The current legal and political context is perhaps more congenial than ever before to considering claims made by minorities for the protection of some aspect of their identity. This book argues that multicultural societies depend for their success on having courts and legislatures which are capable of assessing these identity claims in a fair and transparent manner. Identity claims appeal to distinctive and important features of an individual's or group's identity. Despite the ubiquity of identity claims before public institutions, how decision makers assess these claims and the identities of ... More

The current legal and political context is perhaps more congenial than ever before to considering claims made by minorities for the protection of some aspect of their identity. This book argues that multicultural societies depend for their success on having courts and legislatures which are capable of assessing these identity claims in a fair and transparent manner. Identity claims appeal to distinctive and important features of an individual's or group's identity. Despite the ubiquity of identity claims before public institutions, how decision makers assess these claims and the identities of the groups which make them is only vaguely understood and mostly ignored in normative political theory and policy analysis. This book examines the key approaches used by national and international institutions to assessing the identity claims of religious, cultural, and Indigenous minorities today. It develops a normative guide to aid in the fair assessment of identity claims. The identity approach developed in the book is grounded on the requirement that public institutions must respect people's identities and that these institutions must have the capacity to reflect on their own unfair biases. The analysis identifies and responds to four important skeptical challenges to the public assessment of identity claims which include concerns about the incommensurability and questionable authenticity of identity claims, and about the risks of essentializing and domesticating the identities of the people who advance them. The approach developed in this book explains how decision makers can meet these challenges while engaging in a fair and transparent assessment of identity claims.