Jeremy Waldron
@JeremyJWaldron
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Legal philosopher at NYU; New Zealander by origin
Joined April 2013
Post the four books that started you on your intellectual journey.
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@FoxNews @AlanDersh Alan, there will come a time when there’s no Trump in office anymore. When that time comes, do you want to have anything left of your reputation?.
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Just as there is special circle in hell reserved for those who try to suppress the vote, so there is a special level of gratitude and respect due to hard-working cheerful officials, counters, checkers, & poll workers who nourish our democracy and make it work. Thank you.
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If BK is reported out of committee & confirmed as an Associate Justice, how long will it be before law professors forget and go back to the practice of worshipping and grovelling at the cult of SCOTUS personality? Or will it be different this time? Will this cure us of the cult?.
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Time to start tweeting again. Everyone must stand calmly and protest the separation of parents and children at the border. No gimmicks, no other issues. A simple matter of humanity. Any legislators of either party who can change this need to act.
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NYTimes (Miriam Jordan) reports that Homestead Detention Center rules prohibit children from writing in a journal. How dare they! What could possibly justify such a prohibition? (We know what motivates it.).
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It was on the basis of this 1977 article that I decided I would work with Dworkin when I went to Oxford (from New Zealand) on a Commonwealth Scholarship a year later in 1978. Long time ago.
Oxford philosopher Ronald Dworkin profiled by Time magazine, while on Martha's Vineyard in his swimsuit. September 1977.
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I have just heard the sad news about Joseph Raz. A devastating loss; a great thinker, who transformed several fields. We are truly lucky to have had him among us.
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I’m off to New Zealand to deliver an address at the150th anniversary of my old law school—the University of Otago in Dunedin. Long way to go for a 30 minute address, but it’s very exciting and an honor to be asked.
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So sad. A memory: When I came to Oxford 1978, I was supposed to work with Dworkin. But D was nowhere to be seen. I was looking lost; Brian who was a biologist & Dean of graduates, said “well there is this other chap we could send you to—Hart, Hart I think his name is.” OK I said.
Following the sad news of the death of Dr Brian Loughman, Emeritus Fellow, who died on 9 October aged 94, we are grateful to his friend and colleague, Dr David Bell, Emeritus Fellow of Geology, for this moving tribute:
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I got a ticket here in the early 80s, for cycling on a footpath. It was called Catte Street. I successfully defended the ticket (discharged w/o conviction) before the Oxford magistrates. The relevant statute prohibited driving a carriage on a footpath by the side of any road.
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Or—more likely— the Supreme Court justices will continue to deny justice in cases like these, while swaggering from law school to law school to explain the importance of their constitutional authority.
This week, after protests over George Floyd’s death, the Supreme Court may revisit a key doctrine shielding police officers.
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Hey! Carol and I just got our first Covid vaccine shots a really cool and efficient health care center in Harlem (“the Nest”); no lines, nothing. And automatic booking for the 2nd shot in 4 weeks.
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Grand-daughter Olive (28 months) in her owl-outfit on parade in Brooklyn tonight. A Hallowe’en queen!
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Tomorrow, Katrina Wyman & I teach a ZOOM class on property and the rule of law in our “Property Theory” seminar. It has taken me back to the 2011 Hamlyn Lectures. We’ll be discussing ch. 3, which —on rereading—I’m as proud of as I am of anything I’ve written in last ten years.
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How now will signatories to the law professors’ letter treat “Justice” Kavanaugh? Business as usual for clerkships, invitations to speak, etc?as though the content of the letter was just something we all said during nomination process, not to be taken seriously afterwards.
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Copies of new book just arrived. “Targeted Killing—For and Against.” Tami Meisels makes the case in favor of assassination as a counter-terrorist strategy. And I make the case against death lists, death squads, & state-sponsored killings. I guess terminology’s a bit of an issue!
