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Carl Schmitt positioned his constitutional theory in the context of a “political theology” and referred to himself repeatedly as a Catholic. Schmitt scholarship has long pursued this self-depiction without establishing a convincing “Catholic” doctrine, political position, or life praxis. This chapter provides an overview and critical interrogation of Schmitt’s self-description. By emphasizing his political and theological distance from his early background and from the political Catholicism of the interwar period, the chapter analyzes his systematic connection of theism, personalism, and decisionism, and considers Schmitt as a “religious” author and person. Schmitt’s apocalyptically dramatized perception and stylization of life as a permanent “state of exception” can be seen as a religious practice of testing contingency and sovereignty and self-assigning to “salvation.” Schmitt must thus be understood not as a part of majority Catholicism, but beyond it, among the religious movements in the history of modern secular faith.

The formal organization of court systems and jurisdictional rules established by legislatures often determine which litigants will have their cases reviewed by an appellate court. While some procedural obstacles are straightforward in their application, others require judicial interpretation with research findings suggesting that judges’ policy goals are related to decision-making on threshold issues. Even if there are no jurisdictional constraints, some losing litigants weigh the costs and benefits of pursuing an appeal. Still, filing an appeal does not guarantee full consideration of the issues raised by an appellant. Caseload pressures have contributed to screening procedures that result in only a minority of cases being closely scrutinized by an appellate panel. This chapter examines research on this winnowing process that characterizes litigant access to intermediate appellate courts.

The central objective of administrative law is to reconcile two major aims: the successful exercise of regulatory power by the bureaucracy and the tethering of administrative agencies to the rule of law. The first goal is concerned fundamentally with regulatory governance; the second is concerned with legality. Administrative regulation through specialized agencies is a ubiquitous and rather permanent characteristic of modern policy making. These agencies wield enormous power and, although their respective architectures are arguably in tension with our bedrock constitutional principles of separation of powers and representative democracy, the administrative state seems rather entrenched. This article deals with administrative law and describes the leading effort to tie together the law and politics of administration through the use of positive political theory. It also discusses the dilemmas of regulatory administration and, therefore, of administrative law: delegation, discretion, fairness, and regulatory unreasonableness.

This chapter considers sexualities and genders in Africa by exploring the relationship between precolonial, colonial, and current forms of regulation. The field of research on sexual and gender diversity in Africa is introduced, including African lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and intersex (LGBTI) and queer research, with an emphasis on the need to challenge homogenizing characterizations of “homophobic Africa.” Differences between European colonialisms—such as the British, French, and Portuguese—are noted, with the British as the source of the most extensive legal criminalization of same-sex acts. Regarding recent developments, there is discussion of Uganda as a particularly concerning context, with the Anti-Homosexuality Act briefly passed into law in 2014, though later struck down by that country’s Supreme Court. The passage of Nigeria’s Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in 2014 has similarly reflected homophobic state action. Yet it is also possible to note decriminalizations of same-sex sexual acts in several states including South Africa, Lesotho, the Seychelles, and Mozambique. Examples from Botswana and Kenya are used to discuss the value of strategic litigation in the courts as a way to achieve change. A final section discusses how African international governmental organizations, particularly the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, have become a focus for claims by organizations such as the Coalition of African Lesbians. The recent withdrawal observer status from the Coalition of African Lesbians occurred in a context of pressure from the African Union and exemplifies current tensions and conflicts in the continent.

There are multiple possible views of the Black American psyche. But in the science that focuses on the psyche, the science of psychology, there has really been only variants of one view: the Black psyche is “damaged” to use Daryl Scott's term, in deficit, dominated by self-hatred, infected with self-destructive values and habits of mind, a double consciousness divided against itself, replete with cognitive, linguistic, and emotional deficiencies, and so on. This narrowness of perspective, as reflected in this article, is not restricted to psychology. It is a long evolved cultural framework. Much of the research that has focused squarely on blacks' experiences has examined the potential psychological toll that membership in a socially devalued group may take on black Americans. Although this research is undoubtedly important and informative, it is a perspective that is overrepresented compared with work examining the resilience and strength of blacks and members of other socially devalued groups in the face of group-level devaluation.

Understanding the conditions under which the Supreme Court sets its agenda is crucial to understanding Supreme Court behavior. After all, before the justices make any decision on the merits of a case, they must first decide whether to hear it at all. This chapter analyzes Supreme Court agenda-setting. It begins by describing the process justices employ to select cases to review. It examines how parties file certiorari petitions, the certiorari pool used to provide guidance to the justices, and the conferences in which justices vote to grant or deny review to cert petitions. The chapter then discusses four explanations political scientists have provided to explain the conditions under which justices set the agenda. The article concludes by examining limitations of existing scholarship and providing suggestions for future scholarship.

