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Examines broad political theoretical issues while exploring injuries associated with poverty, discrimination, sexual harassment, and disabling injury
“Do No Harm.” Generally speaking, our society’s commitment to this principle has grounded its system of ethics, legal rules, and policies. Yet, in the context of the law, determining what it means for people to be harmed is a much more complex theoretical question.
In Understanding Harm, legal scholar Mark Kelman expands our contemporary legal and moral understandings of injury and welfare, directly addressing what it means for people to be well or badly off. Engaging with political theory, legal analysis, and empirical findings, Kelman examines how and why people may (or may not) be harmed by disability, poverty, discrimination, and sexual harassment. He provides a comprehensive exploration of how individuals who have been harmed by unjust social practices or the bad acts of others are often injured through the lack of adequate accommodations, restrictions on access to material resources, or economic disadvantages. In doing so, he sharply critiques current legal approaches to injury, examining the intricacies of modern harm-inducing practices. Providing a fresh perspective on today’s most pressing societal issues, Understanding Harm calls for readers to rethink our approach to harm, and to question what can, and should, be done for people who have been harmed.
— Kimberly A. Yuracko, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Kelman provides a masterful, interdisciplinary analysis and critique of our understanding of both injury and human flourishing…Kelman interweaves contributions from philosophy, political theory, legal theory, feminist theory, queer theory, disability theory, empirical psychology, economics, and sociology. Rather than minimizing complexity for the solace that reductionism may offer, this book is an exemplar of rigorous, unflinchingly honest scholarship about difficult questions.
— Seana Shiffrin, author of Speech Matters: On Lying, Morality, and Democratic Law
Mark Kelman at his considerable best: wicked smart, tons of fun, impious about platitudes. Unraveling the knottiest dilemmas, Kelman brings to bear wide and deep learning in law, social science, ethics, and political theory. Grappling with this astonishingly rich book won't just change your mind on stuff you thought you understood. It will make you a better thinker.
— Don Herzog, University of Michigan Law School
Teeming with profound insights, Understanding Harm broadens our understanding of what we mean when we talk about human welfare, ultimately urging the interdependence of subjective, objective, and ideal accounts both of our welfare and our injuries...Kelman’s discussions provoke a deeper understanding of what it means to claim that we have been injured, and, most strikingly, what it means for all of us when we either accept or reject those claims.
— Robin West, author of Civil Rights: Rethinking Their Natural Foundation
Mark Kelman scrutinizes the Left's assumption that harm to subordinated groups should be at the center of our social-justice analysis on their behalf. This highly readable internal critique of these claims across the range – from disability, to poverty, to group-based discrimination, to sexual harassment – is both brilliant and indispensable.
— Janet Halley, Harvard Law School