CFP: Governance, Legality, and Political Morality Beyond the State

The 2017 Ontario Legal Philosophy Partnership Philosophy of Law Conference

Governance, Legality, and Political Morality Beyond the State

Thursday, September 28-Sunday, October 1, 2017 (Burlington, Ontario)

Deadline for Abstracts Extended unitl April 20, 2017

Keynote Speakers

Karen J. Alter and Cristina Lafont (Northwestern University)

Thomas Christiano (University of Arizona)

Sarah Fine (King’s College London)

John Gardner (University of Oxford)

David Luban (Georgetown Law)

Andrei Marmor (Cornell University)

Amrita Narlikar (German Institute for Global and Area Studies)*

Donald Regan (University of Michigan)

Nicole Roughan (National University of Singapore)

Richard Wilder (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Georgetown Law)

*Participating via teleconference.

Call for Abstracts

In addition to the keynote presentations listed above, the conference will feature anywhere from sixteen to twenty-four conference presentations (about 75 minutes each, with comments and Q&A) convened during as many as eight parallel sessions. We expect to publish a compendium of keynote presentations and select conference presentations with a reputable university press.

We welcome abstracts of no more than 1000 words on the theme described below. The deadline for submitting abstracts is April 20. Please send abstracts to [email protected] and indicate Conference Abstract in the subject line. We plan to select papers for inclusion in the conference by April 15.

We will ask all conference participants to submit drafts of their conference papers no later than September 1 so that we can circulate them to commentators and conference participants.

Conference Theme

A bewildering array of institutions prescribe, implement, and enforce policies designed to address morally urgent issues that demand institutional responses on a transnational or global scale. To name just a few, these include:

·      Security arrangements and the maintenance of borders and territories

·      Transnational public health issues

·      Access to and maintenance of the global commons

·      Climate change

·      International trade, currency, and property regimes

·      Global distribute justice

·      Human rights

·      Responses to humanitarian crises

·      Migration across state boundaries

·      The adjudication and punishment of war crimes and crimes against humanity 

The overarching purpose of the conference is to clarify and address a number of tightly interconnected philosophical questions that these morally urgent matters and the institutional responses to them have generated. The following is meant to be suggestive of the questions that we have in mind:

Are all or any of these global and transnational institutions legal institutions? Are the policies that they prescribe and implement law? Must these regimes be legal institutions in order to succeed? Are the institutions that develop and enforce these policies legitimate? Must these institutions give democratic voice to the relevant stakeholders to be legitimate?  To what extent is extending such democratic voice feasible? Do these institutions have the authority that law claims or something similar? Must they have the authority that law claims or something similar as a matter of political morality? Must they be widely regarded as legitimate or as having the authority that law claims or something similar if they are to succeed? How ought these institutions be designed or modified so that they have the legitimacy and authority demanded by political morality and their institutional raison d’etre?

We welcome papers that address any of these questions (or closely related matters) posed singly or together and as applied to global or transnational institutional regimes in general, to particular regimes (e.g., the WTO, WHO, ICC, ICJ, the UN, or the Paris Agreement), or to interconnected sets of such regimes (e.g., the EU and the EMU or the WTO and the Paris Agreement).

Conference Organizers

Claudia Emerson (McMaster University, Philosophy)

Michael Giudice (York University, Philosophy)

Violetta Igneski (McMaster University, Philosophy)

Stefan Sciaraffa (McMaster University, Philosophy)

Francois Tanguay-Renaud (York University, Osgoode Hall School of Law)

 Wil Waluchow (McMaster University, Philosophy)