Date: 08May 2019
In this talk, Professor David Dyzenhaus will explain both how human rights lawyering is possible even when the rule of law is under great stress and why this possibility is always a morally fraught business.
The possibility is explained by the fact that such lawyering requires bolstering the legitimacy of the political regime the lawyers oppose. Professor David Dyzenhaus will elaborate his argument by reference to examples of different kinds of states- the ‘Dual State’ of the Nazi era, the ‘Apartheid State’ of South Africa, the ‘Parallel State’ that unites the legal orders of Israel and the Occupied Territories, and the State that existed in the ante-bellum US, which combined elements of the other three. He will briefly indicate the implications of his argument for legal philosophy.
Speaker:
David Dyzenhaus is an internationally renowned scholar in public law and legal philosophy. He is a University Professor at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He holds a doctorate from Oxford University and undergraduate degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Among many visiting professorships he has been a Visiting Professor and Senior Scholar of Pembroke College, Cambridge, at New York University, and a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.
