Powers of Judgment

David Luban is Distinguished Professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He is the author of Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study (1988), Legal Modernism (1994), Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (Cambridge, 2007), and Torture, Power, and Law (Cambridge, 2014).

• Introduction: Hannah Arendt, the philosopher of judgment; Part I. Adolf Eichmann and the Banality of Evil: 1. Arendt in Jerusalem; 2. Did Arendt get Eichmann wrong?; Part II. The Moral Philosophy: 3. Judgment in dark times; 4. The Socratic moral propositions: thinking and judging; 5. Conscience and the banality of evil; Part III. Common Sense and Moral Breakdown: 6. The flight from common sense; 7. Common sense and plurality; Part IV. Arendt Before Jerusalem: Ethics in The Human Condition: 8. The curious case of the missing morality; 9. The problem of futility in The Human Condition: Part V. Arendt and International Law: 10. Statelessness, human rights, and humanity; 11. The idea of international criminal law; 12. The crime against the human status: Lemkin and Arendt; 13. The promise and peril of identity as politics; 14. Doing justice; 15. Thoughtlessness as culpability; Conclusion: taking stock.

'At this perilous moment in our history, David Luban has delivered a work of exceptional importance. On one level, the book offers an astute and judicious study of Hannah Arendt's moral philosophy, brilliantly illuminating an overlooked dimension of the great thinker's oeuvre. But more distinctively, Luban proves the equal of Arendt, expounding a novel contribution to international legal theory and offering an indispensable guide to preserving our moral bearing and capacity for reasoned judgment in the darkest of times.' Lawrence Douglas, Amherst College