This chapter discusses and brings together two lines of research on global justice—the first on aiding the poor and the second on obligations to those in future generations. This is important as almost any way we try to aid the poor will have a significant impact on poor people in future as well as on present generations. In surveying the literature, the chapter defends a few principles for aiding the poor in present and future generations. It also presents a highly abstract model for testing and thinking through the consequences of such principles that might help arbitrate between principles.

This essay discusses the contribution of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981) to a generation of moral theory. Pitched as a critique of liberal individualism (e.g., Rawls), modernity (e.g., amoral bureaucracies), and the antagonism toward the history of moral theory evinced by analytical philosophers, MacIntyre’s book urges a return toward moral traditions embedded in local communities as the best route to avoid what he regards as the soullessness of modernity and the abyss of Nietzschean philosophy. But his failure to reflect on the political valence of traditions in general or the Aristotelian and Thomist ones he values, seriously compromises his complaints about modernity and his suggestions for ways out.

The question of race lies at the heart of one of the great debates of American ideas and scholarly discourse. At one end of this debate we can find those who argue for the American Liberal Tradition. At its core this position maintains that American institutions, values, and culture are deeply liberal. As such, the nation is destined to adopt a broadly expansive and inclusive sense of who belongs and is worthy of respect. Under this perspective, the United States will eventually and inevitably transcend the divisions of race and black–white inequality that marred the nation's founding, arriving ultimately at a place of full comity between blacks and whites. Several variants and exemplars of the argument exist. For example, sociologist Nathan Glazer made the case for one prominent version of this argument that he termed “the American ethnic pattern.” This view has three core claims. First, that people from the world over would be allowed to enter the United States. And, furthermore, that “all citizens would have equal rights. No group would be considered subordinate to another.” Second, that the government would not extend formal and distinctive political recognition and rights to separate ethnic groups. Third, however, that no ethnic group would be compelled to give up its distinctive cultural traditions and practices.

The relationship between Congress and the judiciary is a complex one that is poorly defined or understood. This ambiguity in the relationship is the result of the failure of the Constitution to define what legal doctrines must shape judicial decision-making or whether the judiciary has the authority to strike the acts of Congress. Whereas the relationship between Congress and the executive is well-defined in the Constitution, the relationship between Congress and the courts was left by the founders to be defined by history. In addition to the Constitution's ambiguity in defining the relationship of Congress and the judiciary, the ambiguity also stems from several factors: the relationship has changed over time; modern accounts of the relationship have produced theoretical claims that are difficult to validate; and the multiple dimensions of the interdependence of the two institutions makes it hard to determine whether Congress is constrained by law and whether the Court is constrained by Congress. This article discusses the evolution of constitutional interpretation. It discusses Congress's abandonment of its role as an interpreter of the Constitution and the emergence of the federal judiciary as a venue for policymaking. The article also discusses congressional response to the Court. It discusses legislative anticipation of judicial review, congressional assertiveness in the nomination process, and congressional reaction to hostile Court activity. The article also discusses judicial anticipation of congressional review.

Many analyses of courts within the economic analysis of law are indistinguishable from those produced by positive political theorists; they consider how judges control, exploit, or resolve conflicts of interest among judges. This article considers three contributions by economic analysts of law outside this common, positive, political theoretic model but which still exploit the tools of rational-choice theory. These contributions either integrate appellate decisio -making within a more comprehensive model of litigant and trial behavior; assume that judges constitute a team with shared preferences; or assume that judges decide cases rather than announce or implement policies. These three elements yield a substantively different understanding of courts than the standard model of positive political theory (PPT). The assumption of shared preferences explicitly rejects the principal-agent model that is standard in PPT. The integration of appellate decision making with other aspects of the disputing process and the shift from policies to cases are consistent with, but potentially transformative of, the standard principal-agent models of adjudication.

This article looks at constitutions. The status and function of constitutions are discussed in the first section of the chapter. It then discusses implementing key founding bargains and structuring the exercise of power. The next sections talk about creating affirmative government obligations, constitutional interpretation and change, the modes of argument, and interpretation and legitimacy. The article ends with several directions for future research on the subject.

Although the presence of animals in our lives seems natural, it is not; it depends on work. But we don’t know what work means for a dog, a horse, or a cow. This chapter proposes a concept of animal work, and argues that there is a subjective involvement of animals in work and intersubjective relations between humans and animals at work. This working is based on a range of structural elements that reflect human work and demonstrate that animals are implicated in work. However, animals also show at work their own way of seeing work according to what the context of production allows, their resistance and their propositions. Faced with an anthropological rupture with animals and the end of domestication, driven by alimentation biotech firms and abolitionists, it is now more important than ever to understand the building blocks of the human-animal bond, such as animal work.

