In “Constitutional Disorder,” LSR Visiting Faculty Fellow Robert Tsai reviews Yuval Levin’s “American Covenant” and Erwin Chemerinksy’s “No Democracy Lasts Forever,” calling them “Two dramatically different views of the Constitution reflect the chasm between how left and right conceive the republic.”
Read the full review…
Congratulations to LEGster and politics graduate student Nancy Yun Tang, who won the American Political Science Association's Kenneth Sherrill Prize for her dissertation "Making Autocracy Queer: A Dance in ‘Law’ Between LGBTQ Movements and…
The Center is pleased to welcome the following Graduate Prize Fellows for the 2024-25 academic year.
Victoria BergbauerVictoria Bergbauer is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History. She is currently completing her dissertation, which will offer the first transnational history of the formerly incarcerated. By tracing…
Phoebe Okowa is Professor of Public International Law at Queen Mary University of London. In 2021, she was elected to the United Nations’ International Law Commission, becoming the first African woman to serve on the Commission since it was established in 1947. She has written extensively on general international law including the…
“For a purportedly originalist Supreme Court, the majority opinion in Trump v U.S. was notably light on the long disquisitions on “history” that have become common in the court’s rulings,” write Melissa Lane, the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, and Jane Manners, assistant professor at Temple University's Beasley School of Law and a UCHV…
In his proposal, Baring wrote:
The global success of Marxism is one of the most important developments in modern intellectual history. By the mid-twentieth century, Marxist ideas had come to inform thinkers and activists on every inhabited continent, with enormous consequences for local and global politics. However, the international…
Listen to Kim Lane Scheppele, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, speak to NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about Hungary's authoritarian leader Viktor Orban, who is set to become the president of the EU.
Appiah is widely known as the Ethicist at the New York Times. He is now an honorary member of the Royal Society, a recent designation intended to honor scholars who do not have the body of scientific publications that most members do. The Royal Society honored his work in “many…
Former Human Values Forum President Ethan Magistro was recently featured in the University homepage's Senior Thesis Spotlight Series.
Tang answers a few questions about her experiences making the film, which you can watch on Vimeo.
Where are you from and what is your major?
I am from Metuchen, New Jersey, and I am a Psychology major.
When did you start making…
Flying a flag is an expression of free speech protected by the First Amendment. But is unfettered free speech a right that every public servant should exercise?
Melissa Lane, UCHV's director and the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, explores this question in her op-ed in US News.
Jan-Werner Müller, the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and professor of politics, was named a 2024-25 Old Dominion Research Professor by the University's Humanities Council.
The professorship provides additional research time for Princeton faculty members and seeks to enhance the University humanities community…
Taylor began his lecture by elucidating the context in which the term anti-racism was popularized: the 2020 racial reckoning that followed the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. These killings sparked important waves of protest that were quickly labeled anti-racist (despite the fact that the activists that participated in them…
The lecture series, titled "Love and Abortion," asks "What does love teach us about abortion? How does love challenge our ideas about abortion? How can love explain the importance of abortion?"
Watch the lectures, "Love as the Reason We Need Abortion," "Loving Someone Whose Death Wouldn’t Matter," and "When Does Love Make a Baby?"…
Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1999 and will transfer to emeritus status in July. He is an associated faculty member at Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, where he is involved with the…
Melissa Lane’s 2023 monograph, published by Princeton University Press, has been feted with multiple book symposia and book launch events.
Alan Patten, the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Politics, will serve as director of the University Center for Human Values, beginning July 1, 2024.
Since its publication two weeks ago, the brief has been cited in multiple news outlets, including:
The Guardian: US historians file brief with supreme court rejecting Trump’s immunity claimThe Washington Post:
Read "Is Corporate America in Denial About Trump?," by Jonathan Mahler and "This Is What You Get When Fear Mixes With Money," by Thomas Edsall.
Congratulations to Kim Lane Scheppele and Jan-Werner Müller, who received 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships.
Melissa Lane, UCHV's director and the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, and Jane Manners, UCHV Fellow in Law, Ethics, and Public Policy, published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times titled …
UCHV is pleased to welcome eight Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellows to campus for the 2024-25 academic year.
