The APA is excited to launch its new blog series, Philosophy and Law, with Sabeen Ahmed as series editor. In this introductory post, Sabeen lays out the scope, goals, and vision for the series.
What is this series about?
Philosophy and Law will be a monthly series of public-facing articles written by philosophers and scholars across all stages of their academic careers, focusing on questions at the intersection of law and philosophy. The intention is to provide a space for scholars to think philosophically about law, whether as a system of norms, a political institution, a field of discourse, or a technology of governance. It also aims to examine how philosophical questions are themselves often operating within an established legal universe that takes for granted certain assumptions about responsibility, subjectivity, freedom, harm, justice, and so forth.
Why is the launch of the Philosophy and Law series relevant right now?
We are experiencing a world-historical moment of overlapping social, material, and existential crises. In the United States, where I’m based, public discourse has been embroiled in debates regarding access to abortion, voting rights and electoral legitimacy, the ongoing fight for racial justice, Covid-related public policies, the treatment and management of migrants, and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan after 20 years of military occupation. These issues—the impacts of which are, of course, never confined solely to the territorial United States—exist within a broader context of extreme global inequality, violent conflicts (in which the U.S. is often a protagonist), heightened xenophobia and support for authoritarian politics, vaccine hoarding by the world’s wealthiest countries, forced displacement on a global scale (the burden of which is disproportionately placed on underdeveloped nations), and increasingly species-ending environmental disasters and climate change caused largely (and knowingly) by multinational corporations.
Though these issues are often driven and framed by partisan interests, the future of these crises (and other, future crises) will largely be decided on the legal stage. Legislative decisions, legal actors, corporate regulations, and public policies wield tremendous power over how people move in and experience the world. And as we know, these experiences are profoundly racialized, gendered, heteronormative, and ableist, and those who are deemed “potential threats”—on whatever metric—are heavily surveilled and policed. Philosophy and Law aims to cultivate a space for philosophically analyzing these issues from diverse perspectives as well as interrogating law’s functioning in social, economic, and political contexts.
Why Philosophy and Law rather than, say, Philosophy of Law?
The branch of philosophy known as “Philosophy of Law” takes up a somewhat narrowly defined set of questions and objects of inquiry, and these questions typically fall under the heading of “jurisprudence” or “legal theory.” For example, most college students who take a “Philosophy of Law” course will examine the major debates and concepts of Anglo-American legal theory. These might include debates between legal positivism and natural law theory or analytic and normative jurisprudence, and/or philosophical issues regarding adjudication, law’s authorizing power, or legal hermeneutics. In rarer instances, students may encounter courses dedicated to examining more recent, critical strands of legal theory like critical legal studies, critical race theory, feminist legal theory, and so on. These questions are critical for better understanding how we engage with law in practice and justify the legitimacy of our political institutions.
By calling this series “Philosophy and Law,” we want to embrace these questions as well as invite philosophers and non-philosophers alike to ask new ones. We want to supply a venue that foregrounds the study of law in its myriad forms, ideals, and realities: its conceptual and material transformations; its disciplinarization in law schools; its functioning as a strategy of domination and liberation; and its centrality in shaping the lived experiences of the subjects it creates. Alongside scholars of classical philosophy of law and critical legal theories, we invite thinkers who engage with law sociologically, anthropologically, or historically, as well as those who examine law from the perspectives of indigenous studies, political economy, philosophy of technology, postcolonial studies, or social epistemology. In this sense, it understands “law” capaciously: as an object of analysis and problematization as well as a site, both institutional and discursive, of creative possibility.
Why use the APA Blog as a venue for this series?
Alongside established and early career scholars, we hope the Philosophy and Law series will be of interest to legal practitioners as well as activists who are engaging with issues of justice, public policy, and institutional transformation. Given the indispensability of law in creating, shaping, and responding to today’s crises, it is more urgent than ever that we foster an open and accessible space in which ideas about these issues can be critically examined, discussed, and shared.
If you are interested in contributing to the Philosophy and Law series, please send your pitch to sabeena@illinois.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!
Sabeen Ahmed
Sabeen Ahmed is currently Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Legal Humanities in the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, after receiving her PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt University in 2020. Her work analyzes the intersection of race and law under modern governmentality through a critical-genealogical lens. Ahmed’s writing has been published in Philosophy Today, Theory & Event, and Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, and she is co-editor alongside Kelly Oliver and Lisa Madura of Refugees Now: Rethinking Borders, Hospitality, and Citizenship (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
