SCHOOL OF LAW

Brian R Leiter

Hines H. Baker & Thelma Kelley Baker Chair in Law
Professor of Philosophy

PhD 1995, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
JD 1987, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
AB 1984, Princeton

Brian Leiter (JD, PhD, Michigan) has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 1995, where he now holds the Hines H. Baker and Thelma Kelley Baker Chair in Law and also serves as Professor of Philosophy and Founder and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program. He was the youngest chairholder in the history of the law school at Texas. He has been a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, University College London, and the University of Chicago Law School. He gave the 'Or 'Emet Lecture at Osgoode Hall School of Law of York University, Toronto in 2006 and, in 2008, will give the Dunbar Lecture in Law and Philosophy at the University of Mississippi and the Fresco Lectures to the Faculty of Law at the University of Genoa in Italy.

Professor Leiter is one of three editors of the journal Legal Theory and editor of the Routledge Philosophers book series. He is the author of two books--Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002) and Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2007)--and editor of six others, including Objectivity in Law and Morals (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Future for Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2004), and (with Sinhababu) Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2007). His article “Legal Realism and Legal Positivism Reconsidered” (Ethics, 2001) was selected as “one of the ten best philosophical articles” of the year by The Philosopher’s Annual, the first time in that publication’s quarter-century history that an article on central topics and figures in legal philosophy was so honored. His other articles have appeared in Ethics, European Journal of Philosophy, Times Literary Supplement, Yale Law Journal, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Stanford Law Review, Philosophical Topics, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and elsewhere.

Professor Leiter teaches courses on Evidence and Jurisprudence, and seminars on topics in legal, political and moral philosophy and post-Kantian Continental philosophy. He has been voted “Professor of the Year” by his students and has received an average instructor rating of 4.6 (out of 5.0) for the eleven courses (avg. size: 42) taught since 2001.