This coming spring semester, as in the just-concluded fall semester, I will be teaching Philosophy of Law. As I get down to thinking about my syllabus, one imperative seems overriding: I must ‘do more’ on mass incarceration (and related topics like the theory of punishment and the death penalty.) No topic seems more important, pressing, and urgent in today’s United States. In the face of the brutal particulars of mass incarceration (and the racism and War on Drugs that animate and sustain it), the highly theoretical particulars of the traditional debates in the philosophy of law–the nature of law according to natural law and positivist theories, legal reasoning, the interpretation of legal texts–seem curiously context-free, unanchored to empirical particulars pertaining to the lives of actual legal subjects. (To be sure, legal realist, critical legal studies, critical race, and feminist legal theories do animate and make concrete these discussions considerably; they also inject a much-needed dose of historical and political perspective.)
With these considerations in mind, a tentative outline for the upcoming semester’s syllabus suggests itself to me: begin with Lon Fuller‘s The Case of the Speluncean Explorers, using it to animate–or as my friend Cathy Kemp likes to say, ‘ignite’–discussions on natural law, positivism, and statutory interpretation; move on to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes‘ classic The Path of the Law; follow this up with H. L. A. Hart‘s The Concept of Law (almost certainly not in its entirety), and then, switching gears, move to Michelle Alexander‘s The New Jim Crow and Albert Camus‘ Reflections on the Guillotine. (As noted, this is an outline; I will supplement this basic structure with some selected case studies that will help illustrate the central issues at play in reasoning by analogy and precedent, and the dominant theories of constitutional interpretation.)
Needless to say, this is a pretty idiosyncratic syllabus, and I might be accused by many philosophers of law of leaving uncovered a host of topics that have traditionally been of interest to that demographic: rights, justice and equality, responsibility, legal procedure and evidence, torts, property, contracts etc. My syllabus shows a clear bias toward public law and ignores private law altogether; there is no critical legal studies; some traditional philosophers will be appalled to see Camus in this reading list; and so on. (The alert reader will have noticed however, that the first four topics on that laundry list cannot but occur, implicitly or explicitly, in a discussion of mass incarceration like the one undertaken in The New Jim Crow.)
I remain resolutely unapologetic about these omissions though. My syllabus will strike a reasonable balance between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘applied’, and more to the point, it will bring into my classroom, that moral, political, and legal atrocity–mass incarceration–that is not only America’s greatest modern embarrassment but also, in some ways, the most relevant topic of all as far as my students’ lives are concerned. I’d consider this the strongest reason of all in favor of its displacement of traditional material.
Samir Chopra 