The below piece is written by our incoming visiting scholars Cecília Pazinato Marcon and Maria Fernanda Marques about the research that they will conduct while they are visiting scholars with the VHC at Emory Law. They will join us virtually from Brazil in 2022.

Our research is about bullying legislation and we understand that all children and teenagers are susceptible to bullying no matter their gender, skin color, ethnicity, religion, or disability. We have noticed that laws and schools usually seem to focus their protection only on a specific group of individuals instead of trying to assure a healthy environment for everybody.

We find vulnerability theory interesting for our research as it begins with the recognition that we are all universally vulnerable because we are all embodied beings, therefore we are all innately dependent on social relationships and institutions.

Continue reading A Note from Our Incoming Visiting Scholars from Brazil

by Martha LA Fineman

The pandemic has created a series of practical and policy challenges for the entities and individuals deemed responsible for public health and welfare. The way in which those challenges have been approached reveals the assumptions that underlie the allocation of social welfare responsibility in a society. Of particular interest are the norms or standards and values governing the relationship between the individual and the state and its institutions. These norms historically reflect the distinction between what is considered appropriately of “public” concern and what is deemed primarily a “private” matter. This line between the public and the private serves to allocate responsibility, with private matters often being assign an individual or personal responsibility. Our understanding of the private also enhances the concept of individual rights as constituting necessary bulwarks against perceived inappropriate or invasive state action. At the same time, the construction of the private constrains notions of collective welfare and responsibility.

Continue reading Populations, Pandemics, and Politics

We are pleased to feature a video on public procurement and distribution by Professor Martha LA Fineman. This video was filmed as the introduction to our workshop on Public Procurement in February 2021. Watch the video here.

 

What follows is a series of anonymous class reflections from Dr. Atieno Mboya Samandari’s class on Law, Sustainability, and Development.

Reflection 1

Equality, as a concept, is a wonderful thing. I have always been moved by John Rawls “Original Position” thought experiment where we design our society/institutions from behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing which race, gender, or economic status we would be assigned in our society. From that original position, people would be incentivized to create a more just and fair system. In “The Vulnerable Subject”, Martha Fineman highlights how our current conception of equality fails to account for discrimination/disparities that are less-easily demarcated.

Continue reading Student Reflections on Dr. Mboya’s course

by Tanya Krupiy

3. Thinking about AI decision-making processes as an institution that brings about transformative effects

The employment of AI decision-making processes is part of a larger trend of digital technologies transforming society.¹⁷⁰ There is a view that digital technologies are ushering in a Fourth Industrial Revolution.¹⁷¹ The vulnerability theory is a fruitful lens for better understanding the AI decision-making processes and what kind of values these processes enact. It sheds light on some of the institutional and societal changes the employment of AI decision-making processes introduces from the perspective of social justice. As a result, one gains insight into how the cumulative use of automated decision-making processes is likely to impact on individuals and society at large from the vantage point of social justice.

Continue reading A vulnerability analysis: Theorising the impact of artificial intelligence decision-making processes on individuals, society and human diversity from a social justice perspective

by Martha L.A. Fineman

“III. BEYOND DISCRIMINATION, BEYOND IDENTITIES

The vulnerability and the human condition thesis presents a foundation for the argument that there is a state responsibility to monitor the promises of equality of access and opportunity that are fundamental to American society’s construction of itself as the “land of opportunity.” My argument is that to attain broad general opportunity and access in today’s world, the state must be responsive to individual, social, and institutional circumstances so that equality is anchored in the realities of the human condition and not some abstract and unachievable “ideal.” In particular, it is surely true that the reality of our universal fragility plays some role in the construction of societal institutions.
Just as surely, how those institutions respond to our collective and individual vulnerability should form part of the basis upon which they are judged by and incorporated into society. To see how these insights are relevant to political and ethical assessments of what constitutes a “just” state, I seek to reconsider the components of the basic social compact on three levels: Who is cast as the universal legal subject? How are the nature and function of societal institutions understood? What are ascribed to be the responsibilities of the state or collective to individuals and institutions?

Continue reading Beyond Identities: The Limits of an Antidiscrimination Approach to Equality (2012)

by Nicole Phillis

Legal theorists are often criticized for developing legal philosophies without a means for practical application.  But in recent months, I had the opportunity to implement Professor Fineman’s vulnerability theory firsthand in local government.  Let me explain.

Since 2014, I have served as an elected official in Santa Monica as a Commissioner on the Santa Monica Rent Control Board.  Through the course of the pandemic, a significant amount of City employees were laid off due to loss of revenue to our City.  Further, the righteous protests for Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Eric Garner forced us to confront the militarization of law enforcement, and the systemic failures of government to protect Black people from systemic oppression, abuse, and persecution.  These events impelled us to re-examine what we believe is the purpose of local government and what we want our new reimagined government to look like.

Continue reading Vulnerability Theory in Local Practice

by Brenda Baker

In the television series, Orange is the New Black the topic of incarcerated women brought to light the life of women behind bars. Prior to this popular book and television series, very little attention was given to women in correctional settings. The Hollywood version of female incarceration provided by the popular series, challenged our common stereotypes about women as caretakers, maternal figures, and gave us a glimpse into the reality that women have been impacted by numerous conditions resulting in time behind bars.

Continue reading Incarcerated Women and Institutional Captivity

by Camilla S. Jydebjerg

This abstract by Camilla S. Jydebjerg serves as a preview for her upcoming visiting scholar presentation which will take place on August 6, 2021.

In my presentation, I will analyze how the Danish Welfare State responds to unemployment. The purpose of the investigation is to determine if and how this response constitutes possibilities of resilience for people encountering unemployment. Along with most other OECD welfare states the politics of workfare or active labor market policies have become the most pervasive political answer to counter unemployment from the 1990s onward (Caswell 2010).  Workfare means “work-for-your-welfare” and can be characterized by that “participation is compulsory for the claimants, i.e., that there are sanctions attached, that the prime activity is work and that the measure is part of social assistance” (Dahl 2003, p. 274). The move towards workfare has been described as a fundamental change in both the meaning and understanding of social welfare rights and the administration of social welfare, turning the exclusion from work into the center of the relationship between society and people experiencing a need of assistance from the state (Handler 2004).

In my presentation, I will analyze a ruling from the Danish Supreme Court concerning the constitutionality of workfare laws. Drawing on Vulnerability Theory as well as on the insights from The Feminist Judgement Movement, I will show how the inherent politicality of this ruling promotes, produces, and reproduces particular understandings of the relationship between human beings and work, autonomy and vulnerability and the state/the collective and the individual in three ways. The first is the blurring of the dichotomies of work and activation and of force and choice/voluntariness. The second is how the plaintiff comes to be recognized by the legal system. This recognition has to do with what the law can recognize as relevant and what stays hidden to the categories of law. The third is what is considered reasonable to ask of people receiving social assistance and who is doing the asking. I will show how this legal privileging of particular understandings takes part in shaping the world and I will investigate how a rewrite of the court case in the light of Vulnerability Theory would make another outcome possible by a different weighing of the factual information of the cases and a different interpretation of the law.

Finally, I will discuss how another reading of the law would have created other possibilities for law- and world creations in practice.