The Harvard Law School Library staff invite you to attend a book talk and discussion in celebration of the recent publication of Sovereignty and the New Executive Authority edited by Claire Finkelstein and Michael Skerker (Oxford Univ. Press, 2018). Professor Finkelstein will be joined in conversation with Professor Charles Fried and Professor Adrian Vermeule.
This book talk is co-sponsored by the Harvard Law School Students for the Rule of Law.
Wednesday, March 13, 2019, at noon
Harvard Law School Milstein West A/B (Directions)
1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
No RSVP required
About Sovereignty and the New Executive Authority
“This volume explores moral and legal issues relating to sovereignty by addressing foundational questions about its nature, examining state sovereignty between states, and dealing with post 9/11 developments in the U.S., potentially destabilizing received views of democratic sovereignty. With essays addressing foundational, state and international sovereignty, the book focuses on Post 9/11 developments including the profusion of secret national security programs, including those pertaining to the interrogation, rendition, and detention of terror suspects; signal intercepts and meta-data analysis; and targeted killing of irregular militants; prompting questions regarding the legitimacy of executive power in this arena.” — Oxford University Press
Professor Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy; Director at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School. She has published extensively in the areas of criminal law theory, moral and political philosophy as applied to legal questions, jurisprudence, and rational choice theory. One of her distinctive contributions is bringing philosophical rational choice theory to bear on legal theory. She has focused in recent years on the implications of Hobbes’ political theory for substantive legal questions. She is the series editor, with Jens Ohlin, of the Oxford Series in Ethics, National Security and the Rule of Law. Within that series, she has co-edited three volumes to date: Targeted Killings: Law & Mortality in an Asymmetrical World (2012), Cyberwar: Law and Ethics for Virtual Conflicts; and Weighing Lives in War (2017). She is also the editor of Hobbes on Law (2005). She is the Faculty Director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Charles Fried will join Professor Finkelstein in discussion of Sovereignty and the New Executive Authority. Professor Fried is the Beneficial Professor of Law and has been teaching at Harvard Law School since 1961. He was Solicitor General of the United States, 1985-89, and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 1995-99. He contributed a chapter to Sovereignty and the New Executive Authority titled Defining and Constraining the Sovereign.
Adrian Vermeule is the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School. Before coming to the Law School, he was the Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. The author or co-author of nine books, most recently Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State (2016), The Constitution of Risk (2014) and The System of the Constitution (2012). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.