•  986
    Authority and Coercion
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 32 (1): 2-35. 2004.
    I am grateful to Donald Ainslie, Lisa Austin, Michael Blake, Abraham Drassinower, David Dyzenhaus, George Fletcher, Robert Gibbs, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Sari Kisilevsky, Dennis Klimchuk, Christopher Morris, Scott Shapiro, Horacio Spector, Sergio Tenenbaum, Malcolm Thorburn, Ernest Weinrib, Karen Weisman, and the Editors of Philosophy & Public Affairs for comments, and audiences in the UCLA Philosophy Department and Columbia Law School for their questions.
  •  275
    In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant's thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant's political philosophy. In addition to providing a clear and coherent statement of the most misunderstood of Kant's ideas, Ripstein also shows that Kant's views remain conceptually powerful and morally appealing today.
  •  254
    Beyond the Harm Principle
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 34 (3): 215-245. 2006.
  •  247
    Foundationalism in political theory
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 16 (2): 115-137. 1987.
  •  140
    Critical notice too much invested to quit
    Economics and Philosophy 20 (1): 185-208. 2004.
    Faculty of Law and Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto 1. INTRODUCTION The economic analysis of law has gone through a remarkable change in the past decade and a half. The founding articles of the discipline – such classic pieces as Ronald Coase’s “The problem of social cost” (1960), Richard Posner’s “A theory of negligence” (1972) and Guido Calabresi and Douglas Malamed’s “Property rules, liability rules, and inalienability: One view of the cathedral” (1972) – offered economic analy…Read more
  •  134
    Commodity Fetishism
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (4). 1987.
    Criticism and sarcasm are interspersed with description and analysis throughout Marx's work. Most of the criticism is aimed at one or another side of a single target: what Marx sees as capitalism's pretensions of freedom, equality, and prosperity in the face of exploitation and recurrent crises. But the remarks on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital seem to be directed at a different target. Here Marx tells us that a commodity is ‘a queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtletie…Read more
  •  99
    Justice and Responsibility
    Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 17 (2): 361-386. 2004.
    I argue that institutions charged with giving justice must understand responsibility in terms of norms governing what people are entitled to expect of each other. On this conception, the sort of responsibility that is of interest to private law or distributive justice is not a relation between a person and the consequence, but rather a relation between persons with respect to consequences. As a result, nonrelational facts about a person’s actions and the circumstances in which she performs them …Read more
  •  97
    Douglas Joel Butler 1957-1991
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 65 (5). 1992.
    APA Memorial Minutes.
  •  87
    In A Theory of Justice, Rawls makes almost no mention of the issues of justice that animated philosophers in earlier centuries. There is no discussion of justice between persons, issues that Aristotle sought to explain under the idea of “corrective justice.” Nor is there discussion, except in passing, of punishment, another primary focus of the social contract approaches of Locke, Rousseau and Kant.1 My aim in this article is to argue that implicit in Rawls’s writing is a powerful and persuasive…Read more
  •  80
    Equality, Luck, and Responsibility
    Philosophy and Public Affairs 23 (1): 3-23. 1994.
  •  76
    Form and Matter in Kantian Political Philosophy: A Reply
    European Journal of Philosophy 20 (3): 487-496. 2012.
    This paper responds briefly to four reviews of Force and Freedom. Valentini and Sangiovanni criticize what they see as the excessive formalism of the Kantian enterprise, contending that the Kantian project is circular, because it defines rights and freedom together, and that this circularity renders it unable to say anything determinate about appropriate restrictions and permissions. I show that the appearance of circularity arises from a misconstrual of the Kantian idea of a right. Properly und…Read more
  •  64
    Ronald Dworkin (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2007.
    Ronald Dworkin occupies a distinctive place in both public life and philosophy. In public life, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and other widely read journals. In philosophy, he has written important and influential works on many of the most prominent issues in legal and political philosophy. In both cases, his interventions have in part shaped the debates he joined. His opposition to Robert Bork's nomination for the United States Supreme Court gave new centrality to …Read more
  •  63
    Three duties to rescue: Moral, civil, and criminal (review)
    Law and Philosophy 19 (6): 751-779. 2000.
