Publisher's Synopsis
Koppelman surveys leading accounts of the evil that antidiscrimination law seeks to remedy, analyzing works by such theorists as Ronald Dworkin, John Hart Ely, Kenneth Karst, Owen Fiss, Alan Freeman, Catharine MacKinnon, and Iris Marion Young. He shows that, while each points to a valuable moral aspiration, none of these aspirations can be realized without cultural transformation, because the central evil that antidiscrimination law seeks to remedy is unjust social devaluation. Koppelman takes up objections from liberal theory, focusing on the works of Robert Nozick, John Rawls, and Bruce Ackerman, and he concludes that liberal principles themselves condemn the corrupting and degrading effects of prejudice and forbid official indifference to those effects. In a final chapter, he addresses the question whether the law should contribute to the transformation of culture by penalizing hate speech and pornography.