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619What Does it Mean to Say “The Criminal Justice System is Racist”?American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (4): 341-354. 2023.This paper considers three possible ways of understanding the claim that the American criminal justice system is racist: individualist, “patterns”-based, and ideology-based theories of institutional racism. It rejects an individualist explanation of institutional racism because such an explanation fails to explain the widespread prevalence of anti-black racism in this system or indeed in the United States. It considers a “patterns” account of institutional racism, where consistent patterns of di…Read more
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441The Undermining Mechanisms of ‘Rule of Law’ Objections: A Response to Song and BloemraadThe Ethics of Migration Policy Dilemmas Project. 2022.In their article, “Immigrant legalization: A Dilemma Between Justice and The Rule of Law,” Sarah Song and Irene Bloemraad address rule of law objections to policies that would regularize the status of undocumented immigrants in the United States. On their view, justice requires that liberal democratic states (i.e., states that are committed to individual liberty and universal equality) provide pathways for undocumented immigrants to regularize their status. We do not disagree with Song and Bloem…Read more
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30A defense of the lifeworldPhilosophy and Social Criticism 40 (2): 215-223. 2014.Hugh Baxter’s book Habermas: A Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy not only carefully recounts Habermas’ political and legal theory, but also raises several insightful criticisms of Habermas. Of particular note is Baxter’s criticism of Habermas’ system–lifeworld model originally presented in Theory of Communicative Action. Baxter argues that Habermas ought to discard the concept of the lifeworld because the distinction between lifeworld and system is no longer tenable in the model of political…Read more
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626Is Crime Caused by Illness, Immorality, or Injustice? Theories of Punishment in the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First CenturiesIn Matthew C. Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 75-97. 2022.Since 1900, debates about the justification of punishment have also been debates about the cause of crime. In the early twentieth century, the rehabilitative ideal of punishment viewed mental illness and dysfunction in individuals as the cause of crime. Starting in the 1970s, retributivism identified the immorality of human agents as the source of crime, which dovetailed well with the “tough-on-crime” political milieu of the 1980s and 1990s that produced mass incarceration. After surveying these…Read more
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84Review of Matthew C. Altman, A Theory of Legal Punishment: Deterrence, Retribution, and the Aims of the State (review)Law and Philosophy 43 (2): 205-201. 2023.Matthew Altman’s A Theory of Legal Punishments sets forth a thorough, systematic account of punishment that relies on both a consequentialist and a retributivist justification of punishment. Preferring the term ‘‘two-tiered model’’ to ‘‘mixed theory,’’ Altman argues that the legislature should employ consequentialist aims while the judiciary should operate with a retributivist purpose. The legislature should define classes of criminal acts and set out ranges of punishment for each class of crime…Read more
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