesting and thoughtful blogs as others host the chapters.  As such, I have very belatedly run into an Arendt question that apparently has people talking, both here and [...]

Here again, is the Sotomayor quote that has some rankled:
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life
Here’s the context of where and why she said it, via the WSJ.  
The idea [...]

It’s funny.  I watched the HBO movie Recount last night, where both sides of the Bush-Gore election are portrayed in a fairly positive manner, but the Supreme Court is not.  It was an interesting thing to watch in the context of the nomination of Justice Sonia Sotamayor to the United States Supreme Court.  
I’m not [...]