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An affable and productive debate yesterday with Prof. Roberto Gargarella of Buenos Aires, on judicial review, constitutional dialogue, and deliberative democracy. Thanks to Patricio Enrique Kenny for organizing and Alma Diamond for chairing. Above all, thanks to Roberto.
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Classes at NYU Law begin tomorrow. I have a busy semester, with three courses: Modern Legal Philosophy-the Books; The Rule of Law; & Democratic Theory (which I teach with John Ferejohn). I know it well & I’m looking forward to the pulse of it.
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Here’s what it comes down to: whether by impeachment, or the 25th Amendment, or pressure for a resignation, Donald Trump must not be allowed the dignity of serving out his term.
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First day back teaching in person today. Democratic Theory seminar with the wonderful John Ferejohn. We talked for two hours about ancient Athenian democracy. What a delight — in a room of 25 students, good-natured, gracefully masked, and everything that makes for a good seminar.
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The dignity of legislation, as I see and understand it.
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The campaign to have John Finnis removed is preposterous. His views on many things-torture, assisted suicide, sexuality-are uncongenial to some of us who respect him nonetheless as a giant of jurisprudence. But defending & elaborating those views doesn't amount to discrimination.
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My grand-daughter Aurelia, working on her dissertation.
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My kind of room.
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Tonight I fly down to Argentina to receive an honorary doctorate. Honored and grateful. The ceremony is actually on Friday, but I’ll be giving a couple of lectures before then. At the Friday afternoon ceremony I will speak on “The Distinctive Value of Human Dignity.”.
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One of the best photos ever.
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At age 20? This is me getting married in Waimate, NZ, to Helen McGimpsey.
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This week, in three classes, we’re talking about three of my favorite things: we’re beginning “Law’s Empire” in Modern Legal Philosophy; Lon Fuller in The Rule of Law; and—most wonderful of all— the 1647 Putney Debates in Democratic Theory.
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Prayer for Christchurch: Lord, give peace to those who died in the massacre, relief to the injured, comfort to the bereaved, strength to those who must stand guard, faith to those who were at prayer, wisdom to leaders who have to think all this through, hope and resolve to us all.
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Just posted "Demonstrations" on SSRN. I presented this at U of Va Law School National Faculty Workshop last week. Trying to get an understanding of why demonstrating is important & why demonstrations are feared (by those in authority). It is available at
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Me, from a few days ago. Now cooped up in isolation, in Queenstown, New Zealand . No real symptoms. Surely luckier than some, but — Rats! I had thought to avoid the wretched virus altogether.
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What the hell is wrong with answering hypothetical questions? Such questions are the essence of legal reasoning: they reveal the principles and doctrines that a judge uses to reach his/her conclusions. Why don’t senators push back against Kavanaugh on this absurd response?.
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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, champion of gender equality, dies at 87 - NPR —-What a great loss! So sad. May she Rest In Peace.
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I've just finished a draft of a new paper on lying called "Damned Lies." (Btw why is there no discussion anywhere of the specific meaning of that phrase?) A lot of the paper is about Trump. Some of it is about Kant. Uploaded just now to SSRN at
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So grateful to Noel Carroll for setting up this chair,& honored to have my name associated with it. As an adjunct from practice, Noel taught me Commercial Law in the 1970s. New Chair of Jurisprudence for University of Otago, New Zealand
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Tribute to Joseph Raz. Tomorrow (Thursday) at 4pm NYU Law School, the Legal Theory Colloquium will have special session discussing Raz’s paper on “Normative Powers.” In the Faculty Library: Vanderbilt Hall 3rd floor. Paper available on Colloquium website.
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Tomorrow John Ferejohn & I will teach one of my favorite classes in democratic theory: epistemic approaches to democracy. From Condorcet to Mill on plural voting to Dave Estlund on arguments against epistocracy to Josh Ober on networking in ancient Athens. All sorts of angles.
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Wonderful day yesterday in Dunedin, celebrating 150 years of law school. I spoke on “The Crisis of Judicial Review,” warning of how events in US and Israel show that the practice poisons the politics of judicial appointment and worsens partisan incivility in our politics.
