PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
I am a political philosopher working at the intersection of contemporary political philosophy, philosophy and public policy, and philosophy of law. My research and publications are primarily concerned with privacy and democracy, although I have also done some research on sexual and racial equality, and on intellectual property and the ethics of patenting human genes.
I became interested in privacy because of feminist criticisms of the public/private distinction. My doctoral thesis, at MIT, was an attempt to show how one might justify legal rights to privacy, philosophically, without justifying sexual inequality. Since then, I have published on privacy and sexual equality, privacy and democracy and on privacy and security, and am finishing a short book, On Privacy, which will be part of Routledge’s Thinking in Action series.
My research on privacy has shaped my work in democratic theory and my particular interest in the ethics of voting. Political philosophers and democratic theorists have paid relatively little attention to the ethics of voting. My research on the secret ballot, compulsory and judicial review, I hope, will alter that neglect. It shows how various are the considerations on which people may legitimately vote; the close connection between democratic rights to participate and to abstain; and the variety of devices, other than elections, which make democratic government possible.
I am now writing Contemporary Democratic Theory: A Critical Introduction for Oxford University Press and have just started a project called ‘Accountability and Fair Representation’ with Luc Bovens (LSE). It aims to illuminate the normative and formal properties associated with different forms of proportional representation, in order to clarify the alternatives to the current voting system (First Past the Post) for British parliamentary elections.