Past speakers

Speakers in the Colloquium present works in progress drawn from their current research. 
We post titles and papers close to the presentation date.

2016-17

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
September 30, 2016 Victor MUÑIZ-FRATICELLI Professor of Law and Political Science at McGill University

The Law of Ecclesiastical Politics: A Pluralist Approach
October 28, 2016 Alison Dundes Renteln USC Dornsife

The Human Right to Photograph
Novemver 25, 2016 Margaret Moore Professor in the Political Studies department at Queen’s University

The Taking of Territory and the Wrongs of Colonialism
January 20, 2017 Brenna Bhandar University of London

Racial Regimes of Ownership: Thinking Through Property with Cedric J. Robinson
February 24, 2017 Patricia Williams Columbia University

On rights and reality: from stated exceptions to states of exception
March 17, 2017 Avery Kolers Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Social Change minor at the University of Louisville

The Territorial Rights of Animals: Zoopolis and Beyond

2015-16

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
September 18, 2015 Steve Gardiner Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor of Human Dimensions of the Environment University of Washington, Seattle Climate Justice vs. Climate Extortion
October 23, 2015 Joseph Carens Professor of Political Science
University of Toronto		 Irregular Migrants, refugees, and Open Borders: Three issues in the Ethics of Migration
December 4, 2015 Nicole Roughan Assistant Professor
Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore		 Legal Officials at the Heart of Legal Theory: the Practice of Role-Morality
January 29, 2016 Jeanne Morefield Professor of Politics
Whitman College		 Empire, Exile and the Presence of the Past: Edward Said and Global Justice
March 4, 2016 Robin Celikates Associate Professor of Political and Social Philosophy
University of Amsterdam		 Transnational Disobedience? Politicizing Irregular Migration
March 18, 2016 Simone Chambers Professor of Political Science
University of California, Irvine		 An Ethics of Public Political Deliberation: the Case of the Rhetoric

2014-15

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
October 3, 2014 Jessica Silbey Professor of Law
Suffolk University, Boston		 Intellectual Property and Constitutional Equality
November 7, 2014 Peer Zumbansen Professor of Transnational Law
Director of the Dickson Poon Transnational Law Institute
King's Collge London		 Whose Rule of Law? Arguments For and Against Its Transnational Diffusion
November 28, 2014 Charles Taylor Professor Emeritus
McGill University		 Some Crises of Democracy
February 6, 2015 Cressida J. Heyes Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality
Professor of Political Science and Philosophy
University of Alberta		 Anaesthetics of Existence: Temporality after Discipline
February 27, 2015 Rainer Baubock Professor of Social and Political Theory
Department of Political and Social Sciences
European University Institute		 Democratic Purposes of Inclusion and Principles of Democratic Membership
March 20, 2015 Ruth Chang Professor, Department of Philosophy
Rutgers University		 Comparativism: The Structure of Practical Reason
April 27, 2015 Rainer Forst Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy
Goethe-University		 Legitimacy, Democracy, and Justice: On Reflexivity of Normative Orders

2013-14

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
September 27, 2013 Jim Tully Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Law, Indigenous Governance and Philosophy
University of Victoria		 A Presentation and Discussion of Dipesh Chakarabaty's "The Anthropocene and Its Challenge to Humanist Thought"
October 18, 2013 Anthony Simon Laden Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy
Unviersity of Illinois at Chicago		 The Gift of Trust: How to Get There from Here
November 29, 2013 Shlomi Segall Senior Lecturer, Department of Political Science
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Visiting Fellow, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto		 In Defense of Strong Egalitarianism
January 24, 2014 Janine Brodie Distinguished Professor and Canada Research Chair in Political Economy and Social Governance
University of Alberta		 Neoliberalism, Inequality and the Politics of Austerity
February 28, 2014 Fonna Forman Associate Professor of Political Science
University of California, San Diego		 The Architecture of Civic Freedom
March 21, 2014 Ingrid Robeyns Professor of Practical Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
Erasmus University Rotterdam		 Having too much

