Harvard Initiative on Law and Philosophy

Featured Events and Programs

Frances Kamm (Harvard)
Symposium: "Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War"

Friday, May 4
Milstein West A/B
Wasserstein Hall
1585 Massachusetts Ave

Please join us on Friday, May 4 at the Center for Ethics for a special symposium featuring Frances Kamm's book Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War. A preliminary schedule and details can be found below. If you wish to attend, please RSVP via reply email by April 25 to Jennifer Campbell (jennifer@ethics.harvard.edu). We hope to see you there!

Schedule of events:

9.30: Coffee & light breakfast

9.45: Welcome, and Introduction by Frances Kamm

10.30 - 12.30: Session 1: On Torture
Presenters:
Caspar Hare, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Torture – Does Timing Matter?”
David Sussman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “Torture after the Fact: Does Ex Postness Matter?”

12.30-2.00: Lunch

2.00-4.00: Session 2: On Terror and War
Presenters:
Suzanne Uniacke, University of Hull: “Opportunistic (Im)Morality"
Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University: "Just Cause for War, Intention, and Proportionality"

4.00: Break

4.15-6.15: Session 3: On War
Presenters:
Thomas Hurka, University of Toronto, "Kamm on Intention and Permissibility"
John Goldberg and Gabriella Blum, Harvard University, "Intention, Morality and Law"

6.15-7:15: Reception for attendees in the Center

SUMMER SCHOOL ON LAW AND LOGIC

We are pleased to announce the Summer School on Law and Logic, to be held at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, from 16-20 July 2012. The Summer School is jointly hosted by the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and the Harvard Law School (Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.). It is also sponsored by the Cardozo Law School (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.), Cirsfid-University of Bologna (Italy), the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and the European Academy of Legal Theory.

The Summer School on Law and Logic is the first course ever to provide a comprehensive introduction to the wide variety of uses of logic in the law. Our aim at this Summer School is to provide law students, graduate law students, and legal professionals with a knowledge of the methods of formal logic and the ability to apply those methods to the analysis and critical evaluation of legal arguments and sources of law (including statutes, cases, regulations, constitutional provisions). It includes the basics of propositional and predicate deductive logic, as well as the use of logic for capturing representing deontic and Hohfeldian modalities, analogical reasoning and inference to the best explanation. It also addresses presents some aspects of non-deductive reasoning in law, such as defeasible reasoning, including argumentation schemes and inductive reasoning. We believe that the kind of background in formal logic we offer in this course can be a very powerful tool for use in legal theory, for developing doctrinal legal research, for working in legal informatics (the application of computer programs to the analysis of law), and, more generally, for the practice of law.

As of Wednesday, April 4, 2012, any interested law student, graduate law student, or legal professional can apply to the 2012 workshop at the following link:

http://lawandlogic2012.wordpress.com/05-application

Places are limited -- registration will be closed when places have been filled.

Professors: Scott Brewer, Henry Prakken, Nino Rotolo, Giovanni Sartor, Peter Tillers

For further information on the Summer School on Law and Logic, please visit: http://lawandlogic2012.wordpress.com, or contact Professor Scott Brewer, sbrewer@law.harvard.edu

About the Initiative: Law and Philosophy Across Harvard University

Working at the intersection of law and philosophy, Harvard University has been home, for more than a century, to some of the greatest theorists in the history of the American Academy. Among its many luminaries have been Ronald Dworkin, Charles Fried, Lon Fuller, H.L.A. Hart (as visitor), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frank Michelman, Robert Nozick, Roscoe Pound, John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Tim Scanlon, Amartya Sen, Cass Sunstein, and Laurence Tribe.  Although most of those mentioned were housed either in the Law School or the Philosophy Department, in more recent years the faculty doing first-rate work at the intersection of philosophy and law have been increasingly represented in other departments or schools at Harvard, including the Kennedy School of Government and the Departments of Government, Psychology, and Economics.

In the Spring of 2011, under the guidance of Martha Minow, Dean of the Law School, and Sean Kelly, Chairman of the Philosophy Department, a group of faculty from the Law School and the Philosophy Department met to discuss ways in which collaboration among those interested in law and philosophy topics could be enhanced. This Initiative was among the several resolutions that have been implemented as a result of feedback from that meeting. There is also information on the recently revamped Harvard University joint law degree-philosophy-Ph.D. program, and a link to the Harvard Philosophy Department site, itself a rich source of information that will often be relevant to the intersection of law and philosophy. 

Visitors to this site may find out about faculty and courses across Harvard University as well as lectures, conferences, symposia, and recent publications that address some aspect of law and philosophy. When available, links to recent publications will be included, as will be videos of events. 
 
Harvard University is today, as it long has been, a vibrant domain for the study of law and philosophy.  Welcome!