LEGAL THEORY WORKSHOP
presents
Deborah Hellman
University of Maryland School of Law
Willfully Blind for Good Reason
Friday, January 16, 2009
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium (Room FA2) – 84 Queen’s Park
Deborah Hellman’s work focuses on moral questions as they arise and are treated in law. Her book, When Is Discrimination Wrong?, June 2008, Harvard University Press, lays out a theory of discrimination that answers an essential but neglected question. Most laws and policies draw distinctions among people and therefore “discriminate.” Yet many of these laws and policies are morally innocuous and legally unproblematic. The book develops a theory that sorts examples of permissible and impermissible discrimination in a way that accords with widely shared moral intuitions and that has something novel and useful to say about those cases that generate disagreement. Briefly, in her view drawing distinctions among people is morally problematic when it demeans and not morally problematic when it does not.
Hellman also writes in the fields of Bioethics and Professional Ethics, focusing particularly on the ethical issues arising from clinical medical research and on the moral significance of professional role.
She has been awarded several fellowships. In 2005-06, she was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In 2004-05, she was the Eugene P. Beard Faculty Fellow in Ethics at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. In addition, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers in 1999. In 2007-08, she was Visiting Professor of Law at University of Pennsylvania School of Law.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
