The Robert H. Litowitz Lecture Series

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law presented the 2010 Robert Litowitz Lecture for the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics. Professor An-Na'im presented and defended a framework for the constant theoretical and political contestation of the relationship between Islam, the state, politics and society.

Mr. Caldwell is a weekly columnist at the Financial Times, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. In his lecture, Mr. Caldwell will discuss the demographic and economic problems facing Europe today. He will argue that both are symptoms of a larger political crisis.

Yale University's Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics is pleased to announce that Joost Hiltermann, Chief Operating Officer at International Crisis Group, will be delivering this year's Robert H. Litowitz Lecture in Ethics and Public Policy. In his lecture, Mr. Hiltermann will ask what can be done to stem an apparent sectarian tide sweeping the Middle East in the wake of recent upheavals, from the 2003 US invasion of Iraq to the 2011 Arab awakening.

Professor Brown will discuss two trends have that grown in ideological force in Arab politics in recent years: one emphasizing popular sovereignty and democratic accountability; the other stressing the divine origin of political authority. Do these operate at cross purposes? And might either trend tame the authoritarian patterns that seem so deeply entrenched in the region?

The United States is the only Western democratic nation to practice capital punishment in the 21st century. Lethal injection was introduced in the late 1970s as a more palatable alternative to evidently brutal methods of execution such as electrocution, hanging, and firing squads. Today, executions are staged as a quasi-medical procedure in which the inmate/patient is put to sleep – and put to death – on a gurney, hooked up to an IV machine, sometimes with the direct participation of medical professionals such as anesthesiologists. Medical knowledge and authority is both invoked to justify the practice of lethal injection and also strictly limited in its capacity to critique, or even to optimize, this practice. In the Supreme Court case, Baze v Rees (2008), prisoners on Kentucky’s death row called for the use of medical technology and expertise to minimize pain during execution. The court denied their request, but in response to a dissenting opinion, many states introduced manual “cons

Yale University’s Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics is pleased to announce Branko Milanovic, Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, who delivered this year’s Robert H. Litowitz Lecture in Ethics and Public Policy. The talk discussed the most recent evolution in global inequality, the new 2011 PPP numbers and focused on the political implications of the important changes that are taking place in global distribution of income. In particular, it focused on the rise of the middle class in Asia, income stagnation of the rich countries’ middle classes, and the emergence of global plutocracy. Branko Milanovic is Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center City University of New York and Senior Fellow at Luxembourg Income Study; was lead economist in World Bank Research Department for almost 20 years and senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Professor Milanovic’s main area of work is income inequality, i

For more than 15 years, Wizner has worked at the intersection of civil liberties and national security, litigating numerous cases involving airport security policies, government watch lists, surveillance practices, targeted killing, and torture. He appears regularly in the global media, has testified before Congress, and is an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law. Since July of 2013, he has been the principal legal advisor to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Ben is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and was a law clerk to the Hon. Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“Turning the Corner to Climate Safety: The Economics and the Politics of Solving the Climate Crisis” Speaker: Nathaniel Keohane, Senior Vice President, Climate Program, Environmental Defense Fund Lecture was presented on April 26, 2018 at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale. Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our world today. With temperatures and sea levels rising, and extreme weather events becoming increasingly frequent, we are already getting a glimpse of the possible future – and yet global emissions of greenhouse gases continue on their seemingly inexorable rise. What impacts are we likely to see in the decades ahead from a changing climate? What can we do to turn the corner on rising emissions and put the planet on a path toward climate safety? Join Nathaniel Keohane, a former Yale professor and Obama Administration official and now Senior VP and head of climate at Environmental Defense Fund, for a discussion of the threats facing all of us – a

In this talk, activist and former environmental law professor Wayne Hsiung, Co-founder of Direct Action Everywhere, discusses how climate change has devastated non-human life, why that matters for the future of human civilization, and why building animal rights into our political system -- starting with a single green, compassionate city (a #GreenNewCity) -- is the fastest way out of the climate crisis.

The Ethics, Politics, and Economics program is hosting the annual Litowitz lecture with guest speaker Anne Phillips, Professor Emerita of Political Theory at the London School of Economics. Professor Phillips will present her work on Unconditional Equals (Princeton University Press, 2022). Given the scale of contemporary poverty, many consider it either inappropriate or just fantastical to also worry about inequality. The priority, it is said, should be the alleviation of poverty and destitution. If societies could once guarantee that everyone had enough – that we all had sufficient resources for an adequate life – there would be no need to also worry about inequality. The presumption is that citizens of at least liberal democracies already enjoy a basic ‘status’ equality (are already in some significant sense regarded as equals), and that the persistence of even gross material inequality does not affect this. The view seriously mistakes both the history of claims about our supposedly