 | Alex Guerrero
Department of Philosophy
5 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003
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ALEX GUERRERO is pursuing a joint JD/PhD degree at NYU. He received his JD from NYU School of Law in 2008 and will complete his PhD in Philosophy at NYU in 2011.
His PhD dissertation is in Political Philosophy, though he also works in Ethics, Legal Philosophy, and Metaethics, and has a side interest in African Philosophy.
His dissertation addresses issues in democratic theory, political representation, and the normative assessment of political institutions. Chapter One defends the rationality of voting by drawing a connection between the level of support that representatives receive and the way that those representatives may permissibly govern if elected. Chapter Two raises a number of problems for political systems that employ elected representatives, problems stemming from the informational complexity of certain legislative issues and the way in which this complexity undermines meaningful accountability. Chapter Three argues that when a political issue involves significant informational complexity, it would be normatively better (for responsiveness and quality-of-outcomes reasons) to employ a different kind of political institution, a Citizens’ Legislature (in which citizens are chosen at random to serve on a single-issue legislature, which involves meeting with experts on the issue, deliberating, and enacting policy directly), to create policy with respect to those issues. Chapter Four defends Citizens’ Legislatures against complaints that they violate norms of equality, fairness, legitimacy, and procedural justice; and responds to several concerns about implementation. Chapter Five argues against attempts to normatively justify or defend the use of one political institution over another on purely non-consequentialist grounds.
Alex’s interests in law include Constitutional Law and Theory, Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility, Criminal Law, Election Law, and Immigration Law.
He has several law papers in progress. The first of these argues that in a certain category of ‘civil’ cases, norms of political legitimacy require that indigent individuals be provided legal representation even though their personal physical liberty is not threatened. The second paper presents, defends, and discusses the implication of two claims: (1) that one cannot normatively assess a constitution without knowing certain facts about the society (particularly with regards to various aspects of the society’s demographics) for which that constitution is or might be the operative constitution; and (2) that one cannot normatively assess some particular element of a constitution without knowing how that element ‘fits’ with the rest of the particular constitutional framework. The third paper defends the view that the role of the lawyer, and the corresponding ethical duties and responsibilities of the lawyer, differs depending on whether the lawyer is representing a client with the State as an adversary or whether the lawyer is representing a client with a private citizen (or group of citizens) as an adversary.
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