Legal philosophy
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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).
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The study of philosophy in law schools, and JD/PhD programs, 2025 edition
Some terminology: by “general jurisprudence,” I mean the core philosophical questions about the nature of law, the relationship between law and morality, and the nature of legal reasoning; by “normative [or “specific”] jurisprudence,” I mean the myriad philosophical attempts to make normative sense (or provide normative rationalizations) of different substantive areas of law, like torts,…
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Richard Stillman on the problem of theoretical disagreements
This will only interest my legal philosophy readers, but I do want to commend to their attention this paper by Richard Stillman, who trained as a philosopher of language with Stephen Neale before coming to Chicago to study law (and jurisprudence). He has identified something important about at least one subset of theoretical disagreements in…
Porphyry of Tyre on Theology and Theurgy (Harvard University Press & Center for the Study of World Religions, 2026) Permanently…