INPC Public Forum

 

Where: Mock Court Room, University of Idaho Law School

 

When: Friday, March 23, 7:30 - 9:00 PM

 

Who: All members of the community are warmly invited to attend this year's INPC Public Forum. Our panelists will include Heidi Li Feldman (Georgetown Law), Charles Barzun (Virginia Law), Barbara Levenbook (NC State Philosophy), and David Boersema (Pacific Philosophy).

 

What: This year's forum shares its tile with the title of the conference, "Pragmatism, Language, and Law." It will begin with brief presentations by a panel of invited INPC speakers who are experts in the areas of philosophy of language and jurisprudence. These experts will present their disciplinary perspective on what it means to take a pragmatic approach to issues of language in the law. Following the presentations by panel members, there will be a discussion, moderated by INPC co-coordinator Graham Hubbs, involving the audience and members of the panel. Prof. Hubbs will field comments and questions from the audience and direct them to the relevant panel members.

The general mission of the public forum run in conjunction with the INPC is to provide a forum for public discussion of classically philosophical topics. While the conference is intended to help facilitate research on such topics, the forum is designed to illustrate to non-philosophers the importance and pervasiveness of philosophy in our daily lives and to help improve the intellectual atmosphere of the greater Moscow community. We hope that both academic participants and non-academic attendees should benefit. For the academics, the forum will serve as an opportunity to live up to the pragmatic ideals that are the subject of their scholarship; for non-academics, it will provide access to professors who have thought long and carefully about the ways in which the language of the law shapes our institutions and lives.   

 

An illustrative example here is the meaning of the text of the U.S. Constitution. It has become commonplace for politicians and pundits to criticize their adversaries of ignoring and violating the Constitution. This sort of critique depends on an at least tacit method of interpreting the Constitution, for applying the Constitution to some matter requires interpreting it. These methods, although proper objects of examination, are too often assumed uncritically; when this happens, critiquing an opponent’s view as unconstitutional may amount to little more than partisan vituperation. This sort of discourse does little to forward civic goals, so an open discussion of the various interpretive perspectives one might take on the Constitution will, we hope, benefit the general public. We hope that this discussion will illuminate the patterns and norms that govern our interpretive practices, which is precisely the sort of goal pursued by the pragmatist approach to philosophy. The aim of discussing this and related issues in the public forum, then, is to employ philosophy in the service of civility.

 

We thank the Idaho Humanities Council for its generous financial support of this project.