Andrew Altman

A liberal theory of international justice

1. Introduction 2. Democracy and Self-Determination 3. Secession 4. International Criminal Law 5. Armed Intervention and Political Assassination 6. International Distributive Justice 7. Immigration 8. Conclusion References

Liberalism and Campus Hate Speech: A Philosophical Examination

In recent years a vigorous public debate has developed over freedom of speech within the academic community. The immediate stimulus for the debate has been the enactment by a number of colleges and universities of rules against hate speech. While some have defended these rules as essential for protecting the equal dignity of all members of the academic community, others have condemned them as intolerable efforts to impose ideological conformity on the academy. Liberals can be found on both sides of this debate. Many see campus hate-speech regulation as a form of illegitimate control by the community over individual liberty of expression. They argue that hatespeech rules violate the important liberal principle that any regulation of speech be viewpoint-neutral. But other liberals see hate-speech regulation as a justifiable part of the effort to help rid society of discrimination and subordination based on such characteristics as race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and sexual preference. In this article, I develop a liberal argument in favor of certain narrowly drawn rules prohibiting hate speech. The argument steers a middle course between those who reject all forms of campus hatespeech regulation and those who favor relatively sweeping forms of regulation. Like those who reject all regulation, I argue that rules against hate speech are not viewpoint-neutral. Like those who favor sweeping regulation, I accept the claim that hate speech can cause serious psychological harm to those at whom it is directed. However, I do not believe that such harm can justify regulation, sweeping or otherwise. Instead, I argue that some forms of hate speech inflict on their victims a certain kind of wrong, and it is on the basis of this wrong that regulation can be justified. The kind of wrong in question

From humanitarian intervention to assassination: Human rights and political violence

An international consensus has begun to take shape around that idea that the cross-border use of armed force by states is morally permissible if such force is required to stop or prevent human-rights abuses amounting to a supreme humanitarian emergency. At the same time, it is widely believed that political assassination is a form of murder and so morally impermissible in principle, regardless of the ends for which it is done. In this article, we reject these views. We argue that armed intervention is morally permissible when (1) the target state is illegitimate and (2) the risk to human rights is not disproportionate to the rights violations that one can reasonably expect to avert. Moreover, once one accepts that such intervention is sometimes permissible, it becomes untenable to hold that political assassination is impermissible in principle. The article is divided into six main sections. In the first two sections,

A defense of international criminal law

In this article, we critically examine the prevailing justification of international criminal law and defend an alternative approach. We share the prevalent view that a system of such law is both possible and in the process of being created. However, we reject the conventional arguments offered in support of this system. Our alternative line of thinking has the consequence that a justifiable international criminal law can be much broader in scope than its conventional advocates presume. Our view is that it is permissible to prosecute and punish persons under international law when there are sufficiently widespread or systematic violations of basic human rights in a state. The rights violations need not constitute genocide, crimes against humanity, or any such “supercrime.” Instead, the violations may simply be ordinary criminal acts,

GENOCIDE AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: DISPELLING THE CONCEPTUAL FOG

Genocide and crimes against humanity are among the core crimes of international law, but they also carry great moral resonance due to their indissoluble link to the atrocities of the Nazi regime and to other egregious episodes of mass violence. However, the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity are not well understood, even by the international lawyers and jurists who are most concerned with them. A conceptual fog hovers around the discussion of these two categories of crime. In this paper, I draw a number of distinctions aimed at clarifying the concepts. I distinguish three concepts of genocide, two legal and one moral, and two concepts of crimes against humanity, a legal and a moral one. I criticize the current legal concept of genocide and, using the idea of discrimination, propose a model for developing a more adequate legal concept and for better understanding the moral concept. I also criticize the moral concept of crimes against humanity, which many thinkers have conflated with the legal concept of such crimes.

Policy, Principle, and Incrementalism: Dworkin's Jurisprudence of Race

For several decades, Ronald Dworkinhas been one of the most prominent voicesdefending the legality and justifiability ofrace-conscious programs aimed at undoing thecontinuing effects of prejudice. Writingwithin the framework of a liberal legalphilosophy, he has formulated powerfularguments against the view that color-blindpolicies are the only defensible ones. Nonetheless, I argue that a more completeliberal defense of race-conscious policieswould need to develop and modify Dworkins lineof argument. Such a defense would go beyondhis policy-based arguments and incorporatearguments of principle. Race-conscious policiesdo not only promote the general good; they arealso required in order to help realize theconstitutional right of equal citizenship.

EXPRESSIVE MEANING, RACE, AND THE LAW:

Recently, legal and social thinkers have turned to the idea that actions possess a nonlinguistic meaning, called “expressive meaning.” In this article I examine the idea of expressive meaning and its role in legal reasoning. My focus is on a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases involving constitutional challenges to election districts drawn on the basis of race. The Supreme Court used the idea of expressive meaning in striking down the districts. After explicating the idea of expressive meaning, I explain and criticize the Court’s reasoning. I distinguish the approach of Justices Thomas and Scalia, who hold that all uses of race in districting do constitutional harm, from that of Justice O’Connor, who distinguishes uses of race that do constitutional harm from those that do not. I contend that Justice O’Connor is right to make the distinction but she draws the line using a questionable standard. A more defensible standard would be more accommodating to the districts that the Court invalidated.

The Right to Punish Crimes Committed Abroad: What are the Scope and Grounds of a State's Criminal Jurisdiction?

In a typical criminal case, the state in which the crime was committed is the state that seeks to prosecute and punish the offender. If Jones robs a bank in France, then he is prosecuted before a French court under French law. However, in some cases, criminal prosecution and punishment are ‘extraterritorial’, in the sense that the prosecution and punishment take place under the laws and legal authority of a state other than the one in which the crime was committed. If Jones counterfeits Canadian currency in his French house, then France can extradite him to Canada for prosecution under Canadian law. Moreover, cases heard by international criminal courts are similarly extraterritorial, because the state in which the crime took place is not conducting the prosecution or imposing the punishment under its laws and legal authority. If Jones commits crimes against humanity in Serbia, he can be turned over by Serbian authorities for prosecution before the International Criminal Court under international law. There is a literature going back centuries that examines the philosophical underpinnings of criminal punishment and addresses the question of why a state is justified in imposing punishment on those who violate its laws. Almost all of this literature presupposes a typical case of punishment in which the state where the offence was perpetrated is the state imposing the punishment. But extraterritorial punishment deviates from the typical case, and the deviation raises questions about penal jurisdiction that many theories of punishment do not consider. These questions have become especially important in light of remarkable developments in international criminal law over the past two decades, including the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the establishment of international tribunals to decide cases arising out of the Rwandan genocide and (2011) 2(3) Transnational Legal Theory 447–453

RELIGION, TAXES, AND SEX DISCRIMINATION:

Modern liberalism developed out of the strife of post-Reformation religious warfare. Among liberalisms central ideas were those of the individuals right of religious liberty and the separate jurisdictions of secular and religious authority. In societies that accepted these ideas and put them into institutional practice, levels of systemic religious violence were dramatically diminished. Moreover, the liberal principles that helped to build and sustain civil peace could make a strong claim to providing a just framework for addressing religious differences. Yet important normative questions have remained about the policies a liberal state should adopt toward religion.