NEW DATE & TIME
Faculty of Law University of Toronto
Globalization, Law & Justice Workshop Series
presents
Linda Bosniak
Rutgers University School of Law
THE PRIVILEGE OF PRESENCE: REFLECTIONS ON TERRITORIALITY
Tuesday, November 29, 2007
4:10 – 6:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
In this Article, I examine a normative idea of territoriality which I call ethical territoriality. By ethical territoriality, I mean the conviction that rights and recognition should extend to all persons who are
territorially present within the geographical space of a national state simply by virtue of that presence. I start by briefly reprising a claim I have developed elsewhere — that territorialism is preferable, on liberal democratic grounds, to status-based approaches to immigrants’ rights. Here, though, I set out to interrogate the logic of ethical territoriality itself. I ask why the mere fact of a person’s territorial presence should serve as the basis for rights and recognition. Further, even conceding that it should, I ask how this commitment is to be operationalized. What is the scope of the territory in which presence figures so significantly in normative terms, and who, precisely, gets access to presence in that territory? My purpose in this Article is to get beyond the status vs. territorial presence-as-basis-for-membership dispute in the immigration debates and to begin a (self-) critical discussion of the ethical territorial commitment itself.
Linda Bosniak has published extensively on immigration, nationalism, equality, globalization and citizenship in law and legal theory . She is the author of The Citizen and The Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton University Press, 2006). Her articles have appeared journals such as Northwestern University Law Review, New York University Law Review, Theoretical Inquiries In Law, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, and Social Text. She has contributed to numerous volumes of edited essays, and has lectured widely. She was a Law and Public Affairs Fellow and Visiting Professor at Princeton University in 2001-2002, and during the 2003-2004 academic year, served as Acting Director of the Center For the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Scholarship at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where she directed the Center’s yearlong program on “Citizenship.”
A light lunch will be served.
For more information about this workshop, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca
