Andrew Rehfeld is an Associate Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies, and the Director of the Political Theory Workshop.

Rehfeld joined Washington University in 2001 after receiving an M.P.P. (Public Policy) and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. His work centers on the relationship between democracy and political representation. Rehfeld has additional interests in the political thought of the Hebrew Bible, and the relationship between political theory and the social sciences more generally. His first book, The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy and Institutional Design was published by Cambridge University Press (2005) and asked why we use territorial boundaries to determine how we get represented. It is also the subject of a symposium in the journal Polity (April 2008). 

Abstract
In the past few decades, it has come to be an expectation, rather than an exception, that international teams of forensic experts will be among those responding to large-scale human rights violations. These teams exhume mass graves in order to collect evidence and/or identify the bodies of victims. The legal and political justifications for their work have focused on the needs of courts and international tribunals as well as, more recently, the rights of living family members to know the fate of disappeared loved ones. Neither of these justifications directly addresses the question of whether the dead themselves have rights or make political claims. This paper surveys the liberal political philosophy, early and contemporary, that has helped to form the human rights framework in order to explain why the dead are rarely conceived of as ethical subjects. It argues for an understanding of international forensic work that does not close the door on the claims of the dead, but rather remains open to important commonalities between cultures regarding the treatment of dead bodies, as well as the ethics of care that forensic experts bring to their work.