Articles by David Reidy

Public Reason member David Reidy, with co-author Jeppe von Platz, has been awarded the 2009 Berger Prize by the APA Committee on Law and Philosophy for “The Structural Variety of Historical Injustices,” Journal of Social Philosophy, v. 37.3, pgs. 360-376, 2006. Reidy worked with von Platz on the paper while the latter was a graduate student at Tennessee. von Platz is now completing his Ph.D. at Penn. The paper will be discussed at a special session of the APA Pacific Division Meeting in the spring. Criticisms of or reactions to the paper are welcome (send to dreidy[at]utk.edu), as preparation for the spring session will no doubt require some rethinking. (For those interested in historical injustice and reparations, the JSP issue in which this paper appears is an excellent special issue devoted to the topic and edited by Kok-Chor Tan and Rahul Kumar.)

I have a conference length paper on Jim Nickel’s criticisms (from the second edition of “Making Sense of Human Rights”) of Rawls’s “ultraminimalist” conception of human rights in LoP. I seek readers’ comments both because I’d like to get a sense of what objections and questions I’m likely to get when I present the paper, and because I’m hoping to expand the paper both to more fully explore Nickel’s take on Rawls and to couple that discussion with an assessment of Allen Buchanan’s closely related criticisms in “Justice, Legitimacy and Self-Determination.” Thanks in advance for any and all comments. The paper can be found at: http://ssrn.com/author=382674

** Sept 1: Thanks to those (half dozen or so) who have sent comments along directly to me.  Very helpful!

As a few readers of Public Reason may know, I am in the very early stages of an intellectual biography of John Rawls. A good deal of Rawls’s correspondence is archived at Harvard, but not all. And so I am posting this request. If anyone has correspondence with Rawls that may prove relevant to my project, I would very much appreciate the opportunity to acquire or examine a copy. I will be happy to reimburse associated costs. I can be reached at dreidy (at) utk.edu. Thanks in advance for any and all assistance.  Finally, please consider passing word of this request along to others (especially senior scholars) who may have corresponded with Rawls but may not be Public Reason readers.

I have the unenviable task of drafting an encyclopedia article on Rawls for the IVR’s online encyclopedia. I’ve posted the most recent version, titled John Rawls, to my SSRN page — http://ssrn.com/author=382674. As with all online encyclopedias, the entry is nearly endlessly revisable. So I welcome critical comment. Bear in mind that the entry is meant to inform and report, not to take a particular position on Rawls’s work. (The entry was uploaded to SSRN on Tuesday, March 11; it sometimes takes a day or two for it to clear the SSRN procedures and become downloadable. — It’s now downloadable, March 14.)