NYU Law has long had a very distinguished program in legal, moral, and political philosophy that has greatly influenced the way law schools across the country teach this complex interdisciplinary field of study. The intellectual values and programmatic innovations of its founding figures, the great philosophers Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Nagel, are evident throughout the curriculum and in the work of the Center for Law and Philosophy.
Anthony Appiah, Sophia Moreau, Liam Murphy, Samuel Scheffler, and Jeremy Waldron, are now the public faces of this program. They are complemented by a faculty with a wide range of specialties. Among the other full-time faculty with strong philosophical expertise are Mark Geistfeld, David Golove, Moshe Halbertal, Stephen Holmes, Robert Howse, Lewis Kornhauser, Mattias Kumm, David Richards, and Katrina Wyman. The Law School has also hosted a number of distinguished legal philosophers as part of its Hauser Global Law School Program, including, in recent years, David Dyzenhaus, Wojciech Sadurski, and Kristin Rundle.
NYU Law’s curriculum offers a selection of legal philosophy courses that presents more choice and opportunity than other top law schools. Students can choose from a three-tiered structure of courses, seminars, and colloquia. The first tier consists of a series of introductory lecture courses about jurisprudence or legal philosophy, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. The second tier involves more specialized courses and seminars, such as The Rule of Law, Theories of Discrimination Law, Private Law Theory, Modern Legal Philosophy: The Books,and Human Dignity, among many others. Co-taught seminars are quite common. For example, in the spring of 2026 Moreau and Murphy will teach a new seminar on the philosophy of free speech and academic freedom.
The third tier is the Colloquium in Legal, Political, and Social Philosophy, offered every fall. This is both a course that students take for credit and the main regular public academic event of the program in Law and Philosophy at NYU. The Colloquium brings in distinguished speakers who present papers in moral, political, and legal theory, and are then are subjected to challenges and questioning from faculty and students. Guests regularly include the most prominent and innovative moral, political and legal philosophers of the day; a special effort is to maintain diversity across a number of dimensions, including subject matter. The Colloquium attracts, in addition to students taking it for credit, faculty from the law school, faculty from other schools and departments at NYU, and faculty from other law schools and philosophy departments in the New York area.
The law and philosophy program is also distinctive for maintaining very close ties with NYU’s Department of Philosophy. Graduate courses in the Department of Philosophy are frequently cross-listed at the Law School (Moral Obligations Under Conditions of Injustice being a recent example) and LLM and JD students (with permission of the instructor and the vice dean of the law school) can take Philosophy courses for credit even when not cross-listed. Many members of the Philosophy faculty, such as Juliana Bidadanure (who is an interdisciplinary affiliate of the Law School), Sandford Diehl, Miranda Fricker, and Sharon Street are frequent attendees at the Colloquium, as are the political theorists Melissa Schwartzberg (also an interdisciplinary affiliate of the Law School) and Ryan Pevnick from the Department of Politics. The Law School offers a JD/MA or PhD in Philosophy jointly with NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science.
Core Faculty