On Justice
Drucilla Cornell’s Revolutionary Thinking
(2026)
Drucilla Cornell’s work revitalized my belief in the transformative power of philosophy. Her book, The Philosophy of the Limit, underscored that philosophy has practical consequences and can challenge and transform the law. Cornell’s philosophy emphasizes the distinction between law and justice, advocating for continual revolutionary action against systemic cruelty. Her unwavering commitment to justice, reflected in her writings and activism, left a profound impact on me and the legal community.
I planted blind hope in their hearts
in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 15 (2025)
I am grateful to Sruti Chaganti and Bhrigupati Singh for the invitation to participate in this discussion of Mayur Suresh’s book Terror trials. It is a great book and very readable. The title of my remarks is based on a line from the epigraph to the book by Anne Carson in her poem Red Doc: “I planted blind hope in their hearts” (Carson 2013). Terror trials is the rare book about law—especially one about the trials against suspected terrorists—that finds hope in the law’s ability to do justice.
Terror trials is about the importance of legal technicalities. We could say that the thesis of the book is: “technicalities matter;” further, that the technicalities that comprise legal process are what lead law along its path to justice. The hope that Suresh finds in law comes from his belief in the power of process to bind law to justice.
Introduction to On Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt
(Library of America Press, 2024)
More urgent than ever: as we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience Together for the first time, classic essays on how and when to disobey the government from two of the greatest thinkers in our literature. In “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), Henry David Thoreau recounts the story of a night he spent in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes, which he believed supported the Mexican American War and the expansion of slavery. His larger aim was to articulate a view of individual conscience as a force in American politics. No writer has made a more persuasive case for obedience to a “higher law.” In “Civil Disobedience” (1970), Hannah Arendt offers a stern rebuttal to Thoreau. For Arendt, Thoreau stands in willful opposition to the public and collective spirit that defines civil disobedience. Only through positive collective action and the promises we make to each other in a civil society can meaningful change occur. This deluxe paperback features an introduction by Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College, who reflects on the tradition of civil disobedience and the future of American politics.
Actions That Deserve to be Remembered: Transcendence and Immortality in a Secular World
in Faith in the World: Post-Secular Readings of Hannah Arendt (2021)
The crisis in politics today is that we live at a moment when, as W.B. Yeats said, "things fall apart; the center cannot hold." The very idea of a meaningful political community is questionable. We live amidst what Carol Becker calls the "agitated now," a time where the narrative that binds the past to the present is broken. Not only in the din of war or in the chaos of catastrophe, but also in everyday life, there is an ever-present feeling "that our lives are discontinuous, that we have lost the sense of home that once anchored us to the physical world, that we have disrupted the continuity of generations (families are dispersed across the nation and the world, trying to stay connected), and that we cannot envision a path to the future." Geographically dispersed, spiritually isolated, and above all lonely and purposeless, we are today adrift and abandoned.
