The Rise and Impact of Muslim Women Preaching Online

Female Muslim preachers are on the rise online, including in some conservative Islamic traditions such as the Salafi movement. The prevailing wisdom is that religion is the key factor explaining the increase and impact of women’s preaching. In this view, religious ideas about gender segregation create a need for female preachers who preach about “women’s issues” to exclusively female audiences. This chapter argues instead for a social movement logic: female preachers help Islamic social movements reach new audiences of both women and men. In this view, religious ideas prohibiting gender mixing are not the cause of women’s preaching, but rather a normative constraint that female preachers circumvent by preaching online. Data from a large Islamic website show that female preachers are reaching mixed gender audiences and eliciting positive reactions, especially from men, supporting the social movement logic.

Constitutionalizing Necessity Through Suspension

This chapter explores how the American Constitution embeds authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in extraordinary times, which allows executive officials to detain individuals without judicial oversight during emergencies. It analyzes the provision that functions as a temporary “emergency constitution” but does not license anything like a complete suspension of the constitutional order. It also looks at how the Suspension Clause works and what it does not authorize, which sheds light on how to incorporate and overcome necessity through ex ante constitutional means. The chapter mentions Chief Justice Marshall that explained in McCulloch how necessity has an ordinary governing relation to normative constraint. It also highlights necessity as a normal part of governing decision–making and subject to review in proportion to how much it invades protected constitutional rights and liberties.

Hermeneutical Injustice, Contract Law, and Global Value Chains

Global value chains (GVCs) resist dominant contract framing, because presumptions about contract’s bilateral structure and party autonomy fail to capture the complex interconnections between private exchange relations. Contract law seems to obscure, rather than capture, the ways in which the relationships and experiences of various actors in GVCs are linked. This article argues that, in doing so, contract law contributes to systemic hermeneutical injustice. Systemic hermeneutical injustice captures how shared interpretative resources can render those in disadvantaged positions of social power unable to make intelligible that what is in their interest to render intelligible. The article’s primary aim is to show how this form of injustice bears on contract law and how it can function as an independent normative constraint on the institution of contract law.

Status (Im)Mobility and the Legal Production of Irregularity: A Sociolegal Analysis of Temporary Migrants’ Lived Experiences

By combining legal analysis with data obtained through a longitudinal and qualitative fieldwork, this article looks at the impact of time and temporality on migrants’ trajectories. We find that legal insecurity is experienced by the majority of migrants residing lawfully in Belgium as a result of temporal constraints. Indeed, we argue that enforced temporariness and the conditionality of migrants’ stay increase the risk of precariousness and irregularity irrespective of migrants’ nationality. The article also looks at the consequences of legal insecurity on individuals’ trajectories. Since legal stay may be subject to disruptions, migrants with temporary status share the feeling of living in a situation of liminal legality and liminal times. However, they can find ways to overcome these temporal constraints using coping strategies. Through a sociolegal analysis, this article sheds light on temporality as a normative constraint as well as an individual experience creating immobility.

On Rule-Following

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein raises difficulties for the idea that what comes before my mind when I hear, or suddenly understand, a word can impose any normative constraint on what I go on to do. The conclusion his reflections seem to force on us gives rise to a paradox: there is no such thing as going on to apply an expression in a way that accords with what is meant by it. The paradox can be seen as one horn of a dilemma, the other horn of which is Platonism about meaning. It is generally agreed that resolving the paradox means finding a middle course between the two horns of the dilemma. This chapter looks at three attempts to find the middle course: communitarianism, naturalized Platonism, and quietism. It then considers whether Charles Travis offers a way out of the dilemma which avoids the problems of the other views discussed.

Empiricism and Normative Constraint

McDowell holds that our thinking, in order to have intentional content, must stand in a normative relation to empirical reality. He thinks that this condition can be satisfied only if we adopt “minimal empiricism”: the view that beliefs and judgements stand in rational relations to perceptual experiences, conceived as passive. I raise two complementary difficulties for minimal empiricism, one challenging McDowell’s view that experiences, conceived as passive, can be reasons for belief, the other challenging his view of experience as presupposing conceptual capacities. I go on to argue that minimal empiricism is not necessary for satisfying the condition that thinking be normatively related to the empirical world. There is another way of understanding the relation between thought and reality which construes it as normative without being rational: we can understand it as the world’s normative constraint on the activity through which empirical concepts, and hence empirical thinking, become possible.

A Fundamental Ground of Demand-Rights

This chapter provides a solution to the demand-right problem. It argues that joint commitment is a ground of demand-rights. A joint commitment in the sense in question is not a conjunction of personal commitments. It is formed when two or more people together commit them all. Given this ground, the right’s addressee is subject to a peremptory normative constraint. There is also a clear sense in which a right-holder can view the action to which he has a right as his. Further, the directed obligation of the right’s addressee can plausibly be said to be willed into being by those who jointly committed themselves. The question whether joint commitment is the only ground of demand-rights is raised. In a coda, pertinent passages in Kant’s discussion of contract right are reviewed.

Refugee Law and Its Corruptions

This paper asks whether refugee law is morally trustworthy. Trustworthiness here denotes that those who make refugee law—in particular those who decide refugee claims—are competent in this domain and are moved by the fact that refugee claimants and citizens of countries of refuge count on them to make morally sound decisions. Drawing on Adam Smith’s sentimentalist theory of law, the paper argues that refugee law is presumptively subject to various corruptions of the moral sentiments, namely national prejudice, contempt for the lowly, love of domination, and self-deceit. Combined, these corruptions may explain the apparent arbitrariness of refugee claim outcomes. They also suggest that we should be skeptical of any claims regarding the moral trustworthiness of refugee law. What they do not suggest, contrary to more cynical theories, is that refugee law is free of normative constraint.