A Symposium on Eric Nelson's The Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of God Commentators: Prof. Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study Prof. Paul Horwitz, University of Alabama Dr. Ayelet Hoffmann Libson, Reichman University Prof. Micah J. Schwartzman, University of Virginia

Commentators: Prof. Lior Barshack, Reichman University Prof. Emilios Christodoulidis, University of Glasgow Dr. Irena Rosenthal, University of Amsterdam Prof. Christian Volk, Humboldt University of Berlin Chapter Summary: This chapter, “Critiquing Rights and the Anti-Legalism of Theory,” poses three main questions. First, why have rights almost uniformly been understood by critical theorists and humanists working on law as having “only paradoxes to offer”? Second, what thinkers and theories helped to engrain that genre of analysis, and what sorts of conclusions has it dictated? Finally, why have theorists (within the legal academy and beyond) subscribed to various forms of “anti-legalism”? In answering these questions, the chapter offers an intellectual history of “rights skepticism” that canvasses philosophical debates about the status of rights beginning in the late eighteenth century and continuing through influential “biopolitical” and critical race theory today. Its ultimate argument is that an emphasis on the paradoxes and contradictions of rights has actively instilled such an antilegalistic mindset, and it therefore ventures a number of critiques of such reasoning.