Jeremy Waldron

Career

He taught legal and political philosophy at Otago (1975–78), Lincoln College, Oxford (1980–82), the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (1983–87), the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Berkeley Law (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) Universities. At New York University, he teaches Rule of Law, Jurisprudence, seminars on Property and Human Dignity and regularly hosts the Colloquium on Legal, Social and Political Philosophy, founded by Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel in 1987 and convened by Liam Murphy, Samuel Scheffler, and Waldron.

Waldron gave the second series of Seeley Lectures at Cambridge University in 1996, the 1999 Carlyle Lectures at Oxford, the spring 2000 University Lecture at Columbia Law School, the Wesson Lectures at Stanford University in 2004, the Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School in 2007, and the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2015. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. In 2005, Waldron received an honorary doctorate from the University of Otago, his alma mater. Waldron 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.

Legal and philosophical views

Waldron is a liberal and a normative legal positivist. He has written extensively on the analysis and justification of private property and on the political and legal philosophy of John Locke. He is an opponent of judicial review of legislation, and of torture, both of which he believes to be in tension with democratic principles. He believes that hate speech should not be protected by the First Amendment. Waldron has also criticised analytic legal philosophy for its failure to engage with the questions addressed by political theory. His later work is devoted to providing a non-religious and non-Kantian concept of human dignity, based on a thought experiment of leveling up all human beings to the high rank of nobility or aristocracy, thus constituting a single rank or caste. He has been working on this topic since he gave the Tanner Lectures on the subject in 2009, published in 2012 as Dignity, Rank and Rights.

Criticism of judicial review

Sandrine Baume has identified Jeremy Waldron and Bruce Ackerman as leading critics of the "compatibility of judicial review with the very principles of democracy". Baume identified John Hart Ely alongside Dworkin as the foremost defenders of this principle in recent years, while the opposition to this principle of "compatibility" were identified as Bruce Ackerman and Waldron. In contrast to Waldron and Ackerman, Dworkin was a long-time advocate of a moral reading of the United States Constitution, whose lines of support he sees as strongly associated with enhanced versions of judicial review in the federal government. A staunch defender of the principle of democratic legislation, in an article titled "The Core of the Case against Judicial Review", Waldron argued for a limited role for judicial review in a robust democratic government. Waldron asserts that there is no inherent advantage to a judiciary's protection of rights than to a legislature's if (1) there is a broadly democratic political system with appropriate suffrage and process, (2) there is a system of courts somewhat insulated from popular pressure and engaged in judicial review, (3) there is a general commitment to rights, and (4) there is disagreement as to the content and extent of rights. Even so, Waldron does not argue against the existence of judicial review, which may be appropriate when there is institutional dysfunction. In this case, the defense of judicial review compatible with democracy is limited to remedies for that dysfunction and are neither unlimited nor universal. Waldron thus places his view of judicial review in the tradition of Justice Harlan Fiske Stone.

Affinity with judicial minimalism

In a review of a 2015 book by Cass Sunstein, Waldron stated that between the polarity represented by judges who can be "heroic" in the interpretation of their judgments and those who abstain, that his preference would be sympathetic to a position which could be described as "judicial minimalism". Waldron states his examples of such judges as including Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Ginsburg, and Felix Frankfurter.

Personal life

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