Jill Stauffer, a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric, draws particularly on the work of French ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas to critique the tradition of social contract theory that underlies many western liberal or democratic assumptions about law and right. In her dissertation, The State of Nature as Revenge or Utopia: Social Contract, Human Rights, and the Foundations of Law, Stauffer reads Levinas against Hobbes, Rousseau, and Rawls and then, in concrete terms, applies Levinas’ critique to contemporary debates and rulings about the status of refugees and international criminal tribunals. Both parts of the dissertation seek to establish the degree to which sovereignty is at odds with human rights--despite the fact that every liberal theory wants both sovereignty and human rights, not just for its own citizens but for all humanity.