Obama and Executive Power: The Case of National Security

April 9, 2010
Heights Room, Corcoran Commons, Boston College

Sponsored by the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. 

Participants will include Akhil Reed Amar, Gabriella Blum, Benjamin Wittes, Timothy Crawford, Mara Liasson, James Q. Wilson, George Brown, Marc Landy, Hugh Heclo, and Daniel Kanstroom (Organized by Marc Landy, Political Science Department, Boston College, and George Brown, Boston College Law School)

View the conference schedule.

Junior Fellows Conference, Georgetown University

Sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University and the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, with the participation of the Clough Center Junior Fellows Program.

The Politics of Human Rights: Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference

March 11-12th, 2010
Boston College

This Conference includes papers from all fields of the social sciences and humanities that address in some way the following questions:

• By virtue of what do we have human rights? Natural law? Divine law? History or convention? 
• To what extent do rights depend upon political enforcement and, accordingly, membership in a particular political community? 
• What determines, and what should determine, the relative weight of different human right claims in public debate and political decision-making? 
• Does the tension between promoting human rights and tolerating cultural differences, whether in principle or in practice, call into question the very premise of human rights?

Keynote speakers will include Susan Shell, professor and chair at the Boston College Department of Political Science, Ann Elizabeth Mayer, associate professor at University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, and Sarah Sewall, lecturer in Public Policy and Program Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Participants will include graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and young professionals in academia.