In Defense of Public Wrongs
Max Planck Guest Lecture
- Date: Sep 22, 2026
- Time: 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Prof. Dr. Michelle Dempsey (Villanova University)
- Michelle Madden Dempsey is the Harold Reuschlein Scholar Chair and professor of law at Villanova University, where she teaches and writes on criminal law, feminist legal theory, and philosophy of law. Before joining Villanova in 2009, she taught at the University of Oxford. Her book, Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical Analysis, was published by Oxford University Press and received second prize in the Peter Birks Award for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. Dempsey’s publications have appeared in leading law and philosophy journals, including Oxford Review of Legal Studies, Modern Law Review, and Ethics. She is co-editor-in-chief of Criminal Law & Philosophy, co-general editor of OUP Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice, and co-founder of The Collective: Women in Legal Philosophy. An elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, she previously worked as a domestic violence prosecutor and civil litigator. She holds a DPhil from Oxford, an LLM from the LSE, and a JD from the University of Michigan.
- Location: Freiburg/Germany, Fürstenbergstr. 19
- Room: Seminar room (F 113) | Guests are welcome; please register
- Host: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law
- Contact: c.hillemanns@csl.mpg.de
Civic vices bear on particular wrongs committed within that community in at least two ways. First, they can partly constitute the wrong-making features of certain wrongs: the wrongness of rape, for instance, can be explained as a violation of sexual autonomy and bodily integrity, but a more illuminating account will also register how, in a patriarchal community, its wrongness is partly constituted by that civic vice. Second, other things being equal, instances of wrongdoing partly constituted by civic vice tend to sustain and perpetuate that vice, further ingraining it in the community’s character.
Of course, much depends on how a political community responds to such wrongdoing. Where tolerated, the vice is further ingrained; where the response makes salient the wrong-making features grounded in the community’s vice and repudiates them, the community’s character can be transformed for the better. I will refer to responses that make salient and repudiate wrong-making features grounded in the community’s civic vice as meaningful responses to wrongdoing.
Political communities have a duty to issue meaningful responses to such wrongdoing. This duty is grounded in the community’s own contribution to the very features that make such acts wrongful. Such wrongs are, in an important sense, partly our responsibility—not because we committed the wrongdoing, but because our civic vice partly constitutes its wrongfulness.
This lecture develops a positivist account of public wrongs, according to which they are constituted by a political community’s negative attitudes, judgments, and responses to wrongdoing. Such responses do not merely register a wrong that was already public; they make it so. The existence conditions of a public wrong are social facts: the negative attitudes, condemnatory judgments, and repudiatory practices a political community develops and sustains toward conduct thereby made public. Public wrongs are thus something we can make, and where they offer a meaningful response to our own civic vices, public wrongs can reconstitute our character. In sum, we can make public wrongs, and public wrongs can remake us.
- External guests – Please register your participation with conference@csl.mpg.de.