Brian Leiter

Brian Leiter is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been a professor at Texas since 1995. Currently, Leiter holds the Joseph D. Jamail Centennial Chair in Law. Notably, Leiter was the youngest chairholder in the history of the law school. He is also the Founder and Director of the Law & Philosophy Program at Texas. He has also been a visiting professor at Yale Law School, University of Chicago Law School, and University College London. He is editor of the journal Legal Theory and also editor of the Routledge Philosophers, a new series of introductions to major philosophers.

Leiter's prolific scholarly writings have been in two main areas: legal philosophy and post-Kantian German philosophy. Philosophical naturalism has been an abiding theme of his work in both contexts. In legal philosophy, he has offered an influential reinterpretation of the American Legal Realists as prescient philosophical naturalists. In his writing on German philosophy, he is best-known for defending a reading of Nietzsche as a philosophical naturalist, most notably in his book Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002).

His other publications include several dozen articles and three edited collections: The Future for Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), Nietzsche (Oxford Readings in Philosophy, 2001), and Objectivity in Law and Morals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Outside his academic specialties, Leiter is perhaps best known for the Leiter Report -- his widely read and frequently controversial rankings of law schools and graduate programs in Philosophy. Leiter is also a controversial figure in the blogosphere because of his forthright and critical attacks on proponents of Intelligent Design, the Iraq War, and other right-wing causes. His blogging style has been dubbed "the no bullshit" approach, which has won him both fans and detractors, usually lining up along political lines.

References

• Brian Leiter profile at the University of Texas Law School website
• On-Line Articles by Brian Leiter
• Leiter's blog -- The Leiter Reports
• Leiter's Law School Rankings
• Leiter's Ranking of Philosophy Departments
• Leiter on Naturalism in Legal Philosophy
• Leiter on Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy