Jeremy Waldron to receive American Philosophical Society's Phillips Prize

University Professor Jeremy Waldron has been selected to receive the American Philosophical Society’s Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence for 2011. Recognizing outstanding lifetime contributions to the field of jurisprudence, including a body of important publications, the Phillips Prize has previously been awarded to legal scholars including Ronald Dworkin, Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law, and Cass Sunstein, the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Waldron will receive the honor on April 29 at the APS’s spring meeting in Philadelphia.

A prolific scholar, Waldron most recently published Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs: Philosophy for the White House, a collection of his writings on the moral, political, and legal issues involved in the post-9/11 response to terrorism. The book covers the morality and legality of torture, the balancing of security and liberty, and the relationship between public safety and individual rights. Waldron has also delivered 23 major named lectures throughout the world, the most recent being the Edward J. Shoen Leading Scholars Lecture hosted by Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in October 2010. At that event, Waldron examined the idea of rights as responsibilities and the resulting implications for the concept of human dignity.

The APS, an elite scholarly organization with just over 1,000 members, was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743. Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington were all members of what is the oldest learned society in the U.S. The society’s current ranks include Dworkin, University Professor Jerome Bruner, and University Professor Thomas Nagel as well as Judith Kaye ’62, retired chief judge of the State of New York, and Judith Resnik ’75, Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

Posted on December 21, 2010