Anti-Climacus

SO: Finished up the conference paper proposal and sent it off. My hope is that it's not too far off the regular political theory radar to get picked up. Title: "Grotius, Rights, and the Rule of Law." The idea came from a half-facetious remark I made about generating paper ideas from my dissertation project--pick any three terms I'm interested in, and that's a paper. Grotius, rights, and the rule of law were the three that happened to come into my head at that moment. But as it so happens, I had recently read a paper by Jeremy Waldron where he uses the concept of 'the rule of law' as a means to guide the practice of governmental officials with respect to international law. He argues in particular that the rule of law provides principles antecedent to the sources of that law to guide interpretation of particular statutes (or treaties, or custom in the international law sense) but also where the law is silent. This put me in mind of the way right in Grotius is attended by moderation, interpretive charity, and the importance of keeping faith, and the rest of the parallels just sort of drew themselves. Hopefully someone else will find this interesting or useful.