Yazier Henry: The Constitutional State, Administrative Violence, and Democratic Responsibility (LPE@HLS)

Friday, March 28, 2025

12:15-1:30pm ET

WCC 2004

Please join the Program on Law and Political Economy as we host Professor Yazier Henry (University of Michigan) for a very special conversation on political, intellectual, and professional responsibility in times of democratic crisis. All are welcome, and lunch from Saloniki will be served!

The world has experienced numerous democratic, anti-democratic, colonial, and anti-colonial waves over the past three centuries. During such times of social upheaval, the state has undergone multiple and significant transformations–in its political, theoretical, and legal dimensions, along with its actual structural life. These changes often unfold in moments of acute global crises, giving rise to world-historical, epoch-defining turns. Analyzing these historically disorienting events in real-time presents complex challenges, as the analyst is simultaneously subject to the often violent experience of living within social, economic, and political rupture.

Today, understanding the centrality of law to the state’s moral basis, structural function, and systemic purpose is a crucial political and intellectual task. Indeed, the very foundations of the constitutional democratic state and their expression in administrative form are fully absorbed in the convulsions of our times.

In his remarks, Professor Yazier Henry will address how legal and policy professionals might approach contextualizing the complex nature of the state. He aims to draw critical attention to the state’s coercive and disciplinary power, its humanist transformations, and the manifold social and economic consequences at hand. Intellectuals, lawyers, and policy professionals caught in the eye of history-making storms can attain no objective freedom or exception from their professional, ethical, and democratic responsibilities. Rather, the only way out is through.