Genocide and crimes against humanity are among the core crimes of international law, but they also carry great moral resonance due to their indissoluble link to the atrocities of the Nazi regime and to other egregious episodes of mass violence. However, the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity are not well understood, even by the international lawyers and jurists who are most concerned with them. A conceptual fog hovers around the discussion of these two categories of crime. In this paper, I draw a number of distinctions aimed at clarifying the concepts. I distinguish three concepts of genocide, two legal and one moral, and two concepts of crimes against humanity, a legal and a moral one. I criticize the current legal concept of genocide and, using the idea of discrimination, propose a model for developing a more adequate legal concept and for better understanding the moral concept. I also criticize the moral concept of crimes against humanity, which many thinkers have conflated with the legal concept of such crimes.

Patricia Smith provides an analysis of the concept of omission that builds upon the work of Joel Feinberg. Her account succeeds in bringing together more systematically than did Feinberg several key elements of his analysis. She also usefully extends the analysis to include unintentional omissions. Nonetheless, I argue that she mistakenly presupposes that there is a unique and logically fundamental concept of omission. Rather, I contend, there are multiple omission concepts, each mapping the conceptual terrain of inaction in a somewhat different way. These different concepts, each useful for a distinct purpose, will emerge from an examination of the flaws that Smith's account shares with Feinberg's analysis.

Modern liberalism developed out of the strife of post-Reformation religious warfare. Among liberalism's central ideas were those of the individual's right of religious liberty and the separate jurisdictions of secular and religious authority. In societies that accepted these ideas and put them into institutional practice, levels of systemic religious violence were dramatically diminished. Moreover, the liberal principles that helped to build and sustain civil peace could make a strong claim to providing a just framework for addressing religious differences. Yet important normative questions have remained about the policies a liberal state should adopt toward religion.

The modern liberal state arose as part of a rebellion against the entrenched hierarchies of rank, power, and privilege that had characterized the feudal order of European society. Under that order, a person's prospects in life were determined almost entirely by his status at birth. The individual lacked the liberty to change his social and economic ranking and was rendered dependent on the will of those in higher-ranking positions. It was against this inclusive, closed, and ascriptive system of inequality and dependence that the proponents of the liberal state fought.

Recently, legal and social thinkers have turned to the idea that actions possess a nonlinguistic meaning, called “expressive meaning.” In this article I examine the idea of expressive meaning and its role in legal reasoning. My focus is on a series of U.S. Supreme Court cases involving constitutional challenges to election districts drawn on the basis of race. The Supreme Court used the idea of expressive meaning in striking down the districts. After explicating the idea of expressive meaning, I explain and criticize the Court’s reasoning. I distinguish the approach of Justices Thomas and Scalia, who hold that all uses of race in districting do constitutional harm, from that of Justice O’Connor, who distinguishes uses of race that do constitutional harm from those that do not. I contend that Justice O’Connor is right to make the distinction but she draws the line using a questionable standard. A more defensible standard would be more accommodating to the districts that the Court invalidated.