Judgment in Law and Politics (POL2302) (LAW372H1F)

This course will explore the nature of the human capacity for judgment and its implications for institutions. We will focus on a series of questions arising out of Hannah Arendt’s work on judgment, which drew on Kant's Critique of Judgment. We will examine the concept of the “enlarged mentality” and what it means to take the perspectives of others into account. This key issue has important implications for the question of diversity on the bench, and thus in law schools. Other important themes are the role of community and narrative in judgment. We will explore how these theories help us understand the differences and similarities between the kinds of judgments involved in what has traditionally been thought of as political decision-making, judicial decision-making, and the everyday forms of adjudication we engage in when we decide between conflicting accounts of problems and solutions, or the judgments we make when we decide which is a good course. We will consider questions such as the following:
Is there something distinct about legal judgments, which requires distinct institutions? What kind of education is necessary to be good "judges"? When is it our responsibility to make judgments? Can we be responsible in our judgments without being judgmental? How can we make fair judgments when confronted with completely different, but honestly believed, stories as frequently happens in cases of rape or sexual harassment? What does it mean to be "objective" in such cases?