Equality, Responsibility, and the Law

Equality, Responsibility, and the Law
Author: Arthur Ripstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2001-03-12
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780521003070

Examines responsibility and luck as these issues arise in tort law, criminal law, and distributive justice.

Responsibility and Distributive Justice

Responsibility and Distributive Justice
Author: Carl Knight
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2011-03-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199565805

This volume presents new essays investigating a difficult theoretical and practical problem: how do we find a place for individual responsibility in a theory of distributive justice? Does what we choose affect what we deserve? Would making justice sensitive to responsibility give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality?

Rights Gone Wrong

Rights Gone Wrong
Author: Richard Thompson Ford
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2011-10-25
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1429969253

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 Since the 1960s, ideas developed during the civil rights movement have been astonishingly successful in fighting overt discrimination and prejudice. But how successful are they at combating the whole spectrum of social injustice-including conditions that aren't directly caused by bigotry? How do they stand up to segregation, for instance-a legacy of racism, but not the direct result of ongoing discrimination? It's tempting to believe that civil rights litigation can combat these social ills as efficiently as it has fought blatant discrimination. In Rights Gone Wrong, Richard Thompson Ford, author of the New York Times Notable Book The Race Card, argues that this is seldom the case. Civil rights do too much and not enough: opportunists use them to get a competitive edge in schools and job markets, while special-interest groups use them to demand special privileges. Extremists on both the left and the right have hijacked civil rights for personal advantage. Worst of all, their theatrics have drawn attention away from more serious social injustices. Ford, a professor of law at Stanford University, shows us the many ways in which civil rights can go terribly wrong. He examines newsworthy lawsuits with shrewdness and humor, proving that the distinction between civil rights and personal entitlements is often anything but clear. Finally, he reveals how many of today's social injustices actually can't be remedied by civil rights law, and demands more creative and nuanced solutions. In order to live up to the legacy of the civil rights movement, we must renew our commitment to civil rights, and move beyond them.

Making All the Difference

Making All the Difference
Author: Martha Minow
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2016-10-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1501705091

Should a court order medical treatment for a severely disabled newborn in the face of the parents' refusal to authorize it? How does the law apply to a neighborhood that objects to a group home for developmentally disabled people? Does equality mean treating everyone the same, even if such treatment affects some people adversely? Does a state requirement of employee maternity leave serve or violate the commitment to gender equality?Martha Minow takes a hard look at the way our legal system functions in dealing with people on the basis of race, gender, age, ethnicity, religion, and disability. Minow confronts a variety of dilemmas of difference resulting from contradictory legal strategies—strategies that attempt to correct inequalities by sometimes recognizing and sometimes ignoring differences. Exploring the historical sources of ideas about difference, she offers challenging alternative ways of conceiving of traits that legal and social institutions have come to regard as "different." She argues, in effect, for a constructed jurisprudence based on the ability to recognize and work with perceptible forms of difference.Minow is passionately interested in the people—"different" people—whose lives are regularly (mis)shaped and (mis)directed by the legal system's ways of handling them. Drawing on literary and feminist theories and the insights of anthropology and social history, she identifies the unstated assumptions that tend to regenerate discrimination through the very reforms that are supposed to eliminate it. Education for handicapped children, conflicts between job and family responsibilities, bilingual education, Native American land claims—these are among the concrete problems she discusses from a fresh angle of vision.Minow firmly rejects the prevailing conception of the self that she believes underlies legal doctrine—a self seen as either separate and autonomous, or else disabled and incompetent in some way. In contrast, she regards the self as being realized through connection, capable of shaping an identity only in relationship to other people. She shifts the focus for problem solving from the "different" person to the relationships that construct that difference, and she proposes an analysis that can turn "difference" from a basis of stigma and a rationale for unequal treatment into a point of human connection. "The meanings of many differences can change when people locate and revise their relationships to difference," she asserts. "The student in a wheelchair becomes less different when the building designed without him in mind is altered to permit his access." Her book evaluates contemporary legal theories and reformulates legal rights for women, children, persons with disabilities, and others historically identified as different.Here is a powerful voice for change, speaking to issues that permeate our daily lives and form a central part of the work of law. By illuminating the many ways in which people differ from one another, this book shows how lawyers, political theorist, teachers, parents, students—every one of us—can make all the difference,

Equality and Responsibility

Equality and Responsibility
Author: Christopher Lake
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2001-11-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199241740

Arguments about distributive justice often take place around two ideas. One is that good should be distributed equally. The other is that how people fare in life should depend on what they are responsible for. The author asks what draws us to these two ideas and examines recent attempts by egalitarian thinkers to bring them together in a single distributive ideal. Underlying this ideal is the egalitarian intuition - the intuition that it is objectionable for some to be worse offthan others through no fault of their own. in a wide-ranging discussion, Lake tests that intuition from a variety of perspectives and points to the gaps in our current thinking about quality and individual responsibility.

