Bio:

Suzanne Dovi is a Professor of the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include democratic theory, representation (especially the representation of historically disadvantaged groups), feminist theory and human rights. She is most interested in exploring how democratic citizens should evaluate those who hold and exercise power over vulnerable and marginalized groups. Suzanne Dovi earned her Ph.d from Princeton University but she also has a MA from Georgetown University and a M. Litt. from Trinity College, Dublin. Her work has appeared in American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Gender & Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, Constellations, and Polity. Her book, The Good Representative, was published by Blackwell in 2008 and was the subject of a special issue in PS: Political Science & Politics. She is currently working on another book project about how representation can have undemocratic and inegalitarian effects. This book is entitled Toxic Representation.

Abstract:

President Trump’s judicial appointments were marked by their unprecedented levels of homogeneity: two-thirds of Trump’s judicial appointments to the federal bench were white men; virtually all appointees were members of the Federalist Society; and all of his three US Supreme Court nominations were arguably Catholic.

Does justice require a diverse judiciary? I think so, and in this talk I posit two concrete recommendations for understanding the relationship between justice and a diverse judiciary.

First, I argue that descriptive representation is desirable when it is necessary to redistribute who receives a “justice dividend” in contexts of systemic structural oppression. In other words, the continued and persistent nature of the institutional legacies from past forms of discrimination produces the need for descriptive representation.

Second, I argue that we need to pluralize the conceptions, and therefore the standards, of justice used to evaluate judicial diversity. Instead of ignoring disagreements about the meaning of justice, I propose using those different understandings to generate different standards of justice. Each way of understanding justice offers a different way of measuring the justice dividend that reflects substantive worries arising from oppressive structural relations. I propose three ideal standards of justice: justice as anti-monopoly, justice as reparation, and justice as non-partisanship.