Wendy Salkin, "Speaking for Others," in conversation with Daniela Tolchinsky

Learn more about Speaking for Others in this interview with Professor Salkin for the New Books Network podcast on September 1, 2024: "Speaking for Others." You can also explore recent reviews of Professor Salkin's book by Loren Reinoso, “Salkin, Wendy. Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation” (Ethics, 2026), and Eline Severs, “Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation. By Wendy Salkin” (Perspectives on Politics, 2026).

In Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation, Wendy Salkin provides a novel conceptual and normative theory of informal political representatives, who speak or act for others despite having been neither elected nor selected to do so by means of a systematized election or selection procedure. Informal political representatives are everywhere. Some are internationally recognized leaders of social movements. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., informally represented Black Montgomerians during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Black Americans generally throughout the civil rights movement. Greta Thunberg informally represents Generation Z or, as she has put it, “we who have to live with the consequences” of climate change. Other informal political representatives are just our neighbors and friends. But when they go to the city council meeting to give voice to our neighborhood’s shared interests, they become our representatives too. Despite informal political representatives’ ubiquity and significance to our political lives, their role is conceptually puzzling, morally troubling, and markedly undertheorized. The central ethical challenge of informal political representation is that informal political representatives can provide valuable political goods to those they represent; yet they are neither institutionally nor procedurally constrained in the ways formal political representatives like legislators are. Moreover, informal political representatives are often the only political actors working to advance the interests of oppressed and marginalized groups, meaning these groups rely on their informal political representatives. As a result, relationships between represented groups and informal political representatives can be inegalitarian and oppressive. How may informal political representatives permissibly undertake activities central to their roles without thereby wronging those they represent? This is the question that drives the book.

Wendy Salkin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law at Stanford University, and a Faculty Affiliate at CCSRE. Her research is in political philosophy, philosophy of law, philosophy of race, and Africana philosophy, and intersects with questions in moral philosophy, feminist philosophy, and law. Her book, Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation (Harvard University Press, 2024) received the Apostolos P. Stefanopoulos Book Prize.

Her research has been generously supported by ​the American Council of Learned Societies, the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, the ConceptLab, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellowship at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, a Stanford Humanities Seed Grant, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Salkin received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University, her J.D. from Stanford Law School, and her B.A. in Philosophy and Africana Studies from New York University. She has served as a law clerk to the Honorable Judge Rosemary Barkett and the Honorable Judge Adalberto Jordan on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Miami, Florida, and as legal advisor to Judge Barkett on the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in The Hague.

In April 2024, Salkin received the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association Teaching Excellence Award.

Sponsored by the Research Institute of CCSRE.