How can we maintain our freedom when living in society with others? What principles inform good governance, where the civic bonds are not too restrictive but allow different people to live together as equals? How are our rights and duties interwoven in a republic? Have we -- in today's America -- lost the register that says that we have obligations toward others, and that being part of a republic means being bound together in a common enterprise? And, most importantly, can we return to a sense that rights and responsibilities, freedom and duty are inextricably interwoven? How we can heal the rifts that have opened in our country? 

I spoke with Professor Ekow Yankah of Cardozo School of Law. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School and Oxford University and focuses on questions of criminal theory and punishment and political theory and particularly, questions political obligation and its interaction with justifications of punishment.