A Little About Me
I have recently received a PhD from the University of Minnesota Philosophy Department. My dissertation focused on the relationship between international law and global justice. I am currently working as a research associate and visiting fellow at the Centre For Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Australian National University (Charles Sturt Division), on issues of transitional justice.
Last Updated: (September 9th, 2011).
Recent Research Highlights:
Paper forthcoming in Social Theory and Practice
"International Rule-of-Law and Killing in War" forthcoming, in vol. 38 (3), July 2012.
Paper presented at 2011 Australian Society of Legal Philosophy Conference
"International Law and the Rule of Law" was presented at the ASLP conference, University of Queensland School of Law, July 2011.
Work begins on the International Criminal Court and the Trust Fund for Victims
Paper on Timor-Leste and jus post bellum coming out in "Morality, Jus Post Bellum and International Law," ed. Larry May (Cambridge University Press). Project on ICC and TFV starting (June 2011).
Seminar at CAPPE
"Killing in War and International Law" was presented at the Centre For Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), Australian National University, September 2010
Work begins on transitional justice and jus post bellum issues in Timor-Leste
Australian Research Council Discovery Grant project ‘Jus Post Bellum & International Law’ Principle Investigator: Professor Larry May
Paper presented at 2010 Australasian Philosophy Conference
"Legitimacy of International Law" was presented at the Australasian Philosophy Conference, University of New South Wales in July 2010.
Paper presented at the University of Sydney
New Horizons in Political Philosophy 2009.
Article published in International Human Rights: Law, Policy, and Process (fourth ed.)
With David Weissbrodt, "Theoretical Foundations of Human Rights: Natural Law Approach, Posivitism, Critical Legal Studies, Feminist Legal Theory, Critical Race Theories and Islamic Approaches" (June 2009).
Paper Published in Journal of Applied Philosophy
My paper, "Are Humanitarian Military Interventions Obligatory?", was published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy.
More to come soon!
My Research
What can institutional analysis tell us about global justice? Many philosophers seem to think that all institutional features are contingent and thus either irrelevant or only tangentially relevant for discussions of global justice. In fact, scholars often assume that institutional structures can be almost infinitely bent to fit the notions of justice developed independently of those same structures. I believe, and set out to show, that this view is mistaken. It seems to me that, some of the time, what justice requires of us in the global arena can only be meaningfully answered by grounding such answers in the necessary institutional structures available for the pursuit of global justice.
With this in mind, I have two aims in my research. One aim of my research is to suggest an appropriate place for the institution of international law in discussions of global justice. I argue that the necessary features of the institution of international law can and should be used to reject some and accept other principles of global justice. I start from an uncontroversial set of rule-of-law conditions, and I ask which features and principles of international law can be justified from this basic set, because I believe that the features that can be justified in that way can then be used to sift through proposed principles of global justice.
Contact Information
The University of MinnesotaOffice: Heller Hall
E-Mail: david258 at umn.edu
Advisor: Professor Michelle Mason
