Online research in philosophy

We seek to establish a dialogue between democratic and Islamic normative political theories. To that aim, we show that the conception of democracy underlying a prominent Islamic political model is procedural. We distinguish proceduralism from a liberal conception of democracy. Then, we explain how bringing together Islamic political theory and democracy alters the meaning of the latter. In other words, we show that democracy within Islam often means democracy within Islamic limits.

Since the enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadians have played out an American-style debate about judicial activism at an accelerated pace. Throughout the 1980s, a number of commentators on the left expressed concerns that the Court was interpreting the Charter in a manner that would thwart legislative attempts to assist the disadvantaged and strike down progressive social legislation as occurred in the United States in the Lochner era: During the next decade, commentators on the right duplicated American criticisms of the Warren Court by arguing that the Supreme Court was exercising too much power by inventing rights not found in the Constitution, and by enforcing the rights of minorities and criminals against the wishes of the majority and their elected representatives. Despite their different politics, these critics of judicial activism share much. They all believe that judges can read their personal preferences into the Charter; they are all skeptical about the rights asserted in Charter litigation; and they all have faith in majoritarian forms of democracy and legislative supremacy.In this essay, I will argue that the term judicial activism is ultimately not a helpful way to structure debate about judicial review under the Charter or other modern bills of rights that allow rights as interpreted by the Court to be limited and overridden by ordinary legislation. The label judicial activism obscures more than it illuminates and allows commentators to criticize the Court and the Charter without really explaining their reasons for doing so. It hints at, if not judicial impropriety, at least judicial overreaching, while hiding often controversial assumptions made by the critics of judicial activism about judging, rights and democracy. Such assumptions need to be revealed and unpacked for all the world to see.

Whether the US Constitution guarantees a right to conduct scientific research is a question that has never been squarely addressed by the United States Supreme Court. Similarly, the extent to which the First Amendment protects the right to communicate the results of scientific research is an issue about which there is scant judicial authority. This article suggests that a crucial guidepost for exploring both these uncharted areas of constitutional law should be whether restrictions on scientific research or communication truly implicate fundamental individual rights or instead primarily concern issues of general social welfare—issues that in a democracy are properly decided by the representative branches of government or their delegates, not by the judiciary.

Table of Contents: Politics, morality, and pluralism -- Liberal morality and political legitimacy -- Political legitimacy and social justice -- Williams's concept of the political -- Legitimacy, stability, and morality -- The politics of morality -- A moral point of view -- Manners and morality -- Morality and conflict -- Moral conflict and political theory -- The morality of politics -- Feminism and multiculturalism -- A defense of culture -- Politics and normative conflict -- The political as moral viewpoint -- Morality and politics: a review -- Political unity and pluralism -- The liberal archipelago -- Loose linkage and political legitimacy -- Political unity and the body politic -- Social justice and political unity -- The bonds of civility -- Nationhood and the liberal polity -- The nature of nationhood -- Pluralism and nationalism -- Nationalism and social justice -- Deliberative democracy and the liberal polity -- Liberalism and democracy -- Democracy and deliberative discourse -- The terms of deliberative discourse -- Normative discourse and political legitimacy -- Deliberative democracy and intragroup politics -- Group autonomy and intergroup discourse -- Politics, history, and reason -- Principle and justice in the liberal polity -- Liberal institutions and liberal ideals -- Stopping history -- Rationalism and politics.

What are things like the Supreme Court? Gabriel Uzquiano has defended that they are groups, entities which are somehow composed of members (at certain times) but which, unlike sets (or pluralities), allow for fluctuation in membership. The main alternative holds that ‘the Supreme Court’ refers (at any time) to the set (or plurality) of their members (at the time). Uzquiano motivates his view by posing a metaphysical puzzle for this reductive alternative. I argue that a parallel reasoning would also find a corresponding “puzzle” in the case of ordinary singular terms like 'The Chief Supreme Court Justice'.

January 21, 2010 will go down as a dark day in the history of American democracy, and its decline. The editors of the New York Times did not exaggerate when they wrote that the Supreme Court decision that day "strikes at the heart of democracy" by having "paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding" -- more explicitly, for permitting corporate managers to do so, since current laws permit them to spend shareholder money without consent.

The Supreme Court of Japan is widely considered the most conservative constitutional court in the world, and for good reason: in over fifty years of operation, it has struck down only eight laws on constitutional grounds. Drawing on interviews conducted in Japan with a variety of judges, officials, and scholars – including seven current and former members of the Supreme Court itself – this Article offers a political and institutional account of why the Court has failed to take an active role in the enforcement of Japan’s postwar constitution. This account of the Court’s behavior also yields a number of insights into the relationship between judicial politics and electoral politics and the role of institutional design in mediating between the two. The fact that the Court is conservative is perhaps only to be expected given its longtime immersion in a conservative political environment: the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Japan’s center-right ruling party, has held power almost without interruption for half a century. Much of the LDP’s influence over the Court is disguised, however, by the institutional design of the judiciary, which appears to enjoy a considerable degree of autonomy to manage its own affairs and even to decide who will serve on the Supreme Court. What the LDP has done is, in effect, to delegate political control of the judiciary to ideologically reliable agents within the judiciary itself–namely, the enormously powerful Chief Justice and his aides in the Court’s administrative arm, the General Secretariat. Like the Chief Justice, the leaders of the General Secretariat are reliably orthodox jurists who have reached positions of power via a lifelong process of ideological vetting that all career judges must undergo. This group of judicial bureaucrats performs a wide range of sensitive activities ranging from the training and screening of new judges to the selection of Supreme Court law clerks, who are themselves successful career judges and exert a conservative influence on the Court. The Japanese experience holds valuable lessons for students of judicial politics and institutional design. There is no plausible way of designing or structuring a court so as to insulate it entirely from political influence. The institutional characteristics of the court can, however, determine how responsive it will be to its political environment. An obviously relevant characteristic is the frequency with which political actors have the opportunity to shape the composition of the court. A less obvious, but no less relevant, characteristic is the extent to which power within the court is centralized or diffuse. The Japanese Supreme Court illustrates the importance of these characteristics: its organization and structure render it highly unlikely to depart from the wishes of the government for any meaningful period of time. The sheer number of seats on the Court, combined with a deliberate strategy of appointing justices close to mandatory retirement a

Since former President Soeharto was forced to resign in 1998, the Indonesian judiciary has been significantly reformed. A Judicial Commission was established to monitor its performance. A Constitutional Court was also created; one of its tasks is to decide disputes between state institutions and to review the constitutionality of statutes. This paper discusses the Constitutional Court case in which several Supreme Court judges alleged that the Constitution’s guarantee of judicial independence precluded the Judicial Commission from supervising the Supreme Court’s performance by critically analysing its decisions. The Constitutional Court accepted this argument, declaring that the Indonesian Constitution prohibited the Judicial Commission from performing this function. This paper discusses this case and its potential ramifications.

January 21, 2010 will go down as a dark day in the history of American democracy, and its decline. The editors of the New York Times did not exaggerate when they wrote that the Supreme Court decision that day “strikes at the heart of democracy” by having “paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding” – more explicitly, for permitting corporate managers to do so, since current laws permit them to spend shareholder money without consent.