Legal Theory

This thesis draws out the tension between the binding claims of dharma and the obligations of the king (qua state) to protect the material interests of his subjects.  I argue that a significant part of the Mahābhārata can be understood as a response to this dilemma, and that a developed political philosophy and theory of justice is found therein.  The picture of justice delineated within the Mahābharata emphasizes the ceteris paribus priority of dharma when the king or other functionaries of the state consider how they should act.  When dharmas conflict or the demands of certain dharmas conflict with the king’s fundamental obligation to defend his subjects against violence and deprivation however, he reserves the right to decide how to act in such an instance.  To prevent abuse in such situations, the king must be virtuous.  In the context of the Mahābhārata, this means acting for the sake of the kingdom and his subjects, rather than for his own interest.  The king demonstrates his virtue by his prior willingness to submit to the demands of dharma even when they are contrary to his material interests, while a king who shows himself to value his own flourishing over that of his subjects may find himself justly deposed by a more righteous king.

"The EU is a structure which is positioned “in-between” hierarchically organized nation-state governing structures and heterarchically structured global governance structures. Thus, the EU is a hybrid which partly relies on governing and partly on governance. This two-dimensionality is the central reason why the question of the constitutional character of the EU remains fundamentally unresolved. Thus, it is proposed that the EU should aim for the development of a constitutional form aimed at alleviating the tensions inherent in the European construction through a conflict of laws approach. In order to respect the hybridity of the Union, such an approach will however have to be based on a three-dimensional conflict of laws concept insofar as it would have to take account of horizontal conflicts between territorial units, vertical conflicts between the EU and its ember states as well as horizontal conflicts between the functionally differentiated structures of the wider society.
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Diplomatic ambiguity is one of the most interesting kinds of language-use in politics in general, and in diplomacy in particular. Normally, it is taken as a device that buys a temporary agreement at the price of a later verbal and interpretive conflict or misunderstanding. Prior to this study, no comprehensive or theory-guided analysis of this both political and linguistic phenomenon had been attempted. The study focuses on a number of ambiguously phrased peace-agreements, exploring three fundamental parameters in terms of which the concept of diplomatic ambiguity can be framed: language, power, and law. It proposes an argument of relevance to the most prominent schools of thought in International Relations, and closes a visible gap in the existing literature dealing with conflict, diplomacy, international politics, and discourse-related aspects of such politics. Due to its interdisciplinary character and sensitivity to the requirements of practice, it also offers an informative and practicable guide to the practitioners of international relations, diplomacy, politics, and law.

"""This article sets out to offer a new reconceptualisation of the common good as the mechanism providing the temporal coordinates for revolutionary politics. The first section investigates the pairing of commonality and goodness, in order to reveal it as a synthesis of apparently irreconcilable opposites, as a signifier and example of several distinctions that are introduced in the article – common good/common goods; spatiality/temporality; democracy/market, etc. – and as providing a key to interpretation of those pairings. The second section examines how this apparent irreconcilability is overcome, advancing the argument that to heal the divide between commonality and goodness, a double movement of definition and concealment is necessary and that this double movement is only possible if the appropriation of value, in the process of definition of what constitutes the common good, is accompanied by an expropriation, or hollowing out, of meaning. The third section opens with a modest proposal for overcoming this epistemological impasse about the nature of the common good. In order to do so, the pairing of chronos and kairós, chronological time and what in English can be translated as ‘opportune time,’ is proposed. Against the all-encompassing power of capitalism to make everything into its image while lending its powers of reproduction to the goods themselves, as a modern-day Alma Venus of Lucretian memory, against the power of law to reach into the future, kairós is presented as the chance to create, within the fissures of the totalitarianism of chronological time, the space – the timescape – for political action. In this way, the value of political and indeed revolutionary action as a meta-value, and a common good, is reaffirmed. This proposal is carried on in the second part of this article, starting with Section 4. Here, the concept of kairós is expanded upon and coupled with the Epicurean and Lucretian idea of the clinamen, the swerve of the atoms that introduces the element of chance, and therefore freedom, against Democritean determinism. With the support of Antonio Negri’s reading of kairós and clinamen, the article moves on to propose that these two concepts provide the spatial and temporal coordinates for revolutionary politics. In Section 5, an attempt is made to better define what revolutionary politics are, in tension and critical engagement with Ackerman’s idea of constitutional moments and the kind of politics that takes place in such moments, to argue, finally, in Section 6, that the common good is to be defined as that which takes place and is identified/identifiable within these coordinates. 

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"This paper explores the advantages of a form of non-arbitrary path dependence within social choice called rational persuasion. Persuasion is characterized as conversationally leading one’s protagonist down a particular choice path to a particular result. The choice path is enticing, or rationally persuasive, because it “makes sense” in a way that alternative choice paths do not. It tends to group, or partition, alternative choices in a way that either allows us to think of the partitioned alternatives as instantiations of some concept or presents us with some issue that we recognize as important in the choice situation. Not all partitions of the alternatives do this equally well. Nor are they as easy to talk about under the shared concepts that will organize, and be persuasive in, conversation. In this respect rational persuasion is a partition dependent idea.

However, the paper also shows that the partitions have to be presented in a certain order if social choices (and the individual preferences that give rise to them) are going to be sensitive to the issues at stake as well as sensible under them. So, in the final analysis, rational persuasion must not only be partition dependent, but path dependent as well. However, contrary to what Kenneth Arrow suggests in Social Choice and Individual Values, such path dependent social choice is not arbitrary. Indeed, because rational persuasion is a form of social interaction that is both sensible and sensitive to the issues that divide us, persuasion is an exhibition of our collective rationality. It is a mistake, under the idea of a social preference ordering (which precludes path dependent social choice), to define it away as a possible approach to the social choice problem.
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