I received my B.A. from the University of Michigan.  After graduating I had no plan for my life, and so I went to New Zealand and Australia for several months. I then made my way to Washington, DC, where I got hired by a small public interest group in Washington, D.C. called Citizens for Tax Justice.  I worked for CTJ for about two years, and then returned to Ann Arbor for my graduate work. In 1992, I joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Nebraska, where I eventually became the Schlesinger Professor of Social Justice.  In 2005, I became the Kenan Eminent Professor of Political Ethics in the Department of Political Science, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

My research focuses on the tensions that arise within contemporary liberal and democratic theory, and between theory and practice. I wrote The Boundaries of Citizenship:  Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State (1994) and Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship (2000) and co-edited Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Right and Diversity (2005). I have written many book chapters and articles, which have appeared in a number of journals, including  Ethics, the Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Political Studies and Perspectives on Politics. My current research project is on radical injustice -- injustices that linger on, without apparent remedy.  This project has a comparative cast, and is fueled by examples from the U.S., Israel and India. I have been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, a Lady Davis Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, also at Hebrew University.