Legal Theory
Our Faculty
Many leading contemporary legal theorists call NYU home, and the Law School has embraced the interdisciplinary study of law as an organizing principle of the legal education it provides its students. Students taking classes with the many members of our permanent faculty, they will also find that some professors hold more than one appointment at the University, crossing from the Law School to the Graduate School of Arts and Science and beyond.
Faculty Director
Liam B. Murphy
Herbert Peterfreund Professor of Law and Philosophy
Liam Murphy, Herbert Peterfreund Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, works in legal, moral, and political philosophy and the application of these inquiries to law and legal theory.
Subjects of his publications range from abstract questions of moral philosophy (for example, Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory) to concrete issues of legal and economic policy (for example, The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice). A central theme of all Murphy's work is that legal, moral, and political theory cannot be pursued independently of each other; they are, in fact, different dimensions of a single subject. This theme is most prominent in "Institutions and the Demands of Justice," and his forthcoming new book, What Makes Law. Read more...