January 2026
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Muhammad Ali Khalidi and Liam Murphy (hereafter K&M) on “Disagreement about the kind law”
This paper by K&M appeared in Jurisprudence 12 (2021): 1-16. The main contribution of the paper is in section 4, which argues, quite plausibly, for the view that law is dependent on (at least some) people having the concept of law. This is a significant improvement on a related point that Alex Langlinais and I…
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My top songs of 2025 according to Spotify, #5: REO Speedwagon, “Roll with the Changes,” 1978
These midwestern boys from Champaign, Illinois started as a blues rock band in the early 1970s, but only made it big in the late 1970s. This song was arguably the turning point for them (in terms of fame and fortune), although they soon adopted a more saccharine pop sound I did not care for. But…
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Kelsen and “grounding” versions of legal positivism
The current American fad (which I write about critically in Chapter 9 of my forthcoming book) of characterizing legal positivism as the view that “legal facts are grounded in social facts” has as one of its many ironies that the other major 20th-century legal positivist, Hans Kelsen, rejects it (Hart as I argue, does not…
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A new policy on advertising MA and PhD programs
Going forward, I am only going to take ads from programs that I think are worth considering (the PGR will be a pretty good benchmark for that, but schools should feel free to ask me). Because many prospective students look to the blog for guidance on quality, including the quality of programs, it occurs to…
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Texas has paused H-1B visas at its public universities (and agencies), and Florida appears poised to do the same
This will be very bad for the public universities in these states. According to the preceding CHE article, the University of Florida had 131 such visas approved just in 2025; Texas A&M had 121 and UT Soutwestern (a major medical research center in Dallas) had 119. Any university strong in the natural and biological sciences…
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Garcia from Free University to Frankfurt
Manon Garcia (feminist philosophy, Continental philosophy), currently a tenure-track professor at the Free University of Berlin, has acccepted a tenured appointment as professor of philosophy (a W3 professorship in the German system) at Goethe University Frankfurt, to begin March 1. (Professor Garcia is under contract to write the book on Simone de Beauvoir in my…
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Profiles in real courage: Liviu Librescu
Holocaust surviver, Ceaucescu survivor, he died shielding his students at Virginia Tech from a gunman.
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Leibniz, proto-panpsychist?
Philosopher S. Siddarth discusses. What do readers think?
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Law professors publishing in peer-reviewed finance journals
Here, courtesy of Mike Simkovic. These journals are important in the corporate law/finance world, less so elsewhere. It would be interesting to see similar studies involving law faculty who have published in elite peer-refereed philosophy, economics, and political science journals. If anyone compiles the information, let me know.
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Williamson vs. Thomasson
Philosopher Amie Thomasson is a leading figure in “deflationary” and neo-pragmatist approaches to metaphysics and ontology, along with other philosophers like Huw Price, Jenann Ismael, Matthieu Queloz, Jose Zalabardo, Cheryl Misak, and Michael Williams. (This is a useful and illustrative collection.) Timothy Williamson, by contrast, is a stalwart friend of “inflationary” metaphysics. Unsurprisingly, he did…
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What the NYT analysis of the shooting of Mr. Pretti reveals
It’s a good piece of work, for which the NYT deserves credit. Here’s what I think we learn from this. First, and as background, we know that police in general are paranoid, because they are tasked with policing a society that is heavily armed, since the U.S. does not have civilized gun laws. Second, ICE…
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Steven Levitsky on “competitive authoritarianism” in Trump’s America
A lecture at UNC-Chapel Hill here. (Thanks to someone at UNC for the pointer, but that person asked not to be identified, given the politics of the moment and in North Carolina in particular. I respect that decision, but it is certainly telling.)
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Most cited post-WWII books on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy written by philosophers (according to Google Scholar again) (CORRECTED)
Books are not, in fact, the most important vehicle for scholarship in this area, as the absence of scholars like Myles Burnyeat, Alan Code, G.E.L. Owen, and Gisela Striker, among others, would suggest. But there are some very important and influential books, as the list shows. I have excluded translations with commentaries on important ancient…
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Most cited books on American constitutional law since WWII (according to Google Scholar)
I’ve tried to list all scholarly monographs with at least 1,000 citations (rounded to the nearest 100). I excluded treatises. Please email me with corrections or omissions
I first met Professor Hoy when I returned to UC Santa Cruz in Fall of ’92 to finish my undergraduate…