La banalité du mal n’est pas un cliché
in Cités (2021)
Au cœur de la controverse entourant Eichmann à Jérusalem se trouve le sous-titre du livre d’Hannah Arendt, lui-même tiré de sa dernière ligne, Reportagesur la banalité du mal. Dans le dernier chapitre (avant un épilogue et un post-scriptum ajouté dans la deuxième édition), Arendt présente le jugement de la Cour israélienne déclarant Eichmann coupable de crimes contre le peuple juif et de crimes contre l’humanité. Elle discute et soutient la décision de condamner Eichmann à mort – même si elle pense que le tribunal le fait pour de mauvaises raisons. Puis Arendt décrit les derniers moments d’Eichmann. Il a bu la moitié d’une bouteille de vin rouge, a refusé la visite d’un pasteur et a décliné l’offre d’une cagoule noire en disant « Je n’en ai pas besoin. » Eichmann insiste : il n’est pas chrétien et ne croit pas à une vie après la mort. Et Eichmann d’annoncer ensuite : « Dans peu de temps, messieurs, nous nous retrouverons tous. »
Analysant les derniers instants d’Eichmann, Arendt souligne la contradiction flagrante entre sa non-croyance en la vie après la mort et sa formule « nous nous reverrons ». Le fait qu’il se replie sur un cliché confirme l’absence de réflexion d’Eichmann, sa superficialité frappante, à la fois comique et terrifiante. À maintes reprises, Eichmann est retombé dans le jargon du IIIe Reich et s’est appuyé sur des clichés pour expliquer comment il a pu participer à l’expulsion, et plus tard au génocide des Juifs. Lorsque les juges ont demandé à Eichmann – qui affirmait ne nourrir « aucune haine pour les Juif…
in Amor Mundi (2018)
Hannah Arendt holds a fundamental belief in the power of talking. Following Socrates, Arendt affirms that simply talking with others about courage can make one more courageous; engaging another on questions of justice can inspire one to act justly; and conversing about piety can lead one to be pious. Arendt’s belief in the salutary power of talking goes to the heart of her political theory and her inquiry into judgment as the human faculty that can help re-imagine a common political world. We have to talk with one another and ourselves in order to embrace fully the plurality of human existence. And in talking and judging we build the connections that re- imagine the common world and give meaning to justice.
Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting The Origins of Totalitarianism
in Los Angeles Review of Books (2017)
THE ASTONISHING STATEMENT Donald Trump made at a January 2016 campaign rally in Iowa seems like the essential moment in his unexpected rise to power: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody,” he said, “and I wouldn’t lose voters.” In saying that he could kill in broad daylight and remain popular, Trump did more than draw a logical conclusion from polls showing that his supporters demonstrated unprecedented loyalty. He understood that he was not running a political campaign but was the leader of a mass movement. Most importantly, he understood something that his critics still fail to understand: the essential nature of loyalty in mass movements.
Mass movements, writes Hannah Arendt in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, are one of the core elements of totalitarianism. Arendt does not say that all mass movements are totalitarian; to take seriously President Trump’s claim to be the mouthpiece of a movement is not to claim that he is a totalitarian leader or that he is leading a totalitarian movement. He has not mobilized terror, concentration camps, arbitrary arrests, a secret police, and a party apparatus that rises above the state — all of which were essential parts of Arendt’s description of totalitarianism in power. Mass deportation of undocumented immigrants — disgusting as it is — is not the same thing as de-naturalization, imprisonment, and deportation of citizens. Common sense insists that we not abandon reality and imagine that the United States is experiencing totalitarianism.
in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought (2015)
Justice is the virtue of acting rightly and prop- erly with regard to others (political justice) and with regard to oneself (moral justice). Justice is also understood as the good, the appropriate, or what is right in a given situation. Rhadamanthus, the Greek judge of the dead, meted out justice according to the maxim: “Suffer what you have done.” The Roman jurist Ulpian writes: “Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to each man his due.” The Golden Rule holds: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. What these examples of folk wisdom share is the sense that justice is about proportionality and also singularity.
in Just War in Religion and Politics, ed. by Jacob Neusner, Bruce Chilton, and R.E. Tully (University Press of America, 2013).
At stake in the effort to justify war is not simply some academic exercise. We ought not to aim for a series of justifications, legal or ethical, that will answer the question of when wars are justified and how they may be justly fought. War, like any deeply human activity, will exceed all efforts by humans to control and to regulate it. What is needed, rather, is a determination to recall that justice, and not merely strategy and utility, has a place in war. Instead of justifications, what just war thinking offers is the insistent determination that those who fight not blind themselves to the illumination of justice amidst the fog of war.
Assassinating Justly: Reflections on Justice and Revenge in the Osama Bin Laden Killing
in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2011)
Assassination has always been part of war and in recent years it has played increasingly important roles in United States military policy. The assassination of Osama bin Laden offers itself as an example of an assassination that nevertheless claims to be just. Comparing the bin Laden assassination with the assassination of Simon Petlura by Sholom Schwartzbard in 1927 and the kidnapping and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, this article argues that assassinations, which under certain conditions are justified under international law, can also be just, but only when they are accompanied by the risk of a jury trial.