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Rainbow this evening over Riverside Drive rooftops looking north towards sunset. Plus UFO.
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Enjoying this new biography of Keynes. Thoughtful, accessible, well-paced. Only tiny blemish is that author insists on describing Edmund Burke, to whose views he compares JMK’s views in “Economic Consequences of Democracy,” as a Scottish philosopher. God help us- Burke was Irish!
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Students of Congress please, please watch current confidence debate in UK House of Commons. Speeches spoken, not read. Interjections enlivening debate. Those speaking often “giving way” to challenges & questions. Not deadening atmosphere of predigested speeches written by aides.
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How many modern philosophers, denouncing such questions, will pause long enough to wonder whether some of our own shared certainties now will turn out to be similarly despicable. We make ourselves terribly vulnerable, morally and intellectually, relying so much on “intuitions.”.
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@vanitaguptaCR @amyklobuchar Would someone who believes ACB is an honorable jurist explain to why she answered Senator Klobuchar in this way? What possible *honorable* reason was there for her to refuse to answer such a straightforward legal question. We know the dishonorable reasons. Very disappointing.
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Tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday, NYU Law has a conference on the late work of Ronald Dworkin. We begin at 1:30pm with a panel on Dworkin’s “Religion without God,” with presentations by Moshe Halbertal, Eric Gregory, and Larry Sager. All welcome. Furman Hall, 9th floor.
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The President needs to go on Twitter and on TV to appeal to his people to withdraw from the Capitol and its grounds. Now. If he won’t, then Vice President Pence must do it. Now.
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In Boston tonight, to talk to Michael Sandel’s class on “Meritocracy & its Critics” about contributive justice. Looking forward. It’s a while since I’ve been out of New York.
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On the deck of our house in Saugerties late on a cool autumn afternoon. The beer is Yuengling, the book is a set of extracts from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, open at the entry on “Cromwell.” (Voltaire prefers Richard to Oliver.) There are worse ways to pass the time.
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I thought this about Sandy Hook and now also about Uvalde: the people who are brave, even unto death, are the women school teachers, putting their lives in harm’s way to try to protect the children, not the dozens of over-armed men in law enforcement standing around outside.
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Looks like I’m better. This around noon (NZ time) today. Thank you for all support and good wishes. It meant a lot!
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We had an unusual Friday meeting of the NYU Law & Philosophy Colloquium yesterday. Here Liam Murphy & Sam Scheffler flanking presenter Moshe Halbertal (with Tom Nagel, on far left). Moshe’s paper addressed themes of human vulnerability & the capacities that give rise to it.
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That’s Constitutionalism as I see and understand it.
Just hear me out here: what if the Federalist Papers were mostly just post-hoc rationalizations for institutions hacked together as unprincipled political compromises?.
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Almost every January I get to New Zealand and to the lovely old dry-stone-walled cemetery in the little town of Clyde where my Dad and lots of his siblings and his parents are buried. Rest eternal. and in the thought of it, for us, a little bit of peace in a crazy world.
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Does anyone else get annoyed by letters and emails beginning “Dear [Firstname] [Lastname],” as opposed to “Dear [Firstname]” if they know you or “Dear Professor [Lastname]” if they don’t? When I read “Dear Jeremy Waldron,” I always expect a hostile communication.
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Teaching this week: Rule of Law classes on 1 Robert Cover & 2 EP Thompson. John Finnis in "Modern Legal Philos." Direct democracy in "Democratic Theory." Plus conference panel on Holmes's dissent in Abrams on Friday. Not overwhelming, really; more like a cornucopia of challenges.
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Today at NYU summer law faculty workshop, I present “Non-normative Principles,” exploring difference between principles that characterize the spirit of a legal system & principles that are actually supposed to do normative work within a legal system. Dull, but helpful I hope.
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I don't want to be a scare-monger, but I thought we'd all accepted that from now on the courts are not all that reliable. Good luck persuading Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh that the President's "interpretation" of the 14th Amend't is wrong. Why do you think they were put there?.
