Past Events
CLP | Defamation: Philosophical and Legal Perspectives
3/4/2022
9:00:00 AM to 5:30:00 PM
401 E. Peltason Drive, Suite 1000, Irvine, CA 92697-8000
This conference, hosted by the UCI Center for Legal Philosophy, will examine the underexplored topic of defamation, both as a moral and as a legal wrong, with the aim of breaking new ground on a legal practice — and a long-standing norm — ripe for philosophical and theoretical scrutiny.
Speakers include:
Jeffrey S. Helmreich
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law
Co-director, Center for Legal Philosophy
UCI
Lyrissa Lidsky
Dean and Judge C.A. Leedy Professor of Law
University of Missouri School of Law
Collin O’Neil
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Lehman College
Robert Post
Sterling Professor of Law
Yale Law School
Kenneth W. Simons
Chancellor's Professor of Law
Co-director, Center for Legal Philosophy
UCI Law
David Sussman
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Eugene Volokh
Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law
UCLA School of Law
Benjamin Zipursky
James H. Quinn '49 Chair in Legal Ethics; Professor of Law
Fordham University School of Law
This event will take place in person at UCI Law, with a live stream available for remote participation. A Zoom link will be provided upon registration.
CLP | Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium: Vera Bergelson
3/17/2021
10:00:00 AM to 11:30:00 AM
Vera Bergelson, Distinguished Professor of Law and Robert E. Knowlton Scholar at Rutgers Law School, will present her paper, "Consent to Pain and Consent to Physical Harm."
The Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium includes distinguished professors of law or philosophy who will present papers on a range of topics in legal philosophy or legal theory, broadly construed, such as the relationship of legal norms to moral norms, responsibility in law and morality, and the criteria for permissible risk imposition.
CLP | Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium: Hallie Liberto
2/24/2021
10:00:00 AM to 11:30:00 AM
Hallie Liberto, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland (philosophy), will present her paper, "Intention and Sexual Consent."
The Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium includes distinguished professors of law or philosophy who will present papers on a range of topics in legal philosophy or legal theory, broadly construed, such as the relationship of legal norms to moral norms, responsibility in law and morality, and the criteria for permissible risk imposition.
CLP | Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium: Tom Dougherty
2/17/2021
10:00:00 AM to 11:30:00 AM
Tom Dougherty, Associate Professor, Mary Noel and William M. Lamont Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Philosophy), will present his paper, "Informed Consent, Disclosure, and Understanding."
The Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium includes distinguished professors of law or philosophy who will present papers on a range of topics in legal philosophy or legal theory, broadly construed, such as the relationship of legal norms to moral norms, responsibility in law and morality, and the criteria for permissible risk imposition.
CLP | Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium: Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
2/10/2021
10:00:00 AM to 11:30:00 AM
Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, Earle Hepburn Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, will present her paper, "Consent, Culpability and the Law of Rape."
The Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium includes distinguished professors of law or philosophy who will present papers on a range of topics in legal philosophy or legal theory, broadly construed, such as the relationship of legal norms to moral norms, responsibility in law and morality, and the criteria for permissible risk imposition.
CLP Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium: Jeffrey Helmreich & Duncan Pritchard
12/5/2019
12:00:00 PM to 1:30:00 PM
401 East Peltason Drive Irvine, CA 92697-8000
Jeffrey Helmreich, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Law at the UCI School of Humanities & Co-Director of the Center for Legal Philosophy, and Duncan Pritchard, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the UCI School of Humanities, will present their paper, "Against the Odds: the Case for a Modal Understanding of Due Care" (forthcoming in Truth & Trials (Routledge)).
The Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium includes distinguished professors of law or philosophy who will present papers on a range of topics in legal philosophy or legal theory, broadly construed, such as the relationship of legal norms to moral norms, responsibility in law and morality, and the criteria for permissible risk imposition.
A draft of the paper will become available on the Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium page closer to the event date.
