What is the ethical basis of democracy? And what reasons do we have to go along with democratic decisions even when we disagree with them? And when do we have reason to say that we may justly ignore democratic decisions? These questions must be answered if we are to have answers to some of the most important questions facing our global community, which include whether there is a human right to democracy and whether we must attempt to spread democracy throughout the globe. This book provides a philosophical account of the moral foundations of democracy and of liberalism. It shows how democracy and basic liberal rights are grounded in the principle of public equality, which tells us that in the establishment of law and policy we must treat persons as equals in ways they can see are treating them as equals. The principle of public equality is shown to be the fundamental principle of social justice. This account enables us to understand the nature and roles of adversarial politics and public deliberation in political life. It gives an account of the grounds of the authority of democracy. It also shows when the authority of democracy runs out. The author shows how the violations of democratic and liberal rights are beyond the legitimate authority of democracy, how the creation of persistent minorities in a democratic society, and the failure to ensure a basic minimum for all persons weaken the legitimate authority of democracy.

The current five-vote majority on the Supreme Court may be the most divisive, anti-democratic court in American history. Overruling Democracy disputes the majority's awful rulings on third parties, race, high schools and corporations.

Laws of Transgression offers multiple perspectives on the story of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), a chamber president of the German Supreme Court who was institutionalized after claiming God had communicated with him, desiring to make him into a woman. Schreber was not only a successful judge, but was also to become the author of one of the most commented upon texts in psychiatric literature, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Published in 1903, this remarkable work documented Schreber’s visions, desires, jurisprudence, and theology. Far from ending the judge’s legal investments, it manifested an intensification of engagement with the law in the attempt to prove that becoming a woman did not deprive the judge of legal competence. Schreber’s experience of bodily change and his account of interior life has been the subject of more than a century of psychoanalytic and medical scrutiny. With the contemporary trans turn, interest in the judge’s desire to become a woman has intensified. In Laws of Transgression, Peter Goodrich, Katrin Trüstedt, and contributing authors set out to unfold Schreber’s complex relation to the law. The collection revisits and rediscovers the Memoirs, not only in its juridical and political implications, but as a transgressional text that has challenged law and heteronormativity.

Historically delineates the problems of genocide as a concept in relation to rival categories of mass violence.

In this major new work, Dominique Schnapper continues her investigation into changes in contemporary democracy. Although she concentrates on the French example, The Democratic Spirit of Law concerns all democratic societies.Schnapper warns against the danger of corrupting the "principles," as defined by Montesquieu, on which democracy is based. If democracy becomes "extreme," all its founding principles risk being corrupted. Respect for institutions is necessary for freedom to be effective. Furthermore, if democrats cease to distinguish between facts and values, religion and politics, politics and the judiciary, knowledge and opinion, and knowledge and intuition, they will sink into absolute relativism or a nihilism that threatens the very values on which democratic society is based.By pointing out the danger of corruption inherent in the democratic promise of freedom, equality, and happiness, the author provides intellectual weapons not only to understand, but also to defend democracy, the only system in history, despite its limits and failures, that has humanely organized human societies. Democracy's future depends on citizens' preservation of the founding spirit of the democratic order: recognition of others, and free, reasonable, and controlled criticism of legitimate institutions.

This book addresses the question of why governments sometimes follow the law and other times choose to evade the law. The traditional answer of jurists has been that laws have an autonomous causal efficacy: law rules when actions follow anterior norms; the relation between laws and actions is one of obedience, obligation, or compliance. Contrary to this conception, the authors defend a positive interpretation where the rule of law results from the strategic choices of relevant actors. Rule of law is just one possible outcome in which political actors process their conflicts using whatever resources they can muster: only when these actors seek to resolve their conflicts by recourse to la, does law rule. What distinguishes 'rule-of-law' as an institutional equilibrium from 'rule-by-law' is the distribution of power. The former emerges when no one group is strong enough to dominate the others and when the many use institutions to promote their interest.

In the original euphoria that attended the virtually simultaneous demise of so many dictatorships in the late 1980s and early 90s, there was a widespread belief that problems of 'transition' basically involved shedding a known past, and replacing it with an also-known future. This volume surveys and contributes to the prolific debates that occurred in the years between the collapse of communism and the enlargement of the European Union regarding the issues of constitutionalism, dealing with the past, and the rule of law in the post-communist world. Eminent scholars explore the issue of transitional justice, highlighting the distinct roles of legal and constitutional bodies in the post-transition period. The introduction seeks to frame the work as an intervention in the discussion of communism and transition-two stable and separate points-while emphasizing the instability of the post-transition moment.

This book is the result of a long and fruitful conversation among practitioners of two very different fields: ancient history and political theory. The topic of the conversation is classical Greek democracy and its contemporary relevance. The nineteen contributors remain diverse in their political commitments and in their analytic approaches, but all have engaged deeply with Greek texts, with normative and historical concerns, and with each others' arguments. The issues and tensions examined here are basic to both history and political theory: revolution versus stability, freedom and equality, law and popular sovereignty, cultural ideals and social practice. While the authors are sharply critical of many aspects of Athenian society, culture, and government, they are united by a conviction that classical Athenian democracy has once again become a centrally important subject for political debate. The contributors are Benjamin R. Barber, Alan Boegehold, Paul Cartledge, Susan Guettel Cole, W. Robert Connor, Carol Dougherty, J. Peter Euben, Mogens H. Hansen, Victor D. Hanson, Carnes Lord, Philip Brook Manville, Ian Morris, Martin Ostwald, Kurt Raaflaub, Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Barry S. Strauss, Robert W. Wallace, Sheldon S. Wolin, and Ellen Meiksins Wood.