This chapter contrasts the dominant sense of the phrase “animals as legal subjects,” which minimizes fundamental protections for nonhuman animals, with alternative senses of the same phrase that focus on nonhuman animals’ realities, such as consciousness and intelligence. Support for the alternatives comes from developments within different domains, including legal education and society more broadly, where the meaning of such phrases as “legal person,” “legal personhood,” and “legal rights” is being debated regarding companion animals, wildlife, and many other forms of life. The upshot of the debate taking place over the status of nonhuman animals in law and broader phenomenon of human exceptionalism is a wide-ranging discussion of additional forms of animal protection.

For all recorded history domestic animals have been considered objects within the legal system, classified as personal property, the primary focus being on what an owner can do with property or how an owner can protect property from intrusions of others or the government. More recently, our society has developed a new perspective, focusing not on the owners’ rights but on the animals themselves and what level of protection and concern they should be given, regardless of the issue of ownership. To aid in the process of giving animals more visibility within the legal system, it is necessary to remove them from the category of personal property and place them in a new category of “living property.” Once this happens, the allocation of legal rights to domestic animals can begin on a clean slate allowing the issues of animal rights and legal personhood to be directly addressed.

The chapter addresses the topic of animals as scientific objects by drawing on recent literature that emphasizes the heterogeneous construction—or eventuation—of the object. As such, the animal object is understood to emerge from a version of biomedical science that encompasses various elements that derive from within and beyond the laboratory and the experimental system. The chapter thus traces a number of ways the animal is eventuated as an object, including the processes of animal supply and scientist self-selection, the procedures of animal care and ethical assessment, and the prospects of collaboration and clinical translation. Along the way, the chapter points to the complex and conjoint eventuation of animals as subjects and of humans as objects. The chapter ends with a brief reflection on how we might better engage with the complex ethics of the co-becomings of human and animal, objects and subjects.

A discrepancy exists between the legal and perceived status of livestock. Legally, food animals are property, but their thing-like status is unstable and does not determine how they are perceived in practice. The extent to which food animals are regarded as commodities or sentient beings is therefore contextually contingent, oscillates, and is riddled with inconsistency. To understand livestock as a sentient commodity is to attend to, and (re)contextualize, the contradictory and changeable nature of the perceived status of commodified animals in food animal productive contexts, and to how stockpeople experience and manage this perceptual paradox in practice. Bringing to the fore the relatively mundane aspect of human-livestock relations not only upsets commonly held assumptions that productive animals are nothing more than mere commodities, it also highlights the non-productive aspects of stockpeople’s roles that have, to date, been typically overlooked or underexplored.

Both “animals” and “religion” are contentious concepts, with many possible meanings and associations. This chapter takes animals to be eukaryotes distinct from protists, plants and fungi, and “religion” as the attempt to “live a dream.” I describe four principal ways of dreaming animals: triumphalist humanism (for which only “human” beings are of any interest); traditional notions of good husbandry (which requires “human” beings to care for the non-human, within limits set by human interests); notions of metempsychosis and transformation (where “human” and “non-human” are constantly shifting characters); and awakening to the real presence of others, and so—paradoxically—evacuating them of merely “religious” meaning.

This chapter discusses the historical development of the modern-day lower court appointment process. When lower court judgeships were used as patronage, the process ran smoothly from nomination by the president through confirmation by the Senate. Today, however, these judgeships are used for other political purposes by the president and senators. This is because elites (party leaders and interest groups) associated with each of the two major parties follow the process closely, and they demand that the “right” kind of judges be appointed to the lower federal courts. In turn, presidents and senators now use the lower court appointment process to “score points” with these key party-affiliated elites. Thus, as the two parties cater to interest groups and party bases on the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, and presidents and senators follow suit, the lower court appointment process has become highly partisan and contentious.

This chapter assesses the literature on Supreme Court appointments and considers directions for future research. Early work on appointments tended to be in the form of broad political histories or more narrow historical accounts of individual appointments. But as the field developed, much of the work on appointments centered on the confirmation process, including the determinants of senators’ confirmation votes and presidents’ success in getting their Supreme Court nominees confirmed. Was this success due to congressional deference to the president’s appointment power? Or, did presidents’ success result from an active and anticipatory selection stage in which presidents strategically consulted with members of Congress in order to pave the way toward a smooth confirmation? To answer these questions, recent work on appointments has focused on the selection stage. The evidence seems to support the latter—presidents anticipate problems and work with members to garner support for a confirmable nominee.