Intellectual Life Workshop: Richard Re
9/18/2019
12:00:00 PM to 1:00:00 PM
401 East Peltason Drive Irvine, CA 92697-8000
Richard Re, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
criminal procedure, federal courts, constitutional law
Predictive Fairness in Criminal Justice
Abstract:
This paper contributes to debates on predictive and algorithmic fairness in the criminal justice system by drawing on contractualism, an ethical theory that demands principles of conduct that no individual can reasonably reject. In general, contractualism privileges the objections of the most vulnerable individual above aggregate social welfare. Contractualism helps to explain why predictive methods pose fairness challenges when they burden people on grounds that are insensitive to their choices: in general, an individual has less ability to raise reasonable objections when he could have reduced his risk of suffering burdens by choosing appropriately. Thus, an individual has good reason to reject principles that would burden him based on the actions of others, particularly when doing so would compound background social inequalities. Examples include not just racial profiling but also predictive policing tools that rest on statistical patterns observable at a population level, without considering individual behavior. Still, contractualism suggests that criminal-justice prediction can be fair. For one thing, an algorithm’s lack of “explainability” is less important to fairness than sometimes suggested, because people can avoid burdens by choosing to abide by the law, even if they don’t understand the nuts-and-bolts of how algorithms work. Further, sophisticated algorithmic tools are at least somewhat sensitive to individual choice and so can be fair—provided certain conditions are met. Finally, contractualism points toward certain measures of algorithmic discrimination, such as false positive rates, over others. Overall, contractualism offers a moderate approach, intermediate between the optimism and pessimism that marks many debates on predictive criminal justice. And contractualism’s insights can be helpful even for those who subscribe to different first-principles views of fairness and criminal justice.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Legal Philosophy.
Lunch will be provided.
Intellectual Life Workshop Calendar
CLP Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium: Connie Rosati
3/14/2019
5:00:00 PM to 6:30:00 PM
401 East Peltason Drive Irvine, CA 92697-8000
Connie Rosati, Professor of Philosophy (University of Arizona) will present her paper, "What Obergefell v. Hodges Should have Said".
Abstract:
In Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, held that under the Fourteenth Amendment, the States must license marriages between persons of the same sex and must recognize valid marriages of same-sex couples performed elsewhere. The landmark opinion strikes many of us as correct, not only morally but also constitutionally, at least in its outcome; and yet we would have welcomed more solid reasoning in support of it. The difficulty isn’t merely that Justice Kennedy’s reasoning is somewhat obscure; and it is not, as Justice John Roberts argues in his dissent, that it deviates from the Supreme Court’s doctrinal test under the Due Process Clause. Rather, the difficulty is that his reasoning,while rightly deviating from the Court’s problematic test, fails adequately to justify this departure, and most important, fails to put a clear and more plausible test in its place. Yet Justice Kennedy’s reasoning provides materials that might be used in formulating an improved test. In this article, I critically examine the Court’s test for fundamental rights under the Due Process Clause, as presented by Roberts in Obergefell v. Hodges, and develop a more plausible test that draws on elements of Kennedy’s suggestive opinion.
The Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium is sponsored by the UCI Schools of Humanities and Law, and includes distinguished professors of law and philosophy presenting papers on a range of topics in legal philosophy and legal theory, broadly construed, and serves as a forum for intellectual exchange between faculty, students, and scholars working across the fields of law, philosophy, and the humanities.
CLP | Rights and Demands Conference
2/9/2019
9:30:00 AM to 2:30:00 PM
UCI School of Humanities
What are rights? How do they relate to duties, powers, and interests that ought to be protected? What normative work is done by calling something a right? Could morality or law provide the basis of genuine rights, and if not, what does?
These and related questions – vigorously debated by moral philosophers and legal theorists for decades – are taken up in a much-anticipated book by UCI Distinguished Professor Margaret Gilbert, Rights and Demands: A Foundational Inquiry (OUP 2018). Professor Gilbert advances her own account of what she calls "demand-rights," arguably the central case of rights, an account that she grounds in the social phenomenon of joint commitment. The view serves not only as a novel alternative to leading theories of rights, but as a challenge to widely held views about the scope of morality, the nature of obligation and the existence of a whole class of phenomena that go by the name “rights.”
