Inaugural Quain Lecture in Jurisprudence:
Legitimacy and Justice

by

Professor Philip Pettit

Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor
of Politics and Human Values, Princeton University

Tuesday 20 March 2012, 6pm

NEW VENUE:

Cruciform Lecture Theatre 1
UCL Cruciform Building
Gower Street
London WC1E 6AE

About the speaker:

Philip Pettit is the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and Human Values at Princeton University, where he has taught political theory and philosophy since 2002. Irish by background and training, he was a lecturer in University College, Dublin, a Research Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bradford, before moving in 1983 to the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University; there he held a professorial position jointly in Social and Political Theory and Philosophy. He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009, and honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2010; he is also a fellow of the Australian academies in Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds honorary professorships in Philosophy at Sydney University and Queen's University, Belfast and has been awarded honorary degrees by the National University of Ireland (Dublin), the University of Crete, Lund University, Universite de Montreal and Queen's University, Belfast. In 2010 he won a Guggenheim fellowship and spent 2010-11 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural and Social Sciences at Stanford University. He works in moral and political theory and on background issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. 

About the lecture:

In one standard usage of the terms, the legitimacy of a legal and political system is distinct from the justice of the system but in recent philosophical practice the two properties have often been run together. The issue of justice has inflated to cover most questions in political philosophy and the issue of legitimacy has all but disappeared. This is an unfortunate trend, as it has displaced some serious normative questions. It can and it should be reversed.