[12] At Brown, Nussbaum's students included philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff and actor and playwright Tim Blake Nelson.

[17] Nussbaum has engaged in debates with other intellectuals, in her academic writings as well as in the pages of semi-popular magazines and book reviews and, in one instance, when testifying as an expert witness in court.

A portion of this testimony, dealing with the potential meanings of the term tolmêma in Plato's work, was the subject of controversy, and was called misleading and even perjurious by critics.

[26][27][28][29] In January 2019, Nussbaum announced that she would be using a portion of her Berggruen Prize winnings to fund a series of roundtable discussions on controversial issues at the University of Chicago Law School.

Nussbaum's interest in Judaism has continued and deepened: on August 16, 2008, she became a bat mitzvah in a service at Temple K. A. M. Isaiah Israel in Chicago's Hyde Park, chanting from the Parashah Va-etchanan and the Haftarah Nahamu, and delivering a D'var Torah about the connection between genuine, non-narcissistic consolation and the pursuit of global justice.

Under Nussbaum's consciousness of vulnerability, the re-entrance of Alcibiades at the end of the dialogue undermines Diotima's account of the ladder of love in its ascent to the non-physical realm of the forms.

Alcibiades's presence deflects attention back to physical beauty, sexual passions, and bodily limitations, hence highlighting human fragility.

[44] Camille Paglia credited Fragility with matching "the highest academic standards" of the twentieth century,[45] and The Times Higher Education called it "a supremely scholarly work".

Noting the Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes' aspiration to transcend "local origins and group memberships" in favor of becoming "a citizen of the world", Nussbaum traces the development of this idea through the Stoics, Cicero, and eventually the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant.

[48]: 41 126  More broadly, Nussbaum criticized Michel Foucault for his "historical incompleteness [and] lack of conceptual clarity", but nevertheless singled him out for providing "the only truly important work to have entered philosophy under the banner of 'postmodernism.

'[48]: 40  Nussbaum is even more critical of figures like Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and George Will for what she considers their "shaky" knowledge of non-Western cultures and inaccurate caricatures of today's humanities departments.

At the same time, Nussbaum argues in support of the legalization of prostitution, a position she reiterated in a 2008 essay following the Spitzer scandal, writing: "The idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque.

[58] Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin faulted Nussbaum for "consistent over-intellectualization of emotion, which has the inevitable consequence of mistaking suffering for cruelty".

[59] Hiding from Humanity[60] extends Nussbaum's work in moral psychology to probe the arguments for including two emotions—shame and disgust—as legitimate bases for legal judgments.

In an interview with Reason magazine, Nussbaum elaborated: Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings.

For both of these reasons, I believe, anyone who cherishes the key democratic values of equality and liberty should be deeply suspicious of the appeal to those emotions in the context of law and public policy.

[63] In academic circles, Stefanie A. Lindquist of Vanderbilt University lauded Nussbaum's analysis as a "remarkably wide ranging and nuanced treatise on the interplay between emotions and law".

[64] A prominent exception was Roger Kimball's review published in The New Criterion,[65] in which he accused Nussbaum of "fabricating" the renewed prevalence of shame and disgust in public discussions and says she intends to "undermine the inherited moral wisdom of millennia".

Nussbaum has recently drawn on and extended her work on disgust to produce a new analysis of the legal issues regarding sexual orientation and same-sex conduct.

Her book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution was published by Oxford University Press in 2009, as part of their "Inalienable Rights" series, edited by Geoffrey Stone.

Drawing upon her earlier work on the relationship between disgust and shame, Nussbaum notes that at various times, racism, antisemitism, and sexism, have all been driven by popular revulsion.

[69] In place of this "politics of disgust", Nussbaum argues for the harm principle from John Stuart Mill as the proper basis for limiting individual liberties.

Nussbaum argues the harm principle, which supports the legal ideas of consent, the age of majority, and privacy, protects citizens while the "politics of disgust" is merely an unreliable emotional reaction with no inherent wisdom.

[citation needed] From Disgust to Humanity earned acclaim from liberal American publications,[70][71][72][73] and prompted interviews in The New York Times and other magazines.

She criticizes existing economic indicators like GDP as failing to fully account for quality of life and assurance of basic needs, instead rewarding countries with large growth distributed highly unequally across the population.