Archives
Political philosopher Robert Goodin to speak at Baldy Center seminar series
By SUE WUETCHER
Reporter Editor
The Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy in the UB Law School will continue its Faculty Seminar Series on Institutional Analysis of Law, Politics and Society with a presentation on March 12 by Robert Goodin, a major contemporary political philosopher and theorist.
Goodin, joint professor of social and political theory and philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University, will speak on "Democratic Accountability: The Third Sector and All" from 12:20-3 p.m. in 545 O'Brian Hall, North Campus. James Gardner, professor in the Law School, and Ken Shockley, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences, will serve as commentators.
Goodin is a pioneer in the political and philosophical analysis of institutional design, notes Gardner. "He is a noted political and moral philosopher in his own right, but his work is of special interest for the faculty seminar for his application of concepts in moral and political philosophy to concrete public policy issues, particularly questions relating to the best structures for social and governmental institutions.
"Law, of course, involves precisely the question of how social behavior should be regulated or channeled, so his insights are of special interest to the Baldy Center, which concentrates on the intersection of law and public policy," he says.
Goodin has written several books and numerous articles on institutional design. He is editor of a Cambridge University Press series on institutional design, and also edits Ethics, a leading scholarly journal of moral philosophy.
His talk at UB will concentrate on how each of the main sectors of society—the state, the market and the voluntary non-profit sector, or the "Third Sector"—are characterized by a distinctive accountability regime focusing on a different subject of accountability (actions, results and intentions, respectively) and a different mechanism of accountability (hierarchy, competition and cooperative networking, respectively). While these different regimes can complement one another—enhancing the democratic accountability of the system overall—they also can undercut one another if their differences are not respected, Goodin notes in an abstract. He maintains that bringing the Third Sector under a market-style accountability regime through "public-private partnerships" based on competitive tendering undermines the distinctive contribution that the Third Sector might make.
The Faculty Seminar Series for 2003-04 has taken on the theme of "Institutional Analysis of Law, Politics and Society." Gardner, who will deliver the last seminar of the semester, explains that institutional analysis is a viewpoint that has become popular within the past 20 years in which scholars in fields as diverse as economics, sociology, political science, law and history examine the commonplace objects of their disciplines—markets, electoral systems, government agencies, systems of legal rules, etc.—as "institutions" or networks of human social relations with organizational structures and properties that can be studied and analyzed.
Although this year's seminar series has been organized broadly to include developments in institutionalism in all fields, the speakers—in keeping with the Baldy Center's emphasis on the intersection of law and social policy—have been focusing primarily on the law as a social institution and the connections between the law and other social institutions, he says.
An innovative feature of the series, Gardner adds, is the participation of commentators, usually from disciplines other than that of the speaker, who attempt to compare the speakers' research to work in other fields and to explore the implications of the work to further understanding of institutional analysis.
Other speakers scheduled to appear this spring are Elisabeth Clemens, a University of Chicago sociologist, who will address Arizona's charter schools as an experiment in institutional change on March 26; Yoram Barzel, an economist from the University of Washington, who will discuss standards prices and information, and the theory of the state on April 16, and Gardner, who will examine self-sustaining constitutional systems on April 22.
Those lectures, as well as Goodin's March 12 lecture, will be held from 12:30-3 p.m. in 545 O'Brian. The seminar series is free of charge and open to all interested faculty members and advanced graduate students. Those who would like lunch, which will be served at noon, should contact the Baldy Center at baldyctr@buffalo.edu or 645-2102.
For further information about the seminar series, contact organizers and law school faculty members Guyora Binder at gbinder@buffalo.edu and Errol Meidinger at eemeid@buffalo.edu, or Baldy Center Director Lynn Mather at lmather@buffalo.edu. Information and papers also are available at http:// www.law.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/facultysem03.html.