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 at Yale Law School, University College London and the University of Paris X-Nanterre, and is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University for portions of the 2011-12 academic year.

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), and Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy (Oxford, 2007). Naturalizing Jurisprudence was the subject of a special symposium issue of the journal Law & Philosophy in 2011. He is presently finishing a book on the moral foundations of the law of religious liberty, as well as working on projects in moral psychology and meta-ethics (often in relation to Nietzsche) and 'realism' as a theme in political and legal theory.

Leiter has given named lectures at universities throughout the world, including the 'Or 'Emet Lecture at York University, Toronto in 2006; the Dunbar Lecture in Law and Philosophy at the University of Mississippi and the Fresco Lectures in Jurisprudence at the University of Genoa in Italy, both in 2008; the Leon Green '15 Lecture in Jurisprudence at the University of Texas and the Meador Lecture at the University of Alabama, both in 2011. 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 the Philosophy of Law (with Leslie Green).