
A Taxonomy of Injustice
Abstract
In recent political theory, various arguments have been mounted to suggest that we can perceive or intuit injustice more directly than what is just (and perhaps, more broadly, what is bad as compared to what is good). Call this the asymmetry thesis. This thesis has become increasingly influential. But what kind of injustice? Whose injustice? After some general reflections on the nature of the asymmetry, I offer an initial taxonomy of injustice. Recognizing the diversity of our senses of injustice might well have implications for how we theorize about justice more generally, but might also cast some doubt on the strength of the purported asymmetry itself.
Bio
Duncan Ivison is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Can Liberal States Accommodate Indigenous Peoples? (2020), Rights (2008), Postcolonial Liberalism (2002), and The Self at Liberty (1997). He was previously Head of the School of Humanities (2007-10), Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (2010-2015), and Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) (2015-2022), all at the University of Sydney.
Pre-seminar reading
Ivison, "Pluralising Political Legitimacy"
Seminar reading
Ivison, "A Taxonomy of Injustice"

World-building, Democracy, and the Limits of Sovereign Mastery
Abstract
What does democracy require of us when it comes to governing land? More fundamentally, what does it mean to be free with regard to land? This talk explores these questions and proposes a geographically-attuned theory of democracy as world-building. To do so, I draw on a set of puzzles and shortcomings in European political theories of land, property, and work. My primary interlocutors are Hannah Arendt, GWF Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Bonnie Honig. Ultimately, I find that these thinkers fail, albeit in illuminating ways, to provide convincing normative foundations for democratic world-building. To ground a robust theory of democracy over land, we will have to turn elsewhere, for example to indigenous theorists and anarchists. Moreover, I find that when it comes to land, it is time to abandon the framework of popular sovereignty that has long guided democratic theory. A truly democratic and participatory theory of land governance must sever any connection with sovereign mastery.
Bio
Anna Jurkevics is a political theorist and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia (PhD Yale 2017). Her research explores theories of land and territory from the vantage point of critical theory and the German tradition. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Contested Territory: A Theory of Land and Democracy Beyond Sovereign Bounds. Her work has appeared in Political Theory, the European Journal of Political Theory, and Modern Intellectual History, among other venues.
Pre-seminar reading
Jurkevics, Land Grabbing and the Perplexities of Territorial Sovereignty
Seminar reading
Jurkevics, World-Building and Democracy*
*Note: readers may want to skim the sections on Arendt and Hegel to save time.

Inventing Necessity: Law and Revolution in Cold War Africa
Abstract
Law and revolution have shaped modernity, yet their study remains dominated by the writings and concerns of a narrow Western canon. This paper responds to this history by exploring alternative anticolonial writing on the specific problem of the coups d'état across independent Africa in the 1960s. I first set out how British legal scholars framed and analysed the problem of revolutionary legality: if and how judges should rule on the legality of an unconstitutional change of government. I juxtapose this discourse and its assumptions to the heated debate in the pages of Transition, the Kampala-based popular magazine, between Ugandan, Kenyan and Tanzania scholars over these same events. The evolving answer of the loose 'Dar es Salaam school' started from an immanent critique of African postcolonial political economy. The result was a different set of problems that asked what role of judges should play in the broader reconstructive project to decolonise the modern African state characterised by political independence and economic dependence.
Bio
Coel Kirkby joined Sydney Law School in 2018 and is Associate Director of the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence. He was elected the Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge for 2017-18. Before that he was a McKenzie Fellow at Melbourne Law School, an Endeavour Fellow at UNSW, and a researcher at the Dullah Omar Institute in Cape Town, South Africa. He has also worked on contemporary constitutional reform projects from Fiji and Tuvalu to Victoria and South Africa.
Dr Kirkby is both a historian of the legal thought and practice of British imperialism, and a comparative constitutional scholar concerned with its legacies in postcolonial states. He has published a number of articles and chapters in the Modern Law Review, University of Toronto Law Journal, Osgoode Hall Law Journal and elsewhere. Coel is currently completing two books on the birth of liberal democracy in the British Empire over the nineteenth century. He is also working on a new book, The Immanentists, on law and revolution during the Cold War.
Seminar reading
"Inventing Necessity" [DRAFT]

Seminar: The Razian's Elephant in the Room: When do Interests Give Rise to Rights?
Abstract
Many legal theorists and political philosophers – myself included – rely on Joseph Raz’s version of the interest theory of rights: we use rights-talk when we believe that some person’s interest has sufficient moral importance to justify holding others to be under specific duties to serve that interest. Sometimes the specified duties are purely moral, but often they’re presumptively legal too. When we rely on Raz’s interest theory we tend not to dwell, however, on the fact that we can conceive of the moral importance of interests in different ways which yield different answers to the question of whether those interests generate rights. This paper explores four factors that can alter our assessment of the moral importance of interests. These four factors represent challenges that must be grappled with if we are to draw determinate boundaries around rights generating interests, especially in key areas such as human rights law. First, when assessing the moral importance of an interest, should we take into account whether it is possible to secure that interest? Second, should we consider an interest in isolation from a person’s other interests or in aggregation with some of her other interests, thereby allowing that individually unimportant interests could aggregate to form morally important bundles that generate rights? Third, should we focus on types of interest or on token interests? For instance, in the case of marriage, should we focus on the fact that adults have a type-interest in being able to marry or on the fact that many women (and girls) lack token-interests in being able to marry? Fourth, should we take into account a person’s own perspective on the importance of her different interests? This lecture will unpack these four challenges and consider the pros and cons of possible solutions.
Pre-seminar readings:
Raz, "On the Foundations of Human Rights"
Tasioulas, "Morality of Freedom"

Seminar: Marx Update
Abstract
Marx is a moving target, but so are his readers. And so are his scholarly editors and translators. Regrettably, though, some of his recent biographers and commentators haven’t moved on very much, partly from keeping him the same and playing safe, and partly from the genre-constraints of intellectual biography and textbook-mainstreaming. Moreover some of his ideas go unmarked and uncredited because they have merged with liberal-minded commonsense and taken-for-granted methodologies. In sum he is a complex cultural phenomenon, taking in visual, dramaturgical and cinematic representation.
This talk will cover various ways that Marx has changed, because we – or rather some of us in the scholarly community – have changed. The text for this talk will be in outline form covering topics such as the Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) or Complete Works project and its editorial politics; the shifting canon of ‘great works’ over the last 120 years; ‘Marx and ...’: ecology, the anthropocene, settler societies, Indigeneity and racial capitalism; feminism and the politics of sex, gender and sexuality; democracy, social democracy and socialisms.
But how to read Marx is changing, given his will to interpret the world and to change it. This is because our understanding of his reception through Engels and subsequent Marxisms has critically evolved; because our contextual understanding of what he thought his words were doing is improving; and because our literary and analytical skills have developed very considerably in a multi- and inter-disciplinary way.
It's a fair question what Marx’s words are doing for us, and why we don’t want him to leave us alone.
Bio
Terrell Carver is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published very extensively on Marx, Engels and Marxisms, and is co-general-editor (with Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto) of a book series of that name for Palgrave Macmillan. His latest books are Marx in the ‘Classic Thinkers’ series for Polity Press, 2018; Engels Before Marx for Palgrave Macmillan. 2020; and The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition, for Palgrave Macmillan (2020).
Talk materials
Abstract + Outline