A vision of leadership : a reflective essay

My interest in the field of education was sparked before I entered kindergarten. My mom was a teacher and I had two high school-aged siblings planning to enter the educational field. These three individuals greatly influenced my desire to enter the educational profession. By the age of eight, I had decided that I was going to make a difference in the lives of children and to right all of the wrongs that I had heard about from various family conversations. My maturity and experiences have allowed me to reflect upon the roles of leadership

Third Parties and the Social Scaffolding of Forgiveness

It is widely accepted that only the victim of a wrong can forgive that wrong. Several philosophers have recently defended “third-party forgiveness,” the scenario in which A, who is not the victim of a wrong in any sense, forgives B for a wrong B did to C. Focusing on Glen Pettigrove\u27s argument for third-party forgiveness, I will defend the victim\u27s unique standing to forgive, by appealing to the fact that in forgiving, victims must absorb severe and inescapable costs of distinctive kinds, a plight that third parties do not share. There are, nonetheless, significant, even essential, roles played by third parties in making forgiveness possible, reasonable, or valuable for victims of serious wrongs. I take a closer look at the links between victims, wrongdoers, resentment, and forgiveness in showing why the victim alone can forgive

Bioethics, Complementarity, and Corporate Criminal Liability

This article provides a brief introduction to some contemporary challenges found in the intersection of bioethics and international criminal law involving genetic privacy, organ trafficking, genetic engineering, and cloning. These challenges push us to re-evaluate the question of whether the international criminal law should hold corporations criminally liable. I argue that a minimalist and Strawsonian conception of corporate responsibility could be useful for deterring the wrongs outlined in first few sections and in answering compelling objections to corporate criminal liability

Doxastic Wronging

In the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite II version of the Eucharist, the congregation confesses, “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed”. According to this confession we wrong God not just by what we do and what we say, but also by what we think. The idea that we can wrong someone not just by what we do, but by what think or what we believe, is a natural one. It is the kind of wrong we feel when those we love believe the worst about us. And it is one of the salient wrongs of racism and sexism. Yet it is puzzling to many philosophers how we could wrong one another by virtue of what we believe about them. This paper defends the idea that we can morally wrong one another by what we believe about them from two such puzzles. The first puzzle concerns whether we have the right sort of control over our beliefs for them to be subject to moral evaluation. And the second concerns whether moral wrongs would come into conflict with the distinctively epistemic standards that govern belief. Our answer to both puzzles is that the distinctively epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. This account of moral encroachment explains how epistemic norms governing belief are sensitive to the moral requirements governing belief

Rights, Wrongs, and Recourse in the Law of Torts

Cardozo\u27s opinion in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.\u27 hinges on a stark assertion about rights and wrongs: A plaintiff has no right of action unless she can show \u27a wrong\u27 to herself; i.e., a violation of her own right. Cardozo himself made this principle the core of his analysis, yet scholars typically regard it as impenetrable, circular, vacuous, or, as Posner put it, eloquent bluff. Small wonder, then, that readers typically turn to reasonable foreseeability as the essence of the case. Leading scholars treat Palsgraf as a proximate cause case, despite Cardozo\u27s pronouncement that W[the law of causation, remote or proximate, is thus foreign to the case before us., Though Palsgraf is widely regarded as the most famous case in American tort law, Cardozo\u27s own reasoning in Palsgraf is typically ignored or derided, but not explained. The facts of Palsgraf may be peculiar, but its core principle is pervasive: For all torts, courts reject a plaintiffs claim when the defendant\u27s conduct, even if a wrong to a third party, was not a wrong to the plaintiff herself. For example, an injured plaintiff can win in fraud only if she was defrauded, in defamation only if she was defamed, in trespass only if her land rights were violated, and so on. Courts reach these results even where the defendant acted tortiously, the plaintiff suffered a real injury, and the plaintiffs injury was reasonably foreseeable. The legal rule upon which these cases rely is that which our scholarly tradition treats so ambivalently in Palsgraf: A plaintiff cannot win unless the defendant\u27s conduct was a wrong relative to her, i.e., unless her right was violated. I shall call this principle the substantive standing rule and shall show that it is a fundamental feature of tort law

