Michelle Madden Dempsey (Villanova University School of Law) & Matthew J. Lister (University of Pennsylvania - Legal Studies Department) have posted Applied Political and Legal Philosophy (Applied Political and Legal Philosophy, in The Blackwell Companion to Applied Philosophy, Kimberley Brownlee, David Coady, and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, (eds.), Wiley, 2017) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This chapter examines three approaches to applied political and legal philosophy: Standard activism is primarily addressed to other philosophers, adopts an indirect and coincidental role in creating change, and counts articulating sound arguments as success. Extreme activism, in contrast, is a form of applied philosophy directly addressed to policy-makers, with the goal of bringing about a particular outcome, and measures success in terms of whether it makes a direct causal contribution to that goal. Finally, conceptual activism (like standard activism), primarily targets an audience of fellow philosophers, bears a distant, non-direct, relation to a desired outcome, and counts success in terms of whether it encourages a particular understanding and adoption of the concepts under examination.
Highly recommended.
