About me

I am an associate professor of philosophy at Queens College CUNY. My research focuses on philosophy of law and ethics. I received my JD (2000) and PhD (Philosophy, 2008) at the University of Toronto, and I spent a year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Philosophy at UCLA before joining the department at Queens College.

My primary interest is in the moral significance of law. What does the establishment of a legal system add to the moral landscape of a community, and what is morally important about a society's holding people legally responsible to one another? These questions run through my work in analytic jurisprudence, just war theory, and Kant's Doctrine of Right.

​I am currently working on the ethics of punishment, and the ways in which our practices of holding each other to account are constitutive of our moral community. I pay special attention to the fundamental challenge that criticisms of mass incarceration pose to traditional justifications for punishment and what this means for the ways that people relate to one another in a society.

Contact

Sari Kisilevsky
Department of Philosophy
65-30 Kissena Blvd
Flushing NY 11367
sari.kisilevsky@qc.cuny.edu

Papers

Balancing Security and Liberty: Trying Foreign Enemy Combatants in Military Commissions Public Affairs Quarterly, vol. 30, issue 4, Oct. 2016 (draft)
Is Obama's Drone War Moral, Atlantic interview (Aug. 2016)

Criminal Law and Social Cooperation: On Vincent Chiao's Criminal Law in the Age of the Administrative State (Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies, Volume 17, Issue 1, 1 June 2018, Pages 143–157)
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Kant's Juridical Conception of Freedom as Independence Studi Kantiani, XXIX, 2016 (draft)
Freedom and Force: Essays on Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (edited with Martin Stone) (Hart Publishing, 2017)

Review of John Gardner, Law as a Leap of Faith​
Against Legal Pragmatism: Greenberg and the Priority of the Moral (Pragmatism, Law and Language, M. O’Rourke, G. Hubbs, and D. Lind, ed.s (Routledge, Dec. 2013))

Easy Cases and Social Sources: Against Mechanical Jurisprudence (under review, draft)
Hard Cases and Legal Validity (draft, forthcoming)

Recent teaching

PHIL 160: Business Ethics
PHIL 104: Intro to Ethics
PHI 384 (Princeton University): Law and Responsibility
PHIL 223: Philosophy of Law 
PHIL 222: Just War Theory and the "War on Terrorism" ​