For Immediate Release
April 29, 2004

Contact:
Elissa Free, (202) 662-9500

WASHINGTON, D.C. – What is legal justice? This question goes to the heart of a new book by Georgetown University Law Center Professor Robin West.

In “Re-Imagining Justice” (Ashgate Publishing), West seeks to re-imagine, rather than simply critique, contemporary notions of the rule of law, rights and legal equality. She argues, through a re-reading of Thomas Hobbes and Tom Paine, for an understanding of the “rule of law” as requiring a state that actively protects citizens against hardship, and a measure of democratic rule – rather than the "traditional" understandings of the “rule of law” as requiring strict judicial fidelity to legal doctrine.

DePaul University College of Law Professor Mary Becker says than in “Re-Imagining Justice,” Robin West makes a compelling progressive case for the moral good of law with a focus on rights, formal equality, and the rule of law. West's rights are positive, designed to ensure human well-being, and include relational rights: the right to care for others and to be cared for. West identifies the moral good in formal equality as the commonly felt imperative that all people should be treated with respect as valuable human beings. Progressives and the left have tended only to criticize rights and formal equality. West does a superb job of showing the need to embrace progressive versions of both.”

Professor West is a national expert in the field of jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, law and literature and constitutional theory. She has written three widely acclaimed books and more than 70 law review articles in her field.

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