Taking Responsibility, Law and the Changing Family

Taking Responsibility, Law and the Changing Family
Author: Heather Keating
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317047052

This volume considers the impact that changing family norms have had on the responsibilities that the law allocates to people in family relationships. Contributions are drawn from a wide variety of jurisdictions in which scholars, lawyers, judges and policy-makers have been trying to discern what the appropriate correlation should be between the responsibilities that people undertake in family settings and the law that regulates family responsibilities. Part I looks at the changes that have occurred in adult relationships and what they have done for our sense of the family responsibilities that adults take for one another. Part II reflects on the changing nature of the parental relationship in order to reconsider the way in which changing family structures affect the responsibilities we think people raising children should have. The third part brings the rights discourse that has dominated jurisprudence for much of the last fifty years into the discussion of family transformation and the responsibilities to which it gives rise. In the final section the authors reflect on the difficulties of trying to resolve the meaning of responsibility in a world of changing families. The collection brings together some of the most eminent and imaginative scholars and judges working in this area. It will be a valuable resource for all those interested in the legal regulation of the transforming family.

Responsibility and Justice

Responsibility and Justice
Author: Matt Matravers
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2013-04-24
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0745655866

In this lively and accessible book, Matt Matravers considers the role of responsibility in politics, morality and the law. In recent years, responsibility has taken a central place in our lives. In politics, both Tony Blair and George W. Bush have claimed that individual responsibility is at the centre of their policy agendas. In morality and the law, it seems just that people should be rewarded or punished only for things for which they are responsible. Yet responsibility is a hotly contested concept. Some philosophers claim that it is impossible, while others insist on both its possibility and importance. This debate has become increasingly technical in the philosophical literature, but it is seldom connected to our practices of politics and the law. Matravers asks, What are we doing when we hold people responsible in deciding questions of distributive justice or of punishment?. By addressing this question, he not only shows how philosophy can help in thinking about current political and legal controversies, but also how we can keep hold of the idea of responsibility in an age in which we are increasingly impressed by the roles of genetics and environment in shaping us and our characters.

Rights and Wrongs

Rights and Wrongs
Author: Susan Cary Nicholas
Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY
Total Pages: 118
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780935312423

This second edition text provides an update on issues pertinent to women's legal status in the U.S. Highlighted are discussions of the ERA, sexual harassment and domestic violence, sex based discrimination, affirmative action and the equal pay for work of comparable worth concept.

Marriage Equality

Marriage Equality
Author: William N. Eskridge, Jr.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 1041
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0300221819

The definitive history of the marriage equality debate in the United States, praised by Library Journal as "beautifully and accessibly written. . . . An essential work.” As a legal scholar who first argued in the early 1990s for a right to gay marriage, William N. Eskridge Jr. has been on the front lines of the debate over same‑sex marriage for decades. In this book, Eskridge and his coauthor, Christopher R. Riano, offer a panoramic and definitive history of America’s marriage equality debate. The authors explore the deeply religious, rabidly political, frequently administrative, and pervasively constitutional features of the debate and consider all angles of its dramatic history. While giving a full account of the legal and political issues, the authors never lose sight of the personal stories of the people involved, or of the central place the right to marry holds in a person’s ability to enjoy the dignity of full citizenship. This is not a triumphalist or one‑sided book but a thoughtful history of how the nation wrestled with an important question of moral and legal equality.

Sovereign Virtue

Sovereign Virtue
Author: Ronald Dworkin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2000
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780674008106

Equality is the endangered species of political ideals. Even left-of-center politicians reject equality as an ideal: government must combat poverty, they say, but need not strive that its citizens be equal in any dimension. In his new book Ronald Dworkin insists, to the contrary, that equality is the indispensable virtue of democratic sovereignty. A legitimate government must treat all its citizens as equals, that is, with equal respect and concern, and, since the economic distribution that any society achieves is mainly the consequence of its system of law and policy, that requirement imposes serious egalitarian constraints on that distribution. What distribution of a nation's wealth is demanded by equal concern for all? Dworkin draws upon two fundamental humanist principles--first, it is of equal objective importance that all human lives flourish, and second, each person is responsible for defining and achieving the flourishing of his or her own life--to ground his well-known thesis that true equality means equality in the value of the resources that each person commands, not in the success he or she achieves. Equality, freedom, and individual responsibility are therefore not in conflict, but flow from and into one another as facets of the same humanist conception of life and politics. Since no abstract political theory can be understood except in the context of actual and complex political issues, Dworkin develops his thesis by applying it to heated contemporary controversies about the distribution of health care, unemployment benefits, campaign finance reform, affirmative action, assisted suicide, and genetic engineering.