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There are things a leader can do or threaten that show depraved indifference to the integrity of republican form of government. Not every abuse or constitutional violation qualifies, but threatening to use active duty troops against protestors certainly does.
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In many countries, registering to vote is compulsory. I don’t mean voting itself is compulsory— tho’ that’s true of a few countries like Australia. I mean the law requires all qualified electors to be on the electoral roll when they reach age 18. Why don’t we do that here?.
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@scottjshapiro I think my best was Dworkin ( my supervisor) saying when I turned up to discuss some long & tedious paper I’d sent him: “I’m sorry, Jeremy, I haven’t had a chance to read your paper yet. Can you come back in five minutes?”.
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NYTimes said phosphine—recently detected in atmosphere of Venus—is found in feces of badgers & penguins. Organisms producing it would have to live high in the Venusian atmosphere. So imagine flocks of flying badgers and penguins all over Venus. Science as I see & understand it.
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@alanigolanski You don’t. Just reading narrowly in what is thought of as the area of one’s specialized scholarship just ends up backing you into a corner. Read everything you can; feed your imagination; your thinking & writing will begin to enrich the field you want to concentrate on.
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Tom Nagel, one of the founding fathers of the NYU Law & Philosophy Colloquium, will be our guest on Thursday of this week at 4pm with a paper called “Moral Reality and Moral Progress.” It’s a huge honor to have him as our guest.
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@thehill What would Jesus think about 100 billion dollars worth of arms sales? What would Jesus think of a man being tortured to death? What would he think about a preacher who traded one off against the other?.
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Here’s a review I wrote of Kei Hiruta’s book on the antipathy between Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt. Or rather: his hatred of her; she didn’t seem to care much about him one way or the other.
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Nice Christmas picture of me with 2 grandchildren (on Carol's side): Ines (aged 2) and Artemio (6) outside our building on Riverside Drive.
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I visited Argentina’s Supreme Court of Justice today. Privileged to lead a seminar on “Judicial Review and Political Legitimacy.” How to reconcile opponents of an outcome to a decision by a court when one cannot persuade them that the decision was right. Great discussion.
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@elsenorrocket No; the controversy in the US (to which I’ve contributed) is mainly over strong judicial review of legislation, not judicial review of executive action. I have no objection to judicial review of the lawfulness of executive action and that’s what’s involved here.
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So here’s the new book. Tami Meisels in favor of targeted killing as counterterrorist strategy; me against. All seems a little irrelevant right now, but it’s an issue that’s not going away and it will be with us even when the current turmoil subsided. And it needs to be debated.
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Our “Property Theory” seminar today addresses homelessness. I reread the “Afterword”—A Logic Like Hell’s: Being Homeless in Los Angeles—that Mike Davis agreed to write when my homelessness article came out in 1991. So grateful to him. “City of Quartz” one of the best books ever.
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Happy New Year, everybody. Every new year, every new day, is another occasion for hope.
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@espinsegall @CJSprigman So we must stop the love affair with the Suprem Court right now. If our students still fetishize it, remind them that it never lifted a finger against slavery. We need to imagine the Court’s non-existence or irrelevance, and figure out a powerful legislative politics accordingly.
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NYU’s Law & Philosophy Colloquium reconvened this afternoon in three dimensions for the first time since 2019. Not the greatest photo, but (all masked) Liam Murphy, presenter Kim Ferzan, and Sam Scheffler discussing Kim’s paper on “Time Off for Time Served.” Good discussion.
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My man.
Biden: "Folks, dignity. Immanuel Kant the philosopher said, dignity. the definition of dignity is that people should never be treated as a means to an end, but an end in themselves"
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Jack Balkin’s new book “What Obergefell v Hodges should have said” is finally out. Proud to be on the panel. I was a dissenter: such a change in nature of marriage -beneficial as it was - should have been made legislatively, as it was all over the world, by reps. of the people.
