Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - 4:00pm to Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - 5:55pm
Location: 
Solarium, FA2, Falconer Hall, 84 Queens Park

******This event is co-sponsored by the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity

LEGAL THEORY WORKSHOP

Presents:

Peter Niesen
University of Hamburg

Common ownership of the earth and migrants‘ entitlements: Two sources of cosmopolitan right

Tuesday, February 12, 2019
4:00 pm  - 6:00 pm
Room FA2(Solarium)
84 Queen's Park

 

I discuss the implications of a famous natural law category for questions of border-crossing migration, the category of original common ownership of the earth, as used by Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant. Kant derives a cosmopolitan right of hospitality from it. Yet the debate on cosmopolitan right is still to adress the yawning abyss (Benhabib) between claims to temporary sojourn and any claims to take up permanent residency. We need some explanation of how this abyss came about. I argue that the dual character of cosmopolitan right results from the fact that Kant is drawing on two different sources from the Grotian tradition, two arguments which yield widely diverging entitlements. Both Grotian sources can be systematically developed, and transformed from natural law into public cosmopolitan law. But they cannot be merged in a satisfactory way. I will not claim that the abyss can be bridged.

Peter Niesen is Professor of Political Theory at Hamburg University and a former member of the Frankfurt-based Cluster of Excellence ‘Formation of Normative Orders‘. His research interests lie in International Political Theory, Kant, Bentham, and Animal Politics. Among his recent publications are “Reframing civil disobedience: Constituent power as a language of transnational protest“. Journal of International Political Theory 15, 2019; "Kant and Rawls on Free Speech in Autocracies", Kantian Review 23, 2018;. "The Cautionary Use of Fakes", Behemoth 11, 2018; "What is Animal Politics?" (with Svenja Ahlhaus), Historical Social Research 40, 2015.

 For additional workshop information, please contact events.law@utoronto.ca