FC Talks - Suzanne Dovi

Our FC Talks speaker this Thursday is Suzanne Dovi.  Please see a brief abstract and zoom information if you are unable to attend in person. We hope to see you there!

TITLE 

Diversity, Justice, and the Courts

ABSTRACT

President Trump’s judicial appointments were marked by their unprecedented levels of homogeneity: two-thirds of Trump’s judicial appointments to the federal bench were white men; virtually all appointees were members of the Federalist Society; and all of his three US Supreme Court nominations were arguably Catholic. 

Does justice require a diverse judiciary? I think so, and in this talk I posit two concrete recommendations for understanding the relationship between justice and a diverse judiciary. 

First, I argue that descriptive representation is desirable when it is necessary to redistribute who receives a “justice dividend” in contexts of systemic structural oppression. In other words, the continued and persistent nature of the institutional legacies from past forms of discrimination produces the need for descriptive representation.

Second, I argue that we need to pluralize the conceptions, and therefore the standards, of justice used to evaluate judicial diversity. Instead of ignoring disagreements about the meaning of justice, I propose using those different understandings to generate different standards of justice.  Each way of understanding justice offers a different way of measuring the justice dividend that reflects substantive worries arising from oppressive structural relations. I propose three ideal standards of justice: justice as anti-monopoly, justice as reparation, and justice as non-partisanship.

LINK & LOCATION

Thursday @ 12:30pm

Social Sciences Seminar Room #224

Join Zoom Meeting
https://arizona.zoom.us/my/clarkdjphilosophy