Justice is a human virtue that is at once unconditional and conditional. Under favorable circumstances, we can be motivated to act justly by the belief that we must live up to what justice requires, irrespective of whether we benefit from doing so. But our will to act justly is subject to conditions. We find it difficult to exercise the virtue of justice when others regularly fail to. Even if we appear to have overcome the difficulty, our reluctance often betrays itself in certain moral emotions. In this book, Jiwei Ci explores the dual nature of justice, in an attempt to make unitary sense of key features of justice reflected in its close relation to resentment, punishment, and forgiveness. Rather than pursue a search for normative principles, he probes the human psychology of justice to understand what motivates moral agents who seek to behave justly, and why their desire to be just is as precarious as it is uplifting. A wide-ranging treatment of enduring questions, The Two Faces of Justice can also be read as a remarkably discerning contribution to the Western discourse on justice re-launched in our time by John Rawls.

The Two Faces of American Freedom boldly reinterprets the American political tradition from the colonial period to modern times, placing issues of race relations, immigration, and presidentialism in the context of shifting notions of empire and citizenship. Today, while the U.S. enjoys tremendous military and economic power, citizens are increasingly insulated from everyday decision-making. This was not always the case. America, Aziz Rana argues, began as a settler society grounded in an ideal of freedom as the exercise of continuous self-rule—one that joined direct political participation with economic independence. However, this vision of freedom was politically bound to the subordination of marginalized groups, especially slaves, Native Americans, and women. These practices of liberty and exclusion were not separate currents, but rather two sides of the same coin. However, at crucial moments, social movements sought to imagine freedom without either subordination or empire. By the mid-twentieth century, these efforts failed, resulting in the rise of hierarchical state and corporate institutions. This new framework presented national and economic security as society’s guiding commitments and nurtured a continual extension of America’s global reach. Rana envisions a democratic society that revives settler ideals, but combines them with meaningful inclusion for those currently at the margins of American life.

Reading Hobbes in light of both the history of ethics and the conceptual apparatus developed in recent work on normativity, this book challenges received interpretations of Hobbes and his historical significance. Arash Abizadeh uncovers the fundamental distinction underwriting Hobbes's ethics: between prudential reasons of the good, articulated via natural laws prescribing the means of self-preservation, and reasons of the right or justice, comprising contractual obligations for which we are accountable to others. He shows how Hobbes's distinction marks a watershed in the transition from the ancient Greek to the modern conception of ethics, and demonstrates the relevance of Hobbes's thought to current debates about normativity, reasons, and responsibility. His book will interest Hobbes scholars, historians of ethics, moral philosophers, and political theorists.

This book shows that constitutional courts exercise direct and indirect power on political branches through decision-making. The first face of judicial power is characterized by courts directing political actors to implement judicial decisions in specific ways. The second face leads political actors to anticipate judicial review and draft policies accordingly. The judicial–political interaction originating from both faces is herein formally modeled. A cross-European comparison of pre-conditions of judicial power shows that the German Federal Constitutional Court is a well-suited representative case for a quantitative assessment of judicial power. Multinomial logistic regressions show that the court uses directives when evasion of decisions is costly while accounting for the government’s ability to implement decisions. Causal analyses of the second face of judicial power show that bills exposed to legal signals are drafted accounting for the court. These findings re-shape our understanding of judicialization and shed light on a silent form of judicialization.

Leonard C. Garrett Sr. was born May 17, 1930 to parents sharecropping a 40 acres slave plot given his mothers parents when they were freed from slavery. Forced from the farm by the Ku Klux Klan, his parents fled to Tampa, Florida. An avid reader, He learned that outside the southern states, for those with Hope, America offered Opportunity, and through Shared Sacrifice, a better America for the Generation that follows. He quit high school and joined the air force, moved his parents out of the projects, and set out to achieve his American dream. Retiring from the air force he joined a major bank as a junior executive and at age fifty-four, had achieved an American dream never believed possible. The Election of 1980 had Unleashed the Wealthy, Greedy, Corrupt, and the politically Powerful from the Bonds of Shared Sacrifice and; empowered conservative ideology driven southern states to roll-back Supreme Court decisions and Laws guaranteeing civil rights of black and Latino Americans. He was harvested, convicted, and sentenced to prison for crimes fabricated by the US attorney, covered up by a Fraudulent Judgment on appeal, denied access to the Court to seek redress, and was held falsely imprisoned for 10 years all; covered-up by a corrupt conservative criminal justice system. Today at age 81, Garrett is among the millions of Americans driving past gated communities into cities with closed factories, boarded-up homes, and neighborhoods of unemployed, elderly, and less-advantaged Americans suffering the question, what happened to the American that We sacrificed so much to make great?

What does it mean to suffer? What enables some people to emerge from tragedy while others are spiritually crushed by it? Why do so many Americans think of suffering as something that happens to other people -- who usually deserve it? These are some of the questions at the heart of this powerful book. Combining reportage, personal narrative, and moral philosophy, Peter Trachtenberg tells the stories of grass-roots genocide tribunals in Rwanda and tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka, an innocent man on death row, and a family bereaved on 9/11. He examines texts from the Book of Job to the Bodhicharyavatara and the writings of Simone Weil. The Book of Calamities is a provocative and sweeping look at one of the biggest paradoxes of the human condition -- and the surprising strength and resilience of those who are forced to confront it.