Article III, State Courts, and the Political-Question Doctrine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Dodson
Keyword(s):  
State Courts ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Question

Reason, Development, and the Conflicts of Human Ends: Sir Isaiah Berlin's Vision of Politics

1980 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Kocis
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Human Values ◽  
The Political ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
Political Question

At the root of the conflict between Berlin and his critics is a fundamental disagreement over the possibility of certainty and over the relation of human ends to politics. Gerald MacCallum's formalist critique obscures the political question of whose values a free person is at liberty to pursue. Macpherson's attempt to defend positive liberty as not rationalistic is shown to fail because he (a) conflates liberty with its conditions and (b) assumes a rational pattern to human moral development. And Crick charges Berlin with ignoring politics, understood as active participation in the polis. Finally, Berlin's conception of politics as a form of human interaction aimed at creating the conditions of human dignity in a situation where we sincerely disagree over the ends of life is shown to be an effort to liberate us to live life for our own purposes. Yet Berlin's defense of liberty is problematic because it is too skeptical; to overcome this difficulty, a non-teleological yet developmentalist account of human nature and a weakly hierarchical account of human values is suggested.

scholarly journals The Political Stakes of Academic Research: Perspectives on Johannesburg

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Chipkin
Keyword(s):  
Inner City ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
Shift Analysis ◽  
Demographic Shifts ◽  
The City ◽  
Political Question

Abstract:This article considers a burgeoning literature on Johannesburg from the perspective of the sorts of questions it asks about the city. There is a substantial and lively literature on questions of poverty and equality, class and race. These studies are strongly informed by the idea that the mechanisms that produce such inequalities are key to understanding the nature of Johannesburg as a city: in terms of how its economy works and how political institutions function, but also in terms of what sort of city Johannesburg is and can be. I consider sociological and economic studies of the inner city that try to account for demographic shifts in the inner city and for processes of social and physical degeneration. I review urban anthropologies of inner-city society, considering in particular new forms of social and economic organization among inner-city residents. Related to these, I discuss debates among scholars about the prospects for governing the city, paying special attention to the consequences for such readings on partnerships. I also discuss an emerging literature, critical of that above, which seeks to shift analysis of the city toward studies of culture and identity. These literatures do not simply approach the city through different disciplinary lenses (sociology or economy or anthropology or cultural studies) . They come to their studies from different normative perspectives. For some, the key political question of the day is one about social and political equality in its various forms. For others, it is about the degree to which Johannesburg (or Africa) is different from or the same as other places in the world. This paper has tried to bring to the fore the political (and not simply policy) consequences of these different views. It concludes not by seeking to reconcile these perspectives, but by suggesting a way of retaining a commitment to equality and justice while not reducing them simply to questions of economy. At stake, I argue, are questions of democratic culture and of sociability.

Must Labour lose? Lessons from post-war history

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Jefferys
Keyword(s):  
Conservative Party ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Post War ◽  
Political Question ◽  
Standing Question

Kevin Jefferys addresses the long-standing question of whether ‘Must Labour Lose?’ This has been an intriguing political question ever since it was first posed in 1960 by Mark Abrams and Richard Rose. Examining the post-war record of the Labour Party, alongside that of the Conservative Party, Kevin Jefferys questions the inevitability of Labour’s decline through a detailed examination of the political results since 1945. Instead of Labour’s inevitable decline he suggests that there is a pattern of the Labour Party success and defeats that are conditioned by the economic circumstances, the performance of the Conservative party, and the leadership of the Labour Party. In the end, he argues that Labour may not always lose but that, given the gap between the opinion about the leadership in the party and the electorate in the country, it may be some time before Labour regains power.

‘I am tired from all of these feelings’: Narrating suffering in the film Sick

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Senka Božić-Vrbančić ◽  
Renata Kokanović ◽  
Jelena Kupsjak
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
The Political ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Lesbian Woman ◽  
Institutional Violence ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
Emotional Relationships ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Political Question

This article explores ‘the politics of sentimentality’ with specific reference to the documentary film Sick, which represents the narrative of a young lesbian woman, Ana, who was confined in a psychiatric hospital in Croatia and ‘treated’ for her homosexuality. We consider the ways our most intimate emotional relationships and states, such as pain and suffering, articulate with a wider context of familial citizenship and critically examine the political limits of compassion within the sentimentalised public sphere. In this analysis, we problematise the film’s emotional logic, which presents an individualised narrative resolution at the expense of dwelling on the political question of institutional violence. We examine the role that politics of sentimentality plays in neutralising the film’s political critique of the state apparatuses (psychiatry and family) that enforce heterosexual norms.

Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Tampio
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Fuel Economy ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regulatory State ◽  
Agonistic Democracy ◽  
Political Question ◽  
Fuel Economy Regulations

In the 1980s and 1990s, a central debate in academic political theory was between liberals and communitarians, Kantians and Hegelians, Rawls and his critics. Bonnie Honig’s Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993) disrupted this debate and argued that surface disagreements conceal an underlying consensus that the purpose of political theory is to answer, once and for all, the fundamental political questions. Drawing upon and transforming the work of Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Nietzsche, Honig argues that democracy requires attentiveness to the remainders of politics and a proclivity to contestation. To show the continuing relevance of Honig’s conception of agonistic democracy, I criticize Cass Sunstein’s account of the regulatory state for its displacement of politics, focusing on how his advocacy of fuel economy regulations occludes the political question of rethinking public transportation.

Act of State Doctrine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfonso Iglesias
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
General Rule ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
National Courts ◽  
Foreign State ◽  
Political Question

According to the act of state doctrine, national courts must refrain from prosecuting the validity of official acts carried out by a foreign state within its own territory, except if it commits violations of international norms with broad consensus of international society, such as, for example, a case of genocide. Both its judicial self-restraint character and its reflection in the judicial deference to the executive branch would justify the ex officio application of the act of state doctrine by the courts. This doctrine is neither a rule nor a legal obligation required by international law, although it arises from the relevance of the international rule of territorial sovereignty of the state. It was not introduced by a constitutional or legislative provision, but is a common law principle developed mainly by Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions on the basis of considerations of international comity, respect for the principles of sovereign equality and non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states, separation of powers, and the choice of law freedom. To some extent, the legal basis of the doctrine of immunity for acts of state was analogous to the basis of immunity granted to the foreign sovereign state and its agents. The underlying rationale of this doctrine consists in preventing domestic courts from issuing adverse judgments against foreign governments that could embarrass international relations and interfere with the conduct of foreign affairs by the executive branch power. The doctrine of the act of state (and that of the political question) has important differences with the immunity of the foreign state: (1) This immunity is per se a general rule of public international law of a customary nature accepted and applied universally—in addition to being regulated in various international conventions, one of them of universal vocation—unlike the doctrines cited, which are not regulated by national legislations or by international codification efforts. (2) The moment of operation is also different, since the immunity of the foreign state functions ex ante as a procedural exception to the exercise of jurisdiction by the court of the territorial state (or court of the forum), which for that reason is obliged to recognize its lack of competence to try the case before it, while the doctrines of the state act and the political question act later—only if the defendant does not enjoy immunity—when the court is already exercising its competence and knowing the merits of the case. (3) The application of the immunity of the foreign state requires that the foreign state be sued before the courts of the forum, whereas the act of state doctrine does not require that the foreign state itself be a party to the proceedings, but it is sufficient to question the validity of an internal act of the foreign state during the judicial proceedings.

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