CIDE to publish Spanish language edition of Logic of Discipline
Honored that the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) will publish a Spanish language edition of “The Logic of Discipline” next year.
Sep 18
Fourth Global Conference on Transparency Research
I’m pleased to be serving on the Advisory Committee for the Fourth Global Conference on Transparency Research to be held at the Universita della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano, Switzerland, June 4-6, 2015. Details here.
AFGD to be published in Chinese
SDX Publishing has signed an agreement with Cornell University Press to publish a Chinese translation of America’s First Great Depression in April 2015.
Paper on fiscal rules for Maurer School symposium
I’ll be presenting this paper, No Simple Fix: Fiscal Rules and the Politics of Austerity, at the annual symposium of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies on September 11. The symposium will be held at the Indiana Maurer School of Law. More about the journal.
Aug 25
America in decay: Is Fukuyama right?
Update July 2016: Readers of this post might also be interested in my new book, Four Crises of American Democracy. Details here.
One of the odd consequences of the global financial crisis — an instance of massive market failure — has been a boom in literature about the defects of contemporary democracy. I’ve recently written reviews of several books in this genre. In the new issue of Foreign Affairs, the distinguished political scientist Francis Fukuyama joins in the fray. America, says Fukuyama, is in the process of “political decay.” Certainly, this is not the best of times for American democracy. But there are five reasons why we should take Fukuyama’s assessment with a grain of salt. Read more
n+1 magazine reviews End of Protest and Logic of Discipline
The Fall 2014 issue of n+1 magazine includes a review essay by Jamie Martin discussing The End of Protest and The Logic of Discipline. “The 2008 crash and its aftermath have amounted, as the legal scholar Alasdair Roberts argues in The End of Protest, to little more than a ‘quiet crisis.'” Read the review.
Wilson Quarterly revamps article on WikiLeaks
Wilson Quarterly has done a very nice redesign of my 2011 article, “The WikiLeaks Illusion.” Read the article.
ABA panel on national security surveillance after Snowden
I participated on a panel on “national security surveillance after Snowden” at the ABA annual meeting in Boston on June 8. The panel was organized by the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security. Learn more about the panel. Here is an ABA write-up of the session. I drew mainly on the background notes for my talks on transparency in New Zealand and Australia in May.
Logic of Discipline discussed in The Nation
In the June 2 issue of The Nation, Thomas Meaney and Yascha Mounk write an essay on the state of democracy that discusses The Logic of Discipline and several other books. “There are three principal reasons for democracy’s deepening crisis of legitimacy,” write Meaney and Mounk. “The first is rooted in what Alasdair Roberts has called the ‘logic of discipline,’ which refers to the strictures that the draftsmen of global capitalism introduced into the blueprints of national governments during the past three decades.” Read the essay.
Rappaport Center annual report
Here is the last annual report for the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service, completed in May 2014. Unfortunately Suffolk University closed the Center on July 31, 2014, for financial reasons. We are proud of the Center’s accomplishments since its establishment in 2007. Some personnel details have been redacted from this version of the report.
Alasdair S. Roberts 