From Justice to Justification: An Alternative Genealogy of Positive Law
in UC Irvine Law Review (2011)
The paper traces the genealogy of positive law from its historical roots in legal positivism, primarily through the works of thinkers like Austin and Leibniz. It argues that legal positivism separates law from moral norms, establishing it as a social fact that reflects the will of a sovereign rather than an inherent moral authority. The exploration delves into how this shift influences contemporary understandings of law and justice, ultimately questioning the divine rationality that once underpinned legal authority and examining the implications of this transformation for future juridical thought.
The Angry Jew: Hannah Arendt on Revenge and Reconciliation
in Philosophical Topics (2011)
Sholom Schwartzbard killed Simon Petlura in an act of revenge. He admitted his crime and a French jury acquitted him in 1927. For Hannah Arendt, Schwartzbard’s actions show that revenge can, in certain circumstances, be in the service of justice. This paper explores Hannah Arendt’s distinction between reconciliation and revenge and argues that Hannah Arendt embraces revenge as one way in which politics and justice can happen in the world, but only under certain conditions. First, Arendt only endorses revenge when the crime calling forth vengeance is extraordinary, one that bursts the bounds of traditional legality. Second, the avenger must give himself up for judgment to the legal system, asking a jury to judge whether his extraordinary act was just even though it was illegal. These are strict conditions and will only rarely be met. When they are, revenge can be a profoundly political act in the service of justice, one that can restore a broken political order.
(2011)
The Power of Non-Reconciliation – Arendt’s Judgment of Adolf Eichmann
on hannaharendt.net (2011)
Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem has caused controversy for all the wrong reasons. Arendt's criticisms of the Judenräte for cooperating with the Nazis and protecting their friends and families while selecting Jews to be sent to the camps is well commented upon, if rarely thoughtfully considered. Her insight into the banality of evil is now common sense, which makes it an easy target for those who seek to discredit her criticisms of the trial in Jerusalem. But Arendt's rejection of the Israeli Court's legalistic response to Eichmann's great wrongs—and her framing of the question of war crimes outside the law and, instead, through the political question of reconciliation—has been poorly understood. As a result, her book has failed to provoke as it ought. The truly radical judgment in Eichmann in Jerusalem is Arendt's insistence that the question for the Israeli Court was one of reconciliation versus non-reconciliation rather than punishment, and thus her argument that the Israeli judges should have dared to judge politically rather than legally.
The judgment that Eichmann must die, Arendt argues, should have been a singular, political, and non-legal judgment that no common world was possible. What was called for in the Eichmann trial was, she argued, was an extraordinary judgment--one not grounded in law—that such things as Eichmann did ought not to have happened. Eichmann must die in order to state unequivocally that we reject a world in which he and the deeds he helped enact could happen. Eichmann must die, in other words, because something happened in Germany to which we, as human beings, cannot be reconciled.
in Democracy Journal (2010)
It’s not all relative: Without judgment, a society loses its sense of justice.
Approaching Infinity: Dignity in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon
in Philosophy and Literature, (October 2009)
Human dignity underlies human rights and is a pillar of liberal politics. Yet what is dignity? And what is the place of dignity in politics? Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is a searing inquiry into the conflict between dignity and reason as opposing grounds of politics. Koestler shows how a rationalist politics corrodes dignity. In response, he imagines dignity as a countermeasure to reason. Political action, he suggests, must be informed by a non-rational and non-religious appeal to the infinite that is the one guarantee of a human politics. There is no justice, Koestler argues, divorced from infinite justice.
Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Some Thoughts on Laurie Ackermann's Dignity Jurisprudence
in Acta Juridica (2008). Reprinted in Dignity, Freedom and the Post-Apartheid Legal Order, ed. by Alfred Barnard (Jutta, 2009).
