The Fragility of Liberal Legality

Rick Abel reflects on how liberal legal orders can rapidly become illiberal and what this reveals about the promises and limits of legal professionalism.

Episode Number 03
Recorded On April 9, 2021

Today, Fabio talks to Rick Abel, an Emeritus Law Professor at UCLA. Rick recently published two books on the United States war on terror, which researchers at the PAL project have found particularly useful. The reason is, in these books, Rick shows how a liberal legal order can quickly be turned into an illiberal one, to fight those who are framed as “enemies of the nation”.

In the episode, Fabio and Rick discuss what these processes involve and what they tell us about the ability that law and lawyers have, or lack, to protect or to undermine political liberalism

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