Legal philosophy
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Illinois-Penn Seminar in Legal Theory on Zoom invites inquiries about attending
Leo Katz (Penn) and Michael Moore (Illinois, formerly Penn) shared this announcement: This year’s iteration of the annual Zoom-only Illinois/Penn Legal Theory Seminar taught by Leo Katz and Michael Moore will be devoted to a chapter-by-chapter examination of a new book by Heidi Hurd and Michael Moore, The Morality of the Criminal Law (Edward Elgar…
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“The Collective: Women in Legal Philosophy”
Information about this organization and its events here. As legal philosopher Barbara Baum Levenbook (a member of the Executive Committee) wrote to me: The mission of The Collective is to promote and support women in legal philosophy and legal theory (broadly defined) who have a commitment to analytical methodology. The Collective began in 2022 as the brainchild of…
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“What do you do when you do jurisprudence? Challenges and New Paths”
This upcoming roundtable at the UK chapter of the IVR (the international association for legal philosophy), organized by Daniel Murata (Surrey), will be online, for those who might be interested:
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“From a Realist Point of View” at NDPR
My thanks to Adrian Kreutz (Amsterdam) for this friendly review of my latest book, about which he writes: Leiter’s new volume…is both a fantastic foray into, and recapitulation of, the many forms realism has taken in philosophy and jurisprudence. It builds on the American tradition, but goes beyond that—or, in any case, presents perhaps the…
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Warwick “mentoring” scheme for “early career researchers” from the Global South, with a focus this year on scholars from India
An interesting initiative from moral, political and legal philosophers at the University of Warwick: “The Centre for Ethics, Law and Public Affairs (CELPA) at the University of Warwick is pleased to announce the CELPA Mentoring Scheme. The Scheme aims to support academics from groups underrepresented in moral, legal, and political philosophy, particularly researchers without established…
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Most cited legal philosophers by D-Index according to research.com (CORRECTED & UPDATED)
We’ve noted the “D-index” (an h-index for discipline-specific journals) calculated by research.com previously. (Their rankings of universities in law are pretty silly, since the faculty lists include deceasd faculty, retired faculty, and faculty who are not law professors.) They clearly don’t count law reviews for D-index, only faculty-edited journals, which is appropriate for legal philosophy.…
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Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, volume 6 will be published…
…in May 2026 (not January 2027 as the website still says), with new essays by Hasan Dindjer (Oxford), Amanda Greene (UC Santa Barbara), Gabe Mendlow (Michigan), Sophia Moreau (NYU), James Penner (NUS), Ralf Poscher (Freiburg), Sabine Tsuruda (Toronto), and Daniel Viehoff (Berkeley), and covering a wide range of topics in general and normative (or specific)…
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Someone once described SCOTUS as a “super-legislature”…
…and the recent NYT expose about the origin of SCOTUS’s “shadow docket” suggests he was right. As one reader put it to me in an email about the NYT article: Ultimate vindication of your “super legislature” moniker. Nothing in the story is particularly surprising, but it does establish that what we call the “shadow docket”…
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“General jurisprudence” in U.S. law schools
Anyone working in legal philosophy who has spent time in Europe or other civil law countries (especially) is aware that most law faculties there typically have entire departments of jurisprudence, with multiple faculty. The historical explanation for this enviable state of affairs is no doubt complex, although the huge influence of Hans Kelsen, the Austrian…
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“From a Realist Point of View” exists!
(UPDATE: Amazon is currently selling the hardcover at an 18% discount [I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining!] I received my copies the other day here in Chicago. More information. A couple of devoted souls even bought it on Amazon (despite the price!). (It was ranked about 8 million a week ago.) My thanks!…
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More on recent “grounding” formulations of legal positivism that exclude Hans Kelsen
Scott Shapiro did the most to popularize a misleading way of describing legal positivism. (The mistake derives from Greenberg and Gideon Rosen, but Shapiro’s 2011 book helped make it common among American legal philosophers, most of whom are not burdened by knowing anything about the history of the subject and, in many cases, have never…
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My legal philosophy blog is coming back to life…
…here, stimulated partly by the advanced class in general jurisprudence I’m teaching this quarter (readings from Dickson, Dworkin, Enoch, Leiter, Toh, Kelsen, Atiq and others). Readers interested in legal philosophy may find some of the posts of interest.
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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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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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Most cited Anglophone books in philosophy of law over the last century
I list all those with at least 1,500 citations (rounded to nearest 100 as usual), since numbers drop off more quickly here (philosophy of law is a lower citation field than political philosophy).
These seem like sensible, measured comments. But I do have a question about (1). You ask: “Is the value of…