Renée Nicole Souris

The edited volume brings together contemporary work by philosophers, legal scholars, and political theorists. This volume presents relevant understandings of the common good, democracy, liberty, and law, and situates them in the context of contemporary countervailing pressures posed by issues in education, access to medical treatment in a pandemic, and the media. Motivated to ascertain how democracy is threatened by a variety contemporary challenges, the authors examine core aspects of law, representative democracy, and constitutionalism to shed light on worrisome contemporary phenomena such as social media-driven conspiracy theories, unequal access to education and medical treatment, among other topics.

Adrian Vermeule’s book Common Good Constitutionalism presents a profound challenge to the reigning schools of American legal thought in an effort to return to our classical roots. Vermeule describes his theory as methodologically Dworkinian in that he intends it to fit and justify American law, but unlike Dworkin’s judge-centered theory of law as integrity, common good constitutionalism argues for judicial deference to political authorities—legislative and executive officials—who have ‘primary competence for promoting the common good.’ Indeed, common good constitutionalism urges political authorities to show a ‘candid willingness to legislate morality.’ The deference expected of judges toward legislators is part of common good constitutionalism’s ‘role morality’ within our constitutional system, though the theory is presented as ‘agnostic at the level of institutions’ such that it does not require any particular institutional scheme. I challenge common good constitutionalism’s argument for judicial deference to legislators from within the classical tradition itself by showing that within this tradition, deference depends upon a presumption of virtue among legislators which is untenable in our institutional environment. From here, I argue that common good constitutionalism either needs a new basis beyond virtue for judicial deference to legislators, or that Vermeule needs to revise the theory’s institutional commitments so that it rules out those institutions that fail to cultivate political virtue among our legislators.

This paper critically examines two formulations of the view that the crime of using child soldiers is less serious than other international crimes. The first formulation presents a sociological argument that using child soldiers is not as serious as other international crimes involving rape or murder, and the second formulation relies on deontological moral norms to argue that using child soldiers is less serious than crimes involving murder because child soldiering does not violate fundamental human values, like the right to life. After critically examining each formulation of this view, I argue that using child soldiers does violate a fundamental human value by attacking the dignity of the developing child, where dignity is understood in terms of a person’s moral agency.

This paper critically examines different formulations of the view that the crime of using child soldiers is less serious than other international crimes. The first formulation presents a sociological argument toward this conclusion and the second a deontological argument. After arguing that the second formulation is stronger, because it is grounded in a coherent ethical framework, I then construct a deontological argument to counter it, which construes the wrong of child soldiering as an attack on the developing child's right to dignity, where dignity is understood through a Kantian lens as a person's moral agency.

Recent global efforts of the United States and England to withdraw from international institutions, along with recent challenges to human rights courts from Poland and Hungary, have been described as part of a growing global populist backlash against the liberal international order. Several scholars have even identified the recent threat of mass withdrawal of African states from the International Criminal Court (ICC) as part of this global populist backlash. Are the African challenges to the ICC part of a global populist movement developing in Africa? More fundamentally, how are the African challenges to the ICC examples of populism, if at all? In this paper, I show that, while there is considerable overlap between the strategies used by particular African leaders to challenge the ICC and those typically considered populist, as well as a discernible thin populist ideology to sustain them, there is insufficient evidence of a larger anti-ICC populist movement in Africa. Although Africa is not as united against the ICC as the populist narrative suggests, the recent challenges to the Court from Africa pose a significant challenge to the Court, as the institution is still in the early stages of building its legitimacy.

This paper examines whether American parents legally violate their children’s privacy rights when they share embarrassing images of their children on social media without their children’s consent. My inquiry is motivated by recent reports that French authorities have warned French parents that they could face fines and imprisonment for such conduct, if their children sue them once their children turn 18. Where French privacy law is grounded in respect for dignity, thereby explaining the French concerns for parental “over-sharing,” I show that there are three major legal roadblocks for such a case to succeed in US law. First, US privacy tort law largely only protects a person’s image where the person has a commercial interest in his or her image. Secondly, privacy tort laws are subject to constitutional constraints respecting the freedom of speech and press. Third, American courts are reluctant to erode parental authority, except in cases where extraordinary threats to children’s welfare exist. I argue that while existing privacy law in the US is inadequate to offer children legal remedy if their parents share their embarrassing images of them without their consent, the dignity-based concerns of the French should not be neglected. I consider a recent proposal to protect children’s privacy by extending to them the “right to be forgotten” online, but I identify problems in this proposal, and argue it is not a panacea to the over-sharing problem. I conclude by emphasizing our shared social responsibilities to protect children by teaching them about the importance of respecting one another’s privacy and dignity in the online context, and by setting examples as responsible users of internet technologies.

In this article, I contribute to the debate between two philosophical traditions—the Kantian and the Aristotelian—on the requirements of criminal responsibility and the grounds for excuse by taking this debate to a new context: international criminal law. After laying out broadly Kantian and Aristotelian conceptions of criminal responsibility, I defend a quasi-Aristotelian conception, which affords a central role to moral development, and especially to the development of moral perception, for international criminal law. I show than an implication of this view is that persons who are substantially and non-culpably limited in their capacity for ordinary moral perception warrant an excuse for engaging in unlawful conduct. I identify a particular set of conditions that trigger this excuse, and then I systematically examine it as applied to the controversial case of former-child-soldier-turned leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Dominic Ongwen, who is currently at trial at the International Criminal Court.