Jeremy Waldron

Jeremy Waldron, born 13 October 1953, is a New Zealand legal philosopher widely considered a leading figure in his field. He currently holds a University Professorship at New York University School of Law and is also part of the NYU Department of Philosophy. Previously, he served as the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University’s All Souls College. He additionally holds an adjunct professorship at Victoria University of Wellington.

Waldron attended Southland Boys' High School before studying at the University of Otago, where he earned a BA in 1974 and an LLB in 1978. He went on to complete a DPhil at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1986, studying under legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin and political theorist Alan Ryan.

His teaching career spans multiple institutions: he taught legal and political philosophy at Otago (1975–78), Lincoln College, Oxford (1980–82), the University of Edinburgh (1983–87), Berkeley Law’s Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (1986–96), Princeton University (1996–97), and Columbia Law School (1997–2006). He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell (1989–90), Otago (1991–92), and Columbia (1995). At NYU, he teaches courses on the Rule of Law, Jurisprudence, and seminars on Property and Human Dignity, and regularly hosts the Colloquium on Legal, Social and Political Philosophy, which was founded by Dworkin and Thomas Nagel and is now convened by Liam Murphy, Samuel Scheffler, and Waldron.

Waldron has delivered several notable lecture series: the Seeley Lectures at Cambridge (1996), the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford (1999), the University Lecture at Columbia Law School (2000), the Wesson Lectures at Stanford (2004), the Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School (2007), and the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh (2015). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Otago in 2005, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2015. In 2019, a Professorial Chair in Jurisprudence was created in his name at the University of Otago.

Politically, Waldron is a liberal and a normative legal positivist. He has written extensively on private property and the political and legal philosophy of John Locke. He opposes judicial review of legislation and torture, arguing both conflict with democratic principles. He also believes hate speech should not be protected under the First Amendment. Waldron has criticized analytic legal philosophy for ignoring questions addressed by political theory. His later work develops a non-religious, non-Kantian concept of human dignity, based on a thought experiment that elevates all people to a single high rank, like nobility or aristocracy. He has explored this since his 2009 Tanner Lectures, published in 2012 as *Dignity, Rank and Rights*.

Sandrine Baume identifies Waldron and Bruce Ackerman as leading critics of the idea that judicial review is compatible with democracy. Baume contrasts them with John Hart Ely and Ronald Dworkin, who defend that compatibility. Waldron, in his article “The Core of the Case against Judicial Review,” argues for a limited role for judicial review in robust democracies, asserting no inherent advantage for courts over legislatures in protecting rights when four conditions hold: a broadly democratic system with proper suffrage and process; courts somewhat insulated from popular pressure; a general commitment to rights; and disagreement about rights’ content and scope. He does not oppose judicial review entirely, allowing it as a remedy for institutional dysfunction, but sees such review as limited and not universal. He places his view in the tradition of Justice Harlan Fiske Stone.

In a review of a 2015 book by Cass Sunstein, Waldron expressed sympathy for “judicial minimalism,” citing judges like Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Felix Frankfurter as examples.

Waldron’s longtime partner is Columbia Law School professor Carol Sanger.

His published books include *Theories of Rights* (1984), *The Right to Private Property* (1988), *Nonsense Upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man* (1988), *The Law: Theory and Practice in British Politics* (1990), *Liberal Rights: Collected Papers 1981–91* (1993), *The Dignity of Legislation* (1999), *Law and Disagreement* (1999), and *God, Locke, and Equality* (2002).