2012-13

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
October 5, 2012 Tim Mitchell Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Columbia University		 Economentality: How the Future Entered Government
November 9, 2012 Sudhir Krishnaswamy Professor of Political Science
Azim Premji University		 Directive Principles as Underenforced Norms:
The Social Question in Indian Constitutionalism
November 30, 2012 Martin Loughlin Martin and Kathleen Crane / LAPA Fellow, Visiting Research Scholar, Princeton Program in Law and Public Affairs
Professor of Public Law,
London School of Economics and Political Science		 The Concept of Constituent Power
January 25, 2013 Jeff McMahan Department of Philosophy
Rutgers University		 What Rights May be Defended by Means of War?
March 8, 2013 Rosemary Coombe Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication and Cultural Studies
York University
cross-appointed Osgoode Hall Faculty of Law (Graduate Programme)
Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought		 Minding your Difference: Standardization, Heritage Politics and Governmentality
April 5, 2013 Dipesh Chakrabarty Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor
Department of History and Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations & Faculty Fellow
Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory
University of Chicago		 The Anthropocene and Its Challenge to Humanist Thought

2011-12

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
October 7, 2011

Jutta Brunnée

Stephen J. Toope

Metcalf Chair in Environmental Law
University of Toronto

President and Vice-Chancellor
University of British Columbia

 Constructivism and International Law
November 25, 2011 Mick Dodson Director of the National Centre for Indigenous Studies
Professor of Law
Australian National University		 “But we have stayed strong and true to our culture.”
The native title experience - an Australian example
January 20, 2012 Sally Engle Merry Professor of Anthropology, Law and Society
New York University		 Seductive Quantification: The Politics of Measuring Human Rights
March 2, 2012 Akeel Bilgrami Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy
Faculty member of the Committee on Global Thought
Columbia University		 Gandhi's Radicalism
March 23, 2012 Gary Francione Distinguished Professor of Law
Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law & Philosophy
Rutgers University		 Killing Animals

2010-11

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
October 1, 2010 Simone Chambers Professor of Political Science
University of Toronto		 Secularism minus Exclusion: Developing a Religion Friendly Idea of Public Reaso
November 5, 2010 Melissa Williams Professor of Political Science
Director, Centre for Ethics
University of Toronto		 Linking Fates Together: Democratic Imaginaries in Global Public Space
December 3, 2011 Linda Zerilli Professor of Political Science
Director, Center for Gender Studies
University of Chicago		 Value Pluralism and the Problem of Judgment: Farewell to Public Reason
January 28, 2011 Daniel Weinstock Professor of Philosophy
Centre de Recherche en Éthique
Université de Montréa		 On Compromise
March 4, 2011 Kok-Chor Tan Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Pennsylvania		 Two Approaches to Global Justice
March 18, 2011 Paul Kahn Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities, and
Director, Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for
International Human Rights,
Yale University		 Love, Innocence and the State

2009-10

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
September 18, 2009 Duncan Ivison Professor and Head of School,
Philosophy and Historical Inquiry,
University of Sydney		 What is a Practice of Liberty?
October 30, 2009 Katherine Gibson Professor, Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy
University of Western Sydney		 Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for 'Other Worlds'
November 27, 2009 Charles W. Mills John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy Northwestern University Deracializing Rawls
January 29, 2010 Bonnie Honig Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University,
Senior Research Fellow, American Bar Foundation		 Antigone's Two Laws:  Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism
February 26, 2010 Tom Christiano Professor of Philosophy and Law
University of Arizona		 Arguments for a Human Right to Democracy

2008-09

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
September 26, 2008 Rajeev Bhargava Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
Delhi		 What is Political Secularism and What Can We Learn from its Indian Version?
October 29, 2008 Quentin Skinner Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities
Queen Mary College, University of London
Formerly the: Regius Professor of Modern History
Faculty of History, Cambridge University
and Fellow of Christ's College		 A Genealogy of Liberty
December 5, 2008 Seana Shiffrin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law
UCLA		 Inducing Deliberation
January 23, 2009 Eamonn Callan Pigott Family Professor, School of Education
Stanford University		 The Better Angels of our Nature: Patriotism and Dirty Hands
March 6, 2009 David Scott Anthropology
Columbia University		 Norms of Self-Determination
March 27, 2009 Arthur Ripstein Law and Philosophy
University of Toronto		 Roads to Freedom

2007-08

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
October 5, 2007 Gerry Mackie Political Science
University of California at San Diego		 On the Expressive Theory of Voting
November 2, 2007 Wojciech Sadurski Professor of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law
European University Institute and
The Faculty of Law, University of Sydney		 Political Equality and Majority Rule
November 30, 2007 Gavin Anderson Senior Lecturer
School of Law, University of Glasgow		 Towards a New Constitutional Knowledge: Beyond the state, or beyond modernity?
January 25, 2008 Debra Satz Director, Barbara and Bowen McCoy Program in Ethics in Society, Professor of Philosophy and, by courtesy, Political Science, Stanford University Voluntary Slavery and the Limits of the Market
February 29, 2008 Tariq Modood Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy
University of Bristol		 Multiculturalism and Secularism
March 14, 2008 Rainer Forst Professor of Political Theory
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt		 Two Pictures of Justice

2006-07

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
October 6, 2006 Ted Parson Dan and Rae Emmett Professor of Environmental Law and faculty co-director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA School of Law. Feasible improvements: strategic behavior and technological uncertainty in environmental regulation
October 20, 2006 Rae Langton Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Speaker's Freedom and Maker's Knowledge:  The Case of Pornography
December 1, 2006 Boaventura de Sousa Santos Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledge
January 26, 2007 Kim Scheppele

Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School and in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University

 The International State of Emergency: Challenges to Constitutionalism after September 11
March 2, 2007 Philip Pettit Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University The What and the How of Democratic Control
March 23,2007 Michael Blake

Professor of Philosophy, Public Policy, and Governance at the University of Washington

 Political Liberalism Abroad

2005-06

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
September 30, 2005 Jim Tully Professor of Political Science, Law, Philosophy, Indigenous Governance
University of Victoria		 On the Nature of the "New" Imperialism
October 28, 2005 Jeffrey L. Stout Professor of Religion
Princeton University		 On Our Interest in Getting Things Right: Pragmatism without Narcissism
December 2, 2005 Sherene Razack Professor, Sociology and Equity Studies in Education
The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto		 How is White Supremacy Embodied?: Sexualized Racial Violence at Abu Ghraib
January 27, 2006 Anna Yeatman

Professorial Fellow in the Whitlam Institute at the University of Western Sydney

 The Politics of Individuality
March 31, 2006 Nicola Lacey Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and an Adjunct Professor at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra Character, Capacity, Outcome: Towards a framework for assessing the shifting pattern of criminal responsibility in modern English law

2004-05

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
October 1, 2004 Rebecca Tsosie Lincoln Professor of Native American Law & Ethics, Executive Director, Indian Legal Program
Affiliate Professor of the American Indian Studies Program, Arizona State University		 Acknowledging the Past to Heal the Future: The Role of Reparations for Native Nations
October 29, 2004 Mark E. Warren Merilees Chair for the Study of Democracy, Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, University of British Columbia
Formerly Professor of Government and CDATS Research Fellow, Georgetown University		 Nature and Logic of Bad Social Capital
November 19, 2004 Iris Marion Young Professor of Political Science
University of Chicago		 Responsibility and Historical Injustice: Application of a Social Connection Model
January 28, 2005 Neil Walker

Professor of European Law at the European University Institute.
Dean of Studies of the European University Institute
Formerly Professor of Legal and Constitutional Theory, Department of Law, University of Aberdeen

 An Agreement to agree to disagree: Europe's constitutional dividend
March 4, 2005 Rebecca Tsosie Lincoln Professor of Native American Law & Ethics, Executive Director, Indian Legal Program
Affiliate Professor of the American Indian Studies Program, Arizona State University		 Acknowledging the Past to Heal the Future: The Role of Reparations for Native Nations
April 7, 2005 Cheryl Misak Professor of Philosophy
Vice-Principal, Academic and Dean
University of Toronto at Mississauga		 Truth and the Deliberative Virtues

2003-04

Date Speaker Affiliation Colloquium title
October 10, 2003 David Ley Trudeau Foundation Fellow, former UBC Director of the Metropolis Project and
Canada Research Chair in Geography at the University of British Columbia		 Forgetting Postmodernism? Recuperating a social history of local knowledge
October 31, 2003 Uma Narayan Associate Professor of Philosophy, Vassar College Coercing Women for their Own Good? Women's Choices, Criminal Sanctions and the State
November 28, 2003 Jennifer Nedelsky

Professor of Law and Political Science, University of Toronto

 Rights and the Fully Human Self
February 6, 2004 Gerald Postema

Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Philosophy and Law, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

 Of Jazz, Jokes and Jurists: Reasoning in the First Person Plural
February 27, 2004 James Boyd White L. Hart Wright Collegiate Professor of Law, University of Michigan Free Speech and Valuable Speech: Silence, Dante, and the "Marketplace of Ideas"
April 2, 2004 James Fishkin Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication, Director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy,
Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University		 Who Speaks for the People? Deliberation and Public Consultation