Academic

Tanguay-Renaud on "Public" Emergencies

By Lawrence Solum

François Tanguay-Renaud (York University - Osgoode Hall Law School) has posted Making Sense of 'Public' Emergencies on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

This is the penultimate draft of a paper that will appear, in a revised form, in Philosophy of Management (formerly Reason in Practice). The paper seeks to clarify the notion of 'public emergency' and to address various theoretical misconceptions surrounding it. Public emergencies, I contend, are emergencies which interfere with the performance of a government's role and which, as a result, tend to have distinctive moral implications. Since their salient characteristics often vary markedly, I argue that one must pay close attention to them when assessing what responses they warrant. I use as my foil three leading theoretical approaches which I challenge and seek to reconstruct: (1) Tom Sorell's focus on worst-case scenarios and conflation of distinctively salient 'public' emergencies; (2) Michael Walzer's 'supreme emergencies' and their alleged ability to make some governmental immoralities moral; and (3) Giorgio Agamben's insistence on a declaration of emergency as the salient moral and legal mark of a public emergency. Overall, I aim to set the stage for further discussion of the specific implications of public emergencies for the law.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on December 11, 2008 (boomark / email).