Seminar series Feminist Voices in Law - Talare

Title: Revaluing Care: Part Time for All and More Than Human Constitutionalism

Abstract: This talk will present my argument in Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto (co-authored with Tom Malleson, Oxford, 2023) along with some of its implications for my new project, “Constitutionalism through a More Than Human Lens.”  PTfA sets out a program for new norms: everyone contributes about 22 hours a week of unpaid care and no-one does paid work more than 30 hours a week. We argue that these norms are vital for overcoming the pressing problems of family stress, inequality for care-givers, policy makers ignorant of care (the care/policy divide), and chronic time scarcity. Everyone needs to care because everyone needs to learn what is learned from doing care. The net result will be a revaluing of care. This is essential not only to equality and human well-being, but the capacity of humans to care for the earth—and to understand that care as a mutual responsibility. My relational approach (Law’s Relations, 2011) finally includes “all our relations.”

Bio: Professor Jennifer Nedelsky is an internationally renowned and prominent scholar in law and political theory. Professor Nedelsky has an impressive list of publications, research initiatives and fields of expertise, spanning over many areas of law, such as criminal law, adjudication, labor law, constitutional law, human rights and the rights of indigenous people, equality and the environment, interpretation and application of law, liability and property rights, administrative law, law and liberalism, commodification theories, feminist theory and jurisprudence.

Jennifer Nedelsky received her Ph.D from the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1977. She held a Killam Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Faculty of Law, Dalhousie University (1977-79) She has an extensive experience as a guest researcher and other honorary positions from several universities, primarily in Canada, Australia and the US. She has been appointed Professor of Law and Politics at the University of Toronto and as Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice, in Sydney, Australia. She has also been appointed at the University of Chicago Law School and Princeton University.

Her first book was Private Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism, followed by Law’s Relations: A Relational Theory of Self, Autonomy, and Law (2011). Her latest book is jointly authored with Tom Malleson, Part Time for All: A Care Manifesto (Oxford University Press, 2023). She is now returning to her book manuscript, “Judgment in Law and Life,” building on the unfinished theory of judgment of Hannah Arendt, her dissertation supervisor. She is also returning to her work on property as part of a larger project on revisioning constitutionalism from a more than human perspective. She is married to Joe Carens and the mother of two sons, Michael (1987) and Daniel (1990); their care and relationship have shaped all her work. Her appointment at Osgoode will end December 2024 and she looks forward to exploring new opportunities.