Former Fellow

Thomas P. Crocker

Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina

Research project title:
The Constitution of Ethical Life: Privacy, Community, and the Liberal State

Abstract
I am in the early stages of a monograph project entitled, “The Constitution of Ethical Life: Privacy, Community, and the Liberal State,” that explores how conceptions and practices of privacy are central to constitutionalism, and are therefore central to how legal practices and institutions constitute ethical life within a polity. This project will investigate how constitutional communities shape governing institutions through shifting conceptions of privacy. How has an increased tendency to blur the distinction between state and private commerce-a process of privatization-also accompanied a pervasive loss of personal privacy? Public goods, however these might be defined, are increasingly provided through private entities, closed to ordinary forms of democratic transparency and control. At the same time, everyday private matters are increasingly rendered transparent to both governmental and other private enterprises. On the one hand, political policies translate public goods into private values subject to market exchange and cost benefit logics. On the other hand, private matters of everyday personal life are subject to surveillance and marketized “datafication” by both governmental bodies and other private entities. As a consequence of these two processes, the status of privacy, of “the private,” is undergoing a transformation that this project seeks to explore. My exploration of this transformation focuses on the relationship between the constitutive commitments that comprise a shared ethical life and the constitutive understandings that shape a constitutional community.

  • Biografische Angaben

    Thomas Crocker is Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Wales. He has held fellowships as a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, MA, as a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Germany at the Johann Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, where he was a resident fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, and as the MacCormick Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh School of Law. His scholarship focuses on issues in constitutional law and theory, and intersects both law and philosophy. Within constitutional theory, his scholarship addresses issues concerning privacy, free speech and democracy, criminal procedure, presidential power, and constitutional constraints. His book, Overcoming Necessity: Emergency, Constraint, and the Meanings of American Constitutionalism, is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
  • Publikationen

    Overcoming Necessity:  Emergency, Constraint, and the Meanings of American Constitutionalism (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2020). “Constitutions, Rule Following, and the Crisis of Constraint,” Legal Theory, vol. 24 (2018): 3-39 (with M. Hodges). “Constitutive Visions: Sovereignty, Necessity, and Saramago’s Blindness,” Constellations, vol. 24 (2017): 63-75. “Dystopian Constitutionalism,” 18 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, vol. 18 (2015): 593-655.

News from the research center

Event
14.07.2025 | Frankfurt

Utopie und Aufbruch der 1968er – Was von politischer Rebellion und individueller Selbstbefreiung geblieben ist

Panel Discussion

Die Diskussionsrunde mit Rainer Langhans, Christa Ritter, die seit 1978 zur Selbsterfahrungsgruppe um Langhans gehört, und dem Sozialphilosophen Martin Saar widmet sich utopischen Vorstellungen, die von der 1968er Bewegung ausgingen, und beleuchtet deren Ideale, Impulse, individuelle und gesellschaftspolitische Nachwirkungen.

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Event
10.07.2025 | Frankfurt am Main

Territorial Justice by Lea Ypi

Workshop

Workshop on the new book by Lea Ypi (LSE). With, among others: Andrea Sangiovanni and Ayelet Shachar.

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Event
01.07.2025 | Brussels

Europa in einer multipolaren Welt – Wie kann die EU den Herausforderungen gegenüber Großmächten begegnen?

Crisis Talk

Impuls von Prof. Dr. Nicole Deitelhoff mit anschließender Podiumsdiskussion

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News
22.05.2025

Does deliberative democracy have a future in the age of oligarchs, autocrats and patriarchs?

On June 3, Prof. Simone Chambers will give a lecture on the value of democracies and the future of the form of government.

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News
19.05.2025

What can a baroque tapestry tell us about colonial iconography?

Lecture by Cécile Fromone on May 21. The professor at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, director of the Cooper Gallery at the Hutchins Center and author will talk about the long-forgotten African origins of iconography and its colonial dimension.

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News
05.05.2025

Normative Orders Newsletter 01/25 published

The newsletter from Research Centre Normative Orders collects information on current events, reports, news and publications several times a year. Read the first issue 2025 here.

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News
05.05.2025

"Hitler. History of a Dictator" by Sybille Steinbacher will be published on May 15, 2025

The historian's new book deals with Hitler's origins, the roots of his anti-Semitism and his rise to power.

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News
29.04.2025

Public lecture series “Racism in the police” begins on May 13, 2025

Racism in the police has various dimensions. In the lecture series “Racism in the police - empirical findings, methodological approaches and controversies”, three empirical studies on police work will be presented.

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