On May 15, 017, the Illinois Program in Law and Philosophy will co-host a Roundtable on the Influence of Larry Alexander at the Yale Law School. Organized by Illinois Professor Heidi M. Hurd, the Roundtable will feature presentations of chapters written by leading legal theorists for a volume edited by Professor Hurd and published by Cambridge University Press entitled Moral Puzzles and Legal Perplexities: Essays on the Influence of Larry Alexander. The event will feature introductory comments by three of America's law school deans—Illinois’ own Dean Vikram Amar, Yale Law School's Dean Robert Post, and the University of San Diego's Dean Stephen Ferruolo--and will be attended by globally prominent scholars in criminal law, constitutional law, jurisprudence, and moral philosophy.
Larry Alexander is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law, moral philosophy and jurisprudence. He is the author of more than 170 scholarly articles and 9 books on such topics as freedom of speech, the foundations of contract law, constitutional interpretation, legal authority, crime and culpability, and legal reasoning.
In her book proposal to Cambridge University Press, Professor Hurd described the significance of Alexander’s contributions to the legal academy as follows: "Larry Alexander is one of the most profound and influential legal scholars in the last half-century. His voluminous portfolio of work spans numerous areas of law and not only grapples with, but positively invents, illuminating puzzles of extraordinary interest, difficulty, and importance for those who work at the intersection of law and philosophy. The solutions to these puzzles proffered by Professor Alexander have served as invitations to other scholars to explore completely new areas of legal inquiry and previously undiscovered philosophical terrain. Anyone who now sets out to write in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law, jurisprudence, legal reasoning, or moral philosophy cannot help but engage with the tantalizing difficulties that Professor Alexander has identified and the beguiling and contrarian positions that he has staked out in these arenas. It is the signature of a great scholar that one cannot enter a field without being forced to engage his work in the course of doing one’s own, and by that measure, scholars within numerous disciplines and for numerous decades have had to shape their work to fit the contours of topics molded by Professor Alexander’s path-breaking contributions.”
As is evidenced by the extraordinarily distinguished group assembling at Yale in May to honor his scholarly legacy, Alexander is also, in Professor Hurd’s words, “beloved within the legal academy.” As Professor Hurd says: “It is hard to find anyone who works on topics within his broad areas of influence who does not feel beholden to Professor Alexander and who does not have tremendous respect for the energy that he brings not just to academic inquiry, but to the cultivation of others’ work and to the collaborative pursuit of knowledge.”
"It is a great honor and quite humbling to discover that one’s peers find one’s work worthy of their serious attention," said Alexander about the forthcoming celebration of his work.
For more information, please contact Professor Heidi Hurd.