NEW LOCATION
CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF LAW WORKHOP SERIES
presents
Bernard Harcourt
University of Chicago
Against Public Policy: A Critique of Economic Cost-Benefit Analysis
Thursday, September 29, 2011
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium, Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
The contemporary economics-oriented cost-benefit public-policy approach stands politics on its head by transforming political judgments and values into mere instrumentalities of efficiency-oriented decision-making. Instead of contemporary public policy serving as a means to ensure the effective implementation of political visions, cost-benefit policy-making influences, shapes, and distorts political ideals—“distorts” in the sense that it affects political values without openly engaging, debating, confronting, or negotiating the very balance of political values at the heart of our political union. This paper argues against public policy.
Bernard E. Harcourt is the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at The University of Chicago. He is the author most recently of The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011), and the co-editor of the forthcoming French and English editions of Michel Foucault’s Mal faire, dire vrai: Fonction de l’aveu en justice (Presses Universitaires de Louvain and University of Chicago Press). He is also the author of several other books, including Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press 2007), which won the Gordon J. Laing Prize from the University of Chicago Press in 2009, Language of the Gun: Youth, Crime, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press 2005), and Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken-Windows Policing (Harvard University Press 2001). Professor Harcourt earned his bachelor’s degree in political science at Princeton University and holds his law degree and Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. Before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago in 2003, he taught at Harvard, NYU, and the University of Arizona, and has also taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and Université Paris X.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
