2011 Conference Program (PDF) - Syracuse University College of Law

Linda L. Berger
Inevitability in Judicial Opinions Part III
If there are inevitabilities in the law comparable to those in works of art, what is needed
next are examples of this “inevitability” and this approach to law as a social
phenomenology. For this, we will explore what one would search for in a judge and in an
opinion in using this criterion, as an art critic might, as a measure of good law. For
example, a judge who approached law in the manner that Beethoven approached music
would have a certain form of humility before the materials of the law and the “negative
capabilities,” in Keats’s terms, needed to let the “inevitability” of the law speak itself. We
will display this in one or more opinions.
4.8 Bodies of Law
Steven Macias
Law of the Men’s Room
Long before Senator Craig was caught soliciting sex in an airport restroom, gay men
were taking advantage of social spaces—like public toilets and locker rooms—for the
unique mix of public and private opportunities they presented. For this reason, there is
also a long history of policing these locales, and prosecuting those who violate the
socially approved modes of behavior within their confines. The taboo against the
expression of sexual interest is especially strong where heterosexual men are literally
exposed. Nevertheless, these sites of male exposure reinforce heterosexual masculinity
through both conscious and unconscious demonstrations of non-interest in that exposure.
These public spaces at once reinforce heterosexual identity yet remain highly vulnerable
to homosexual intrusion. Because these locations present contradictory understandings of
privacy and sexuality, legal actors have had a difficult time coming to terms with how the
law should apply in these quasi-public sites of male identity.
Elizabeth Anker
Bodily Dignity and the Construct of Human Rights
This paper analyzes and interrogates how the expectation of human dignity lends
coherence to liberal articulations of human rights. While human rights norms work to
protect the human body from injury and harm, the standard of dignity, I argue, also
contributes to an idealized, purified conception of human embodiment. Moreover, dignity
as a standard is consolidated by images of violated and broken bodies. As such, this paper
considers how the premium on dignity smuggles in an array of foreclosures and
exclusions. In contrast, I maintain that a formulation of human rights that instead “takes
embodiment seriously” might better remedy those inequities, and I develop a
phenomenological account of social justice as a means of evading and surmounting many
of the impasses that current trouble dominant discourses of human rights.
4.9 Rethinking National Boundaries and Borders
David Louk
Rights Beyond Borders: The Nation as Imagined Community and the Problem of Global
Ethical Obligations
This paper addresses the role of the nation as imagined community in instigating,
constituting, and sustaining strong ethical obligations among citizens in cases of political,
civil, and social rights. In recent decades we have observed widespread growth in support
of human rights and individual entitlements backed by institutional arrangements at the
national level. While many political theorists have argued for and against extending these
commitments across borders internationally, I question whether the attempt to broaden
such ethical obligations globally may undermine the very support for these obligations,
!
89