The Judge as Tragic Hero: An Arendtian Critique of Judging
on hannaharendt.net (2008)
In his book Justice Accused, Robert Cover explores how and why ante-bellum Federal judges who were opposed to slavery consistently upheld the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. These judges claimed that despite their strong personal convictions that slavery was immoral and wrong, they were constrained by the U.S. Constitution to declare the Act constitutional. As Cover convincingly demonstrates, however, the arguments for the constitutionality of the Act of 1850 were not widely perceived to be ironclad, even in 1850. Nevertheless, the judges, at least some of whom were sincere in their opposition to slavery, upheld the Act. In justifying their decision the judges relied on what Cover calls the ‘judicial can’t.’ The judicial can’t is easily understood since it lies at the core of what most Americans understand judging to be: It invokes the duty of the judge to follow the law, not to make it. Confronted with claims by white lawyers on behalf of fugitive slaves that the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional, the anti-slavery judges almost uniformly responded by invoking the formal limit of their powers. “As a citizen and as a man,” they said, “I may admit the injustice and immorality of slavery. ... But as a jurist, I must look at that standard of morality, which the law prescribes.” These judges felt themselves to be responding to a calling; their roles as judges required them courageously to suppress their personal morality in the service of higher principle which they understood as the impartial application of formal rules.
Transcendence & Finitude in Drucilla Cornell's Philosophy of the Limit
in Memory, Imagination, Feminism. On Drucilla Cornell, ed. Renee Heberle and Benjamin Pryor. (SUNY, 2008)
Democratic Legitimacy and the Scientific Foundation of Modern Law
in Theoretical Inquiries in Law, v. 8.1 (2006)
Introduction: Revenge and Justice
in Law, Culture and the Humanities (2005)
The Accusers: Law, Justice, and the Image of Prosecutors in Hollywood
in Griffith Faculty Law Review v. 13, #2 (2005)
This essay begins with the observation that the American culture industry is nearly incapable of presenting state prosecutors in a positive light. Through readings of three apparent exceptions to this rule, the essay argues that prosecutors can only be heroically and positively conceived on screen when they abandon their traditional association with law and seek to do justice beyond the laws. To the extent that prosecutors can be seen as a proxy for the image of the ideal of legal justice itself, this essay arguesthat the imagining of prosecutorial justice in Hollywood shows that law has lost its once-assumed connection with justice.
Law, Justice, and the Transformation of the Prosecutorial Ethic
in Rechtssysteme im Vergleich: Die Staatsanwaltschaft, ed. Dieter Simon, et al. (2004)
Als ein recht fruchtbares Terrain fur die komparative Sicht auf das kontinentale und das anglo-amerikanische Rechtssystem hat sich das Thema Staatsanwaltschaft erwiesen, mit dem die Arbeitsgruppen des Max-Planck-Instituts fur europaische Rechtsgeschichte und der rechtshistorischen Universitatsinstitute von Berkeley, Mailand und Montpellier ihre Zusammenarbeit fortsetzten.
Error-Centricity, Habeas Corpus, and The Rule of Law As The Law of Rulings
in Louisiana Law Review (2003)
Friedrich Nietzsche, the Code of Manu, and the Art of Legislation
in Cardozo Law Review (2003)
Political and legal theorists ask the question: What should law be? In so doing, they implicitly or explicitly overlook what law is. This preference for the normative as opposed to the ontological approach to law is rooted in the assumption that law serves social and political ends.
'Not Guilty' - Millennial Speculations on Legal Defense from Queen Fredegond to Bill Clinton
in Advocatus Defensorum, ed. Dieter Simon, et al. (2000)
Truth and Error: Legal Error and the Uniquely American Doctrine of Habeas Corpus
in Error Iudicis. Juristische Wahrheit und justizieller Irrtum, ed. A. Gouron, et al. (1998)
in Europaische und Amerikanische Richterbilder, ed. A. Gouron, et al. (1996)
To pursue the question of judicial duty, it is first necessary to gain clarity about the concept of obligation. An obligation, if it is to be morally valid, must be absolute and unqualified.