Dissertation Title: What We Value About Others: Associative Obligation From the Perspective of Practical Reasoning
Doctoral Supervisors: Moshe Halbertal, Liam B. Murphy, Jeremy Waldron
Biography: Xi Zhang is a JSD Candidate at NYU School of Law. He obtained his LL.B. and Bachelor of Economics (double major) from Peking University in 2014. After working as a transactional lawyer in two international law firms based in Beijing and Shanghai respectively for nearly three years, he moved to the United States and transitioned into academia. He obtained his LL.M. in legal theory from NYU Law in 2018, and continued his affiliation with NYU Law as a Junior Research Scholar at U.S.-Asia Law Institute and Center of Civil Justice in AY 2018-19. He joined the JSD program in Fall 2019, and is currently finalizing his dissertation and preparing for defense. In Spring 2025, Xi is associated with the Surrey Centre for Law and Philosophy at University of Surrey School of Law as a PGR Visiting Fellow.
Research: