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Harris, Pamela

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Pamela Harris studied at Berkeley and Harvard Law School, and clerked at the Italian Constitutional Court. She is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at John Cabot University and teaches courses in international law, constitutional law, American government, and political theory. She has written articles on law and literature as well as on religious liberty in the United States.

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2006 - 200912010 - 20162
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    The Humanitarian God in the Political Marketplace
    (2016) Harris, Pamela
    Realist critiques have understandably faulted the human rights project for being both too ambitiously utopian on the one hand, and too compromisingly modest on the other. Starting from this basic challenge to the moral and practical appeal of human rights, this article examines two recent responses. Stephen Hopgood, in Endtimes for Human Rights, argues that international human rights has come to serve a pernicious, American neo-liberalism, and thus ought to be abandoned in favor of local self-determination. Alison Brysk, in Speaking Rights to Power, accepts that human rights activists must compete to win an audience in a pluralist political marketplace, and offers practical advice for doing this as effectively as possible. While a pragmatic refocus in the face of lost utopia may lead Hopgood to reject the value of international human rights altogether, Brysk seeks to salvage what she can, in the hope of promoting more modest and incremental improvements.
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    The Politics of Judicial Public Reason: Secular Interests and Religious Rights
    (2011) Harris, Pamela
    This paper seeks a better understanding of the role of public reason in alimenting or defusing religious conflicts by looking at how courts apply it in deciding cases arising out of them. Recent scholarship and judicial decisions suggest, paradoxically, that courts can be biased towards either the secular or the religious. This risks alienating both religious majorities and religious and secular minorities. Judicial public reason is uniquely equipped to protect minorities, and its costs to religious majorities may be mitigated by accepting religious morality and identity claims in the political and legislative realm. Despite the political fragilities of judicial public reason, it is not intrinsically hostile to religious claims. It ought in fact to be fully equipped to recognize the equality and religious freedom rights that religious groups and individuals might assert in pursuing exemptions from general secular laws. Judicial public reason does have the potential to defuse religious conflicts, however much it falls short in practice.
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