About the Program
Philosophical problems rest at the heart of each area of law. Criminal law punishes people for wronging others, but what conduct is wrong exactly, and do current criminal laws prohibit only such conduct? Civil rights law prohibits discrimination, but what kinds of differential treatment are morally troubling and why? Family law governs relationships among adults and between adults and children, but what right does the state have to intervene in our personal affairs and what rights and responsibilities do parents with respect to children? Constitutional law offers special protection for freedom of speech and religion, but are speech and religion really special?
Our perceptions of what we owe each other turn somewhat on whether we consider “another” to be “an other”—a stranger and not a friend. In this essay...
We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...
How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...
This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The...
At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...
Faculty Director(s)
Deborah Hellman
Robert E. Scott Distinguished Professor of Law
F. Palmer Weber Research Professor of Civil Liberties and Human Rights
Director, Center for Law & Philosophy