Scheppele is quoted in the following media:
Articles AP News: Trump meets with Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orbán, continuing his embrace of autocrats Haaretz:
According to Nature, the peer-reviewed article cautions scientists of being overconfident in AI's "superhuman abilities when it comes to objectivity, productivity and understanding complex concepts. The authors argue that this put researchers in danger of…
UCHV's Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching Wojciech Sadurski received a Medal of Honor for his service to justice from the Polish government. He received the award in Warsaw last week from Poland's Minister of Justice/Attorney General Adam Bodnar.
What could J. L. Austin’s theory of performativity, Hannah Arendt’s account of political action, and Euripides’ Hippolytus ever have in common? That is precisely the question that Professor Bonnie Honig, Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University, sought to explore in her riveting…
The University Center for Human Values (UCHV) fosters ongoing inquiry into important ethical issues in private and public life and supports teaching, research, and discussion of ethics and human values throughout the curriculum and across the disciplines at Princeton University. The Center strives to provide the larger community with the space…
The intellect, Hegel alleged in The Philosophy of Right, usually apprehends its surroundings only as they fade. Our ability to reflect on the world, he thought, depends on that world’s passing away in the face of something new. In his second Tanner Lecture, Adam Tooze alighted on a recent example of this Hegelian tragedy…
Last November, Adam Tooze, the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Chair of History at Columbia University and director of the European Institute, delivered the 2023 Tanner Lectures on "The Last Dystopia: Historicizing the Anthropocene Debate in a Multipolar Age."
The GPF program recognizes and supports post-generals graduate students with distinguished academic records (in any discipline) whose dissertation research centrally involves the critical study of human values. In addition to providing tangible support, a main purpose is to enable scholars working on topics in human values to engage with each…
UCHV's Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching Wojciech Sadurski received the Karol Pilarczyk Award from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America for "promoting democracy and the rule…
UCHV Fellow in Law, Ethics, and Public Policy Jane Manners was selected as an inaugural member of the Brennan Center's Historians Council on the Constitution.
According to…
UCHV invites practitioners, faculty members of any discipline, independent scholars, and lawyers to apply for visiting residential fellowships for 2024-25.
Fellows will devote the full academic year to research, discussion, and scholarly collaboration on topics related to…
Philosophy in the Wild invites abstract submissions for presentations at its fourth annual conference, “The Philosophical Environment,” happening July 26-28, 2024, at Colton Point State Park in Pennsylvania. The conference is being organized by UCHV postdoc…
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching, was Ezra Klein's featured guest on today's episode of the popular podcast, "The Ezra Klein Show."
In the episode,…
In Jan-Werner Mueller's Guardian op-ed, "A second Trump term will be far more autocratic than the first. He’s telling us," Mueller discusses Trump's claim that he has a mandate to accrue…
Evgeny Roshchin, a visiting research scholar at UCHV, was quoted in a recent Daily Princetonian article, "Princeton provides Ukrainian and Russian scholars two years of protection." UCHV took a…
The Angelus Novus Project, a collaboration of Princeton’s Form Finding Lab, UCHV’s Research Film Studio and the architecture firm SOM, won the European Cultural Centre’s University Innovation Award.
In The London Review of Books article "Poland after PiS," Jan-Werner Mueller reviews Jarosław Kuisz's book "The New Politics of Poland: A Case of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty."
An article by Shuk Ying Chan *21, a Graduate Prize Fellow at UCHV in the 2018-19 academic year, and Alan Patten, chair of the Department of Politics and a member of the UCHV Executive Committee, has just been published in the American Political Science Review.
Last month, Philip Pettit, the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of University Center for Human Values, was elected as an honorary fellow at Cambridge University's Trinity Hall. Pettit was a research fellow at Trinity Hall in the 1970s.
Visit…
Recent articles by Jan-Werner Mueller have been published in Foreign Policy on October 29 and Project Syndicate on October 20. The Foreign Policy article “How the European Project Fell Apart” is a review of Timothy Garton Ash’s latest book…
Use of the cessation of all brain function as a criterion of death has long seemed a settled issue, but the Uniform Law Commission recently started discussing changes to the laws that were adopted, more than 40 years ago, following a recommendation it had then issued. After opening the discussion, however, the Commission soon slammed the lid…