You'll forgive me, I hope, this bit of navel-gazing...
But we were preparing our materials for next year on the Law & Philosophy Program here in lovely Austin--is there a nicer place to live in America? (well, OK maybe there are 1 or 2 places, if you can afford them)--and in reviewing our offerings, I began to wonder whether any law school in the United States had as rich a set of offerings in law and philosophy. This year, we have offered the following courses in the Law School:
The distinguished moral philosopher John Deigh, the editor of Ethics, taught a seminar on "Liberty."
The wonderful legal and political philosopher Leslie Green taught a seminar on "Legal Reasoning."
One of the world's most important and influential philosophers of science Larry Laudan taught a seminar on "The Epistemology of Proof in Law."
I taught, as I do every year, the 4-hour basic course in "Jurisprudence" (covering Llewellyn, Frank, Holmes, Hart, Raz, Finnis, Dworkin, Brink, Green, etc.).
The constitutional theorist Larry Sager and the philosopher of criminal law Mitchell Berman (of Punishment Theory fame!) ran the "Colloqium on Constitutional and Legal Theory," in which students scrutinized the work of and then interacted with a diverse range of scholars, including John Ferejohn, John Gardner, Frederick Schauer, and Seana Shiffrin, among others.
The feminist and legal theorist Jane Cohen taught a course on "Feminist Theory and Its Legal Applications."
The bioethics and constitutional scholar John Robertson taught a seminar on "Genetics and the Law."
The internationally known torts scholar and theorist Jane Stapleton taught a seminar on "Causation in the Law."
As my colleague Les Green says, there are three places with big concentrations of legal philosophers these days: Austin, New York, and Oxford. I will venture the depth and breadth of our course offerings bests them all (even Oxford, which, in terms of faculty quality, still dominates internationally).
OK, I'm done gazing...
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