Philosophy of Law

On December 4, 2024, news broke that a lone gunman had assassinated UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive officer, Brian Thompson, outside the company’s headquarters.1 The killing itself was shocking, but what unsettled many observers was the wave of sympathy that quickly coalesced around the perpetrator—donations, online tributes, and statements of support that revealed a raw seam in America’s collective experience of health care.2 This dramatic act of killing is entangled with the dark trajectory in the devolution of the marketized healthcare industry in the United States: normalizing traumatic acts of takings, with increasingly unsustainable industry practices justifying the suspension of pre-existing taboos concerning the sanctity of life and the boundaries of wealth transfer.3 ...

I am delighted to announce the publication of my latest article, “Legal and Ritualological Dynamics of Personalized ‘Pillars of Shame’ in Chinese Social Credit System Construction," featured in the latest issue of The China Review (Vol. 24, No. 3). This work explores the intersection of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS) with the Confucian ritual legal tradition and the rhetoric of public shaming. It integrates insights from rhetorical studies and philosophy of law to examine how the SCS operates as both a governance-by-data experiment and a framework that aligns with—and diverges from—domestic and transnational constitutional norms. ...