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 Continental 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 and a general defense of what he calls "naturalized jurisprudence." 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). His best-known articles include "Determinacy, Objectivity, and Authority" (University of Pennsylvania Law Review) (co-authored with Jules Coleman), "Rethinking Legal Realism: Toward a Naturalized Jurisprudence" (Texas Law Review), "Nietzsche and the Morality Critics" (Ethics), "Legal Realism and Legal Positivism Reconsidered" (Ethics), "Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence" (Virginia Law Review) (co-authored with Ronald Allen), and "Beyond the Hart/Dworkin Debate: The Methodology Problem in Jurisprudence" (American Journal of Jurisprudence).

Outside his academic specialties, Leiter is perhaps best known for his widely read and frequently controversial rankings of law schools and graduate programs in Philosophy, as well as his blog, which includes both philosophy and forthright attacks on proponents of Intelligent Design, the Iraq War, and other right-wing causes.

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