Past Events

Can progressive, statutory legal reform improve the lives of the poor in places where formal legal institutions have limited reach? Using new survey data on over 4,500 legal disputes in rural Liberia, we show that the vast majority of cases are taken to customary institutions, including by demographic groups who possess limited customary rights, such as women, minorities and the poor. We develop and test a simple model of forum choice in which the socially disadvantaged trade off the repressive aspects of customary law against the formal system's high costs and punitive approach to justice. Consistent with the model, plaintiffs facing a disadvantageous pairing under the custom---e.g., women suing men---are more likely to choose the formal system and are relatively happier when they do. We apply these insights to a randomized trial of a pro bono legal aid program designed to overcome the tradeoff between restorative customary remedies and more egalitarian formal law. On average, legal aid has strong and robust impacts on case outcomes, as well as significant downstream economic benefits---including increases of 0.24 and 0.38 standard deviations, respectively, in household and child food security. Furthermore, in line with our model, both demand for and impacts of the program are greater for plaintiffs facing poor odds in the customary system. Our results suggest that there are large socioeconomic gains to be had from improving access to formal law, by making its institutions more competitive with the organizational forms of the custom.

In this paper I address an issue concerning the site of anti-perfectionist liberalism. After briefly describing different conceptions of parental perfectionism, I set out an argument for extending anti-perfectionism to the raising of children, which implies that enrolling children into controversial comprehensive practices and encouraging them to form particular comprehensive beliefs are illegitimate. One objection to parental anti-perfectionism is that it leaves space for only insipid conceptions of upbringing and parenting. I respond to that objection by elaborating some of the positive features of anti-perfectionist childrearing on the basis of which we might evaluate different kinds of parenting as more or less successful. The paper finishes by addressing a different objection, that anti-perfectionist childrearing is unattractive because it implies that when educating children parents and others may not take a stand on the soundness of Darwinian evolution as an account of natural history.

I argue that free will and determinism are compatible, even when we take free will to require the ability to do otherwise and even when we interpret that ability modally, as the possibility of doing otherwise, and not just conditionally or dispositionally. My argument draws on a distinction between physical and agential possibility. Although in a deterministic world only one future sequence of events is physically possible for each state of the world, the more coarsely defined state of an agent and his or her environment can be consistent with more than one such sequence, and thus different actions can be “agentially possible”. The agential perspective is supported by our best theories of human behaviour, and so we should take it at face value when we refer to what an agent can and cannot do. On the picture I defend, free will is not a physical phenomenon, but a higher-level one on a par with other higher-level phenomena such as agency and intentionality.

John Tomasi did his graduate work in political philosophy at the University of Arizona (M.A.) and Oxford University (B.Phil., D.Phil.). He has held positions at Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard. Tomasi is currently Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Brown University where he is the founding director of The Political Theory Project. He also holds an appointment at the University of Arizona's Freedom Center. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Tomasi is the author of Liberalism Beyond Justice (Princeton) and Free Market Fairness (Princeton).