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Wonderful (step)grand-daughter Olive. One year old. She can’t walk yet, but boy she can dance!
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Terribly sad news that David Lieberman, emeritus of UC Berkeley Law’s JSP program died yesterday in a hiking accident in Lassen National Park in Northern California. One of the nicest people you would ever know. Wise too—a man of good in peace, David.
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Yesterday I presented a paper at NYU Summer Workshop called “Denouncing Dobbs and opposing Judicial Review.” It discusses the consistency of categorizing legislation as unconstitutional in a way that doesn’t depend on what courts say. The draft is at
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Quite right too. And who are the marks—the 25%—that the justices are still conning?.
GALLUP: Confidence in U.S. Supreme Court Sinks to Historic Low. “25% of Americans have confidence in Supreme Court, down from 36% in 2021”
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And now we see how much ACB cares and what she cares about. Not the Constitution; not the democratic process, which she might be called upon to protect. The correct answer here was a clear and forthright “Yes.”.
Justice Barrett refuses to answer whether a president should commit to the peaceful transfer of power. She says that because it's a current "political controversy" since Trump has not committed to doing so.
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Nice feeling when an essay you've forgotten about suddenly turns up, edited in preparation for publication. I presented "Desanctification of Law" in 2016 in Jerusalem. It's been languishing at but now soon to be published in Theoretical Inquiries in Law.
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A welcoming face at University College, Oxford when I arrived there as a student from Otago in late 1978. At that time, Univ. had one of the best bunches of philosophers in the world: Dworkin, Evans, Finnis, Mackie, McDowell, and H.L.A. Hart as a senior research fellow.
"There are no objective values" -died #OTD 12 Dec 1981, aged 64, author of 'Ethics: Inventing Right And Wrong', J. L. Mackie. Ency entry: Times obit: & Mackie's Arguments for The Moral Error Theory' (SEP):
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This is very moving.
Yesterday we buried a lovely woman. Due to #Covid19 there was no wake & our community couldn’t enter the church. But the entire parish came out & lined the 2km road to graveyard to say goodbye to Betty Ryan. Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine #WestKerry
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Yeah, yeah. Jurisprudence is like this too. I’ve seen positivists do worse.
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Congratulations Marcela. What a wonderful achievement!.
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Yesterday a panel at Columbia celebrating Seyla Benhabib's book, “Playing Chess with History: Exile, Migration & Statelessness from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin,” with me, Nadia Urbinati, Adam Tooze, & Bernard Harcourt. Fine opportunity to defend Arendt against Isaiah Berlin.
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One of the best panels I have attended. Bravo to all. Bravo to Wojciech.
Great discussion about my book at NYU; from the left Professors De Burca, Issacharoff, Sadurski, Weiler, Teitel and Rosenfeld; in the first row Jeremy Waldron on the left. In the opening, I mentioned the case of Judge Tuleya which encapsulates what is wrong with the rule of law.
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Nice panel this afternoon at Harvard on “Rawls, Religion, and Society” with Andrew March, Eric Gregory, Paul Weithman. I spoke about public reason and religious interventions in politics. Lots of controversy.
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Off to Chicago to talk about Locke and religious accounts of basic equality at Brian Leiter’s class on the Enlightenment. A nice chance to go back into the long Chapter 3 of “God, Locke, & Equality,” which gave me such trouble when drafting the Carlyle Lectures in 1999.
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An unfamiliar perspective on Manhattan from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum. We went up for a drink before dinner. In all my years in NYC, I don’t remember being up here before.
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Bergrruen Prize winner Martha Nussbaum will be our guest at NYU's Law & Philosophy Colloquium Thursday, November 15, 4pm. Her paper is about the application of the capabilities approach to non-human animals. Paper is available here:
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Colin McGinn’s analysis of hate speech laws is undermined by his lack of awareness that such statutes typically restrict speech that aims to stir up hatred, not speech that is expressive of hatred. If only philosophers would deign to read the legislation they’re criticizing.
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