April 23, 2003
Press Contact: Professor Brian Leiter, (512) 232-1319
Law and Philosophy Program Announces 2003-04 Events
Professor Brian Leiter, Director of the Law and Philosophy Program (LPP)
and holder of the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair
in Law, has announced the LPP visitors for the 2003-04 academic year:
John Gardner is the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University,
and has also taught at King’s College, London and the law schools at Columbia
and Yale. Like Ronald Dworkin, whom he succeeded
as Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, Gardner was appointed to the most
prestigious chair in jurisprudence in the English-speaking
world before the age of forty. His primary writing has been in philosophy
of criminal law, and cognate issues in moral philosophy, but he has published
widely on topics in political and legal philosophy. He will visit for several
days in spring 2004, during which time he will also deliver the annual Leon
Green ’15 Lecture in Jurisprudence.
Liam Murphy, Nicos Stavropoulos,
and Benjamin Zipursky will all participate
in a conference on “Methodology in Legal Philosophy” on March 26-27, 2004.
Murphy is Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University; Stavropoulos,
a prior visitor to the LPP, is University Lecturer in Legal Theory at Oxford
University; and Zipursky is Professor of Law at
Fordham University in New York. “These are three of the most talented and
creative legal philosophers of their generation,” remarked Professor Leiter.
“Getting them together to present new work on what may be the liveliest
issue of current jurisprudential debate promises to be exceptionally rewarding
for students and faculty alike.”
Mark Murphy is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.
He is, according to Professor Leiter, “probably the leading young defender
of natural law theory in the English-speaking world.” He is the author
of Natural Law and Practical Rationality (Cambridge University Press,
2001), and is currently completing the “State of the Art” essay on natural
law theory for the journal Legal Theory, which is edited by Professor
Leiter. He will visit for several days in fall 2003.
Jonathan Wolff is Professor of Philosophy and Head
of Department at University College London. He is the author of Robert
Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal State
(Polity Press and Stanford University Press, 1991), An Introduction to
Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1996), and Why Read
Marx Today? (Oxford University Press, 2002), as well as numerous articles on a
wide variety of topics in political philosophy. His work has been
translated in to many languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Spanish,
and Portugese. “Jo Wolff is one of the most interesting political
philosophers in Britain today,” noted
Professor Leiter. “He is both a sympathetic and penetrating interpreter of
the ideas of others, and an original contributor to debates about equality
and liberty.” He will visit for several days in fall 2003.
LPP events at Texas are unusual not only for the caliber of the visitors,
but for the intensive interaction, over several days, between visitors and
UT faculty and students. “Most schools bring visitors in to deliver a paper,
and then they’re gone,” noted Professor Leiter. “We’ve found it far more
valuable to have visitors spend several days and to interact with faculty
and students in a variety of settings: existing seminars, special workshops,
and public lectures. Our LPP visitors always say two things: they worked
really hard and they had a great time.”
LPP events are made possible by generous support from the School of Law and
the M.D. Anderson Foundation in Houston.
For more on prior LPP events, see http://www.utexas.edu/law/faculty/bleiter/LPPEvents.htm