Introduction


INTRODUCTION

Each year, the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law devotes a day-
long symposium to the significant contributions of a senior scholar to the
literature of gender and/or sexuality law and theory. For our inaugural
symposium we were pleased to have selected Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst
Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University
of Chicago with joint appointments in the Philosophy Department, Law
School and Divinity School. Professor Nussbaum's work spans a daunting
terrain. In her work as a classicist and theorist of liberal humanism, she has
both explored an ethics of vulnerability and human flourishing, in The
Fragility of Goodness (1996), and defended liberal education in Cultivating
Humanity (1997). In Hiding from Humanity (2004) she used tools from
moral psychology to better understand the role that shame and disgust play
in legal argument, focusing in particular on the subordination of women,
Jews and homosexuals. Her Sex and Social Justice (1999) defended a
universal notion of gendered and sexuality-based justice that demonstrates
the ineluctable link between sex and social justice. Finally, in Women and
Human Development (2000) and Frontier of Justice (2006) she made a
compelling case for defining development goals in terms of human
capabilities that insist on the priority of gender and sex-based justice.

Some scholars of great prominence make their mark by boring deep
into a difficult problem, using complex theoretical tools to reveal a
problem's troubled premises, illuminate its hidden biases and in so doing
enhance our appreciation of the problem and the role of law in its
eradication. Other distinguished scholars aim more for breadth than depth,
reaching across disciplines to aid our understanding of a domain in life or in
law with the tools and methodologies of an allied field, be it philosophy,
political theory or economics. Still others have built remarkable bodies of
work taking as their starting point not the realm of theory but the demands
of real life and those who suffer unnecessarily. Their work starts with the
world and works out from there to the more abstract domain of ideas.
These scholars insist that our scholarly projects be motivated by and
responsive to the most urgent of real world problems.

What is most remarkable about Martha Nussbaum is that she has
developed a body of field-transforming scholarship not in any one of these
domains, but in all of them. She is at once a scholar in the field of classics
and political philosophy, of ethics and the rights of disabled people, of
cognitive psychology and development policy, of Stoicism and the rights of
gay people and women, and of disgust and animal rights. Her work shows



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

us how a thick commitment to justice can extend not only to the dignity
claims made by poor women in India, same-sex couples seeking to marry in
California, and disabled people living anywhere, but to animals in circuses
and factory farms as well. To do so she pairs Cicero with Mill, Rawls with
Plato, Blackstone with Maguigan.

She challenges us to think hard about complex problems, and
complexly about hard problems. Even when we disagree, which is
inevitable in work of such ambition, she makes us better for the way her
work rigorously challenges us to carefully articulate and defend where and
why we part ways.

The Symposium, held in February of 2009, was organized around
three general themes in Professor Nussbaum's work: Feminism and
Liberalism; History, Identity and Sexuality; and Gender and Development.
We invited distinguished scholars from law, history, sociology,
development and political science to discuss the ways in which Professor
Nussbaum's work has influenced the fields in which they write as well as
their own thinking. To this stellar group, we posed the questions: Where,
from your vantage point, has her work had the most significant theoretical
and policy-based influences? Where have you picked up her ideas and
taken them somewhere else-perhaps somewhere Nussbaum herself would
not have gone?

The papers that follow in this volume represent our panelists'
efforts to engage these and other means by which to assess the enormous
contributions of Professor Martha Nussbaum's work to the scholarship and
practice of gender and sexuality law. Her work in any one of several areas
-classical philosophy of ethics and emotions, contemporary moral
philosophy or international development policy-standing alone would
amply justify her honor as a giant in the field of gender and sexuality law.
Her capacity to undertake such intellectually rigorous and politically daring
work across a broad spectrum of disciplines renders her without question
among the most influential scholars of sex and gender justice of our
generation. Professor Nussbaum is a scholar of rare and distinguished
talents that cover a broad range of scholarly disciplines, methodologies and
social contexts, and we take great pleasure in honoring that work in this
special issue of the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law.

Katherine Franke
Suzanne B. Goldberg
Directors, Center for Gender & Sexuality Law
Columbia Law School

[Vol. 19:1