    No Abstract
  •  63
    Practical Rationality and Preference: Essays for David Gauthier (edited book)
    with Christopher W. Morris
    Cambridge University Press. 2001.
    What are preferences and are they reasons for action? Is it rational to cooperate with others even if that entails acting against one's preferences? The dominant position in philosophy on the topic of practical rationality is that one acts so as to maximize the satisfaction of one's preferences. This view is most closely associated with the work of David Gauthier, and in this collection of essays some of the most innovative philosophers working in this field explore the controversies surrounding…Read more
  •  62
    Law students are usually told that the purpose of damages is to make it as if a wrong had never happened.3 Although torts professors are good at explaining this idea to their students, it is the source of much academic perplexity. Money cannot really make serious losses go away, and it seems a cruel joke to say that money can make an injured person “whole.” Worse still, if money could make an injured person whole, injuring someone and then paying them seems just as good as not injuring them at a…Read more
  •  60
    Critical notice
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40 (4): 669-699. 2010.
    The 2008 meltdown in global capital markets has led to a renewed interest in questions of economic distribution. Many people suggest that the motives, incentive structures, and institutions in place were inadequate and, for the first time in a generation, public debate is animated by arguments about the need for greater equality. G.A. Cohen's new book resonates with many of the themes of these debates; he advocates a more thoroughgoing equality, even more thoroughgoing than that demanded by John…Read more
  •  55
    Law and Morality: Readings in Legal Philosophy
    University of Toronto Press. 2001.
    Filling a long-standing need for a Canadian textbook in the philosophy of law, this anthology includes articles, readings, and cases in legal philosophy to give students the conceptual tools necessary to consider the general problems of jurisprudence.
  •  55
    In one of the few widely discussed passages in the Doctrine of Right, Kant makes the surprising claim that a shipwrecked sailor who dislodges another from a plank that will support only one of them is "culpable, but not punishable." Many commentators regard this passage as a sort of smoking gun that shows that, in extremis, Kant resorts to the very sort of empirical and consequentialist reasoning that he claims to do without.2 My aim in this paper is to defend his analysis, by showing both that …Read more
  •  52
    Just War, Regular War, and Perpetual Peace
    Kant Studien 107 (1): 179-195. 2016.
    Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 107 Heft: 1 Seiten: 179-195.
  •  52
    Rules for Wrongdoers
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    Ripstein's lectures, which constitute the central texts of this book, focus on the two bodies of rules governing war: the jus ad bellum, which regulates resort to armed force, and the jus in bello, which sets forth rules governing the conduct of armed force and applies equally to all parties. The lectures argue that both sets of rules constitute prohibitions rather than permissions, and that recognizing them as distinctive prohibitions can reconcile the seeming tension between them. By understan…Read more
  •  49
    Kant and the Law of War
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    "The past two decades have seen renewed scholarly and popular interest in the law and morality of war. Positions that originated in the late Middle Ages through the 17th century have received more sophisticated philosophical elaboration. Although many contemporary writers draw on ideas that figure prominently in Kant's moral philosophy, his explicit discussions of war have not been brought into their proper place within these discussions and debates. Kant argues that a special morality governs t…Read more
  •  46
    Private law and private narratives
    Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 20 (4): 683-701. 2000.
  •  42
    Property and Sovereignty: How to Tell the Difference
    Theoretical Inquiries in Law 18 (2): 243-268. 2017.
    Property and sovereignty are often used as models for each other. Landowners are sometimes described as sovereign, the state’s territory sometimes described as its property. Both property and sovereignty involve authority relations: both an owner and a sovereign get to tell others what to do — at least within the scope of their ownership or sovereignty. My aim in this Article is to distinguish property and sovereignty from each other by focusing on what lies within the scope of each. I argue tha…Read more
  •  38
    Law and Disagreement
    Philosophical Review 110 (4): 611. 2001.
    The most obvious way of settling disagreements peacefully is to take a vote. Yet, as Jeremy Waldron points out, the attitudes of philosophers and political theorists towards majority voting have ranged from indifference to hostility. Piled on top of all this scorn for legislation comes further scorn from social choice theorists, who insist that majority rule is useless as a means of making decisions.