Civil Recourse Defended: A Reply to Posner, Calabresi, Rustad, Chamallas, and Robinette

As part of a symposium issue of the Indiana Law Journal devoted to our Civil Recourse Theory of Tort Law, we respond to criticisms by Judge Calabresi, Judge Posner, and Professors Chamallas, Robinette, and Rustad. Calabresi and Posner criticize Civil Recourse Theory as a bit of glib moralism that fails to generate useful answers to the difficult questions that courts face when applying Tort Law. We show with several examples, both old and new, that the glibness is all on their side. From duty to causation to punitive damages, from products liability to fraud to privacy, our scholarship has had a great deal to say on pressing questions in tort. Posner and Calabresi seem to assume that, because our work engages rather than deconstructs concepts such as \u27duty\u27, it cannot address the ‘practical’ issues raised by tort cases. They have things exactly backwards. Civil Recourse Theory engages Tort Law’s concepts precisely in order to address those issues; that is, to a great extent, the point of the enterprise. In a similar vein, Professors Chamallas, Rustad, and Robinette allege that Civil Recourse Theory is blind to various ‘realities\u27; including that Tort Law’s value resides in part in its furtherance of certain policies, that it sometimes operates as an agent of injustice, and that it departs in practice from theory. Of course we have never denied any of these obvious truths. Rather, we have argued that, if Tort Law’s instrumental value is to be appreciated and enhanced, its content as a body of common law cannot be treated in a facile manner. If its discriminatory impact is to be grasped and eliminated, the particular way in which it empowers injury victims must be made clear. If the behavior of legal actors in the shadow of the law is be understood and evaluated, the structure and content of Tort Law’s rules must be rendered more transparent

The Strict Liability in Fault and the Fault in Strict Liability

Tort scholars have long been obsessed with the dichotomy between strict liability and liability based on fault or wrongdoing. We argue that this is a false dichotomy. Torts such as battery, libel, negligence, and nuisance are wrongs, yet all are “strictly” defined in the sense of setting objective and thus quite demanding standards of conduct. We explain this basic insight under the heading of “the strict liability in fault.” We then turn to the special case of liability for abnormally dangerous activities, which at times really does involve liability without wrongdoing. Through an examination of this odd corner of tort law, we isolate “the fault in strict liability”—that is, the fault line between the wrongs-based form of strict liability that is frequently an aspect of tort liability and the wrongs-free form of strict liability that is found only within the very narrow domain of liability for abnormally dangerous activities. We conclude by defending these two features of the common law of tort: the strictness of the terms on which it defines wrongdoing and its begrudging willingness to recognize, in one special kind of case, liability without wrongdoing

Truth, Understanding, and Repair

Dukes argues that the quest for truth, understanding, and victim-defined repair present more appropriate vehicles for addressing certain cases of severe injustice than might a focus upon apology and forgiveness. In his work, he helps construct conversations among people who often have different and conflicting interests, such that they may gain knowledge--knowledge about one another, about their relationships, and about the issues at stake. He acknowledges that he does focus on helping to build resilient and sustainable communities, but he also insists that productive resolution of some problems can happen in spite of, even because of, the lack of full reconciliation, including forgiveness, in social relationships

Ethics, Rights, and White's Antitrust Skepticism

Mark White has developed a provocative skepticism about antitrust law. I first argue against three claims that are essential to his argument: the state may legitimately constrain or punish only conduct that violates someone’s rights, the market’s purpose is coordinating and maximizing individual autonomy, and property rights should be completely insulated from democratic deliberation. I then sketch a case that persons might have a right to a competitive market. If so, antitrust law does deal with conduct that violates rights. The main thread running throughout the article is that what counts as a legitimate exercise of property rights is dynamic, sensitive to various external conditions, and is the proper object of democratic deliberation