Brian Leiter

Brian Leiter was a visiting professor at the Law School in the fall of 2006 and joined the faculty July 1, 2008, simultaneously founding the Law School’s Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values.  Prior to that, he taught for more than a dozen years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was the youngest chairholder in the history of the law school.  He has also been a Visiting Professor of Law or Philosophy at Yale University, University College London, University of Paris X-Nanterre, and Oxford University.

His teaching and research interests are in general jurisprudence (including its intersection with issues in metaphysics and epistemology), moral and political philosophy (in both Anglophone and Continental traditions), and the law of evidence.  His books include Objectivity in Law and Morals (Cambridge, 2001) (editor), Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002), The Future for Philosophy (Oxford, 2004) (editor), Naturalizing Jurisprudence (Oxford, 2007), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (co-editor), and Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, 2013).   He is presently working on projects in moral psychology and meta-ethics (often in relation to Nietzsche), on ‘realism’ as a theme in political and legal theory, and on philosophical issues about free speech.

Leiter will deliver the 2012 Seegers Lecture in Jurisprudence at Valparaiso University, and, in 2013, the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Danish Philosophical Association and the Julius Stone Address in Jurisprudence at the University of Sydney.   He was editor of the journal Legal Theory from 2000 to 2008, and is the founding editor of the Routledge Philosophers book series and of the annual Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law (with Leslie Green).