Brian Leiter

From AcademicBlogs

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 and University College London, and will be a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law School in fall 2006.

Professor Leiter is one of three editors of the journal Legal Theory (published by Cambridge University Press) and editor of the Routledge Philosophers book series. He is the author of Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002), the leading defense of the idea that Nietzsche is a philosophical naturalist, and editor of five books, 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, forthcoming). Oxford University Press will also publish next year (in both cloth and paper) a collection of his papers in legal philosophy, together with a reply to critics, under the title Naturalizing Jurisprudence: Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy. 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, Philosophical Topics, Social Philosophy & Policy, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and elsewhere.

Professor Leiter teaches courses on Evidence and Jurisprudence, and seminars on topics in legal 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.