At the conference, prominent theorists of ethics and jurisprudence engage with this provocative account and its wide-ranging implications, addressing some fundamental questions for ethics and rights theory going forward.
Featured Speakers Include
-
Richard Arneson
Distinguished Professor and Valtz Family Chair in Philosophy
University of California, San Diego -
Allen E. Buchanan
Research Professor
University of Arizona -
Stephen Darwall
Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy
Yale University -
Frances Kamm
Distinguished Professor
Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy
Rutgers University -
Gregory Keating
William T. Dalessi Professor of Law and Philosophy
University of Southern California -
Gary Watson
Provost Professor of Philosophy and Law
University of Southern California
CLP | Rights and Demands Conference
2/8/2019
10:00:00 AM to 5:00:00 PM
UCI School of Humanities
What are rights? How do they relate to duties, powers, and interests that ought to be protected? What normative work is done by calling something a right? Could morality or law provide the basis of genuine rights, and if not, what does?
These and related questions – vigorously debated by moral philosophers and legal theorists for decades – are taken up in a much-anticipated book by UCI Distinguished Professor Margaret Gilbert, Rights and Demands: A Foundational Inquiry (OUP 2018). Professor Gilbert advances her own account of what she calls "demand-rights," arguably the central case of rights, an account that she grounds in the social phenomenon of joint commitment. The view serves not only as a novel alternative to leading theories of rights, but as a challenge to widely held views about the scope of morality, the nature of obligation and the existence of a whole class of phenomena that go by the name “rights.”
At the conference, prominent theorists of ethics and jurisprudence engage with this provocative account and its wide-ranging implications, addressing some fundamental questions for ethics and rights theory going forward.
Featured Speakers Include
-
Richard Arneson
Distinguished Professor and Valtz Family Chair in Philosophy
University of California, San Diego -
Allen E. Buchanan
Research Professor
University of Arizona -
Stephen Darwall
Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy
Yale University -
Frances Kamm
Distinguished Professor
Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy
Rutgers University -
Gregory Keating
William T. Dalessi Professor of Law and Philosophy
University of Southern California -
Gary Watson
Provost Professor of Philosophy and Law
University of Southern California
CLP Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium: Ken Simons
11/29/2018
5:00:00 PM to 6:30:00 PM
UCI School of Law
401 E. Peltason Dr., Irvine, CA 92697-8000
Ken Simons, Chancellor’s Professor of Law (UCI School of Law) will present his paper, “The Justifiable Scope of Hate (or Bias) Crime Laws.”
Abstract:
This Encyclopedia entry addresses some crucial questions about the justifiable scope of hate crime or bias crime laws—laws that enhance punishment when the criminal conduct occurred because of group hatred or bias. My conclusions include the following:
·Hatred (as opposed to bias) should not be treated as either a necessary or sufficient condition for enhanced punishment.
·The most plausible justifications for enhanced punishment are: (1) bias crimes cause greater harm (including greater psychic harm to the immediate victim and group-specific fear and outrage in the victim’s community); (2) bias crimes display greater culpability; and (3) bias crimes express profound disrespect for the group of which the victim is a member.
·Bias crime laws, if properly designed, do not improperly punish for thoughts or character.
·Bias crime laws are more defensible if they require some form of animus towards the disfavored group, and not merely a discriminatory method of selecting the victim.
·With respect to causation, the most defensible test is that bias or animus must have been the actor’s primary motive.
·There is no principled reason to require that a bias crime merely enhance punishment for an already existing parallel crime.
·Imposing a very significant increase in punishment because of bias is likely to violate principles of proportionality. For the most serious crimes, such as murder or rape, sentences should only be modestly enhanced.
The Law, Reason, and Value Colloquium is sponsored by the UCI Schools of Humanities and Law, and includes distinguished professors of law and philosophy presenting papers on a range of topics in legal philosophy and legal theory, broadly construed, and serves as a forum for intellectual exchange between faculty, students, and scholars working across the fields of law, philosophy, and the humanities.