Civility, Legality, and the Limits of Justice

Speaker List

Jason Frank, Cornell University, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and the Department’s Director of Graduate Studies. His primary field is political theory and his research and teaching interests include democratic theory, American political thought, politics and literature, political culture, and the philosophy of political inquiry. Jason received his MA and Ph.D. in political science from the Johns Hopkins University, and a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before coming to Cornell, Jason taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke University, and Northwestern. He has also held research fellowships at UCLA’s Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, Duke’s Franklin Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Jason works on historically situated approaches to democratic theory, with an emphasis on early American political thought and culture. His book Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Duke University Press, 2010) explores the legal and political dilemmas engendered by the American Revolution’s enthronement of “the people” as the legitimate ground of public authority. Jason is currently completing a new book on The Federalist Papers entitled Publius and Political Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming), editing A Political Companion to Herman Melville (University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming), and beginning a new research project on the aesthetic dimensions of political authority. He is also the co-editor of Vocations of Political Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and of a recent double issue of the journal Diacritics 37:2-3 (“Taking Exception to the Exception”). Jason’s articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as Political Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Theory & Event, Public Culture, Constellations, Perspectives on Politics, The Review of Politics, and several anthologies.

Bryan Garsten, Yale, is Professor of Political Science. He is the author of Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006) as well as articles and essays on questions about political rhetoric, deliberation, trust and anger, practical judgment, representative government, and liberal understandings of religion.
Garsten is now finishing a book called The Heart of a Heartless World that examines the ethical, political and religious core of early nineteenth century liberalism in the United States and France. He has also just edited Rousseau, the Enlightenment, and Their Legacies, a collection of essays by the Rousseau scholar Robert Wokler (Princeton University Press, 2012). His writings have won various awards, including the First Book Prize of the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. His work in the classroom earned him the 2008 Poorvu Family Prize for Interdisciplinary Teaching.

In the recent past Garsten has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Yale’s major in Ethics, Politics and Economics and the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Political Science. He is also active in the humanities, serving as a member of the Executive Committee for Yale’s Humanities Program and a Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center. He is currently the co-president of the International Conference on the Study of Political Thought and a Fellow of the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education.

His co-author will be Teresa M. Bejan who is a studying for her PhD at Yale.

Letti Volpp, University of California, Berkeley, is Professor of Law. After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1993, Leti Volpp clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Thelton E. Henderson ’62 of the Northern District of California, and then worked as a public interest lawyer for several years. Volpp served as a Skadden Fellow at Equal Rights Advocates and the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, both in San Francisco; as a trial attorney in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division in Washington, D.C.; and as a staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project in New York City.

She began teaching at the American University, Washington College of Law in 1998 and visited at UCLA School of Law in 2004-05. She joined the Boalt faculty in 2005.

Volpp’s numerous honors include two Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Individual Research and Writing Grant, and the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section Derrick A. Bell, Jr., Award. She has delivered many public lectures, including the James A. Thomas Lecture at Yale Law School, the Korematsu Lecture at New York University Law School, and the Barbara Aronstein Black Lecture at Columbia Law School.

Volpp is a well-known scholar in law and the humanities. She writes about citizenship, migration, culture and identity. Her most recent publications include “Imaginings of Space in Immigration Law,” in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2012), the edited symposium issue “Denaturalizing Citizenship: A Symposium on Linda Bosniak’s The Citizen and the Alien and Ayelet Shachar’s The Birthright Lottery,” in Issues in Legal Scholarship (2011), and “Framing Cultural Difference: Immigrant Women and Discourses of Tradition,” in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (2011). She is the editor of Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders (with Mary Dudziak) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). She is also the author of “The Culture of Citizenship” in Theoretical Inquiries in Law (2007), “The Citizen and the Terrorist” in UCLA Law Review (2002), “Feminism versus Multiculturalism” in the Columbia Law Review (2001), and many other articles.

Linda Marie-Gelsomina Zerilli, University of Chicago, is the Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College. She is currently Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Zerilli is the author of Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), and articles on subjects ranging across feminist thought, the politics of language, aesthetics, and Continental philosophy. Her current book project is titled Toward a Democratic Theory of Judgment. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow, and has most recently won a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant. Professor Zerilli has served on the executive committee of Political Theory and is currently serving on the editorial boards of Philosophy and Rhetoric, Constellations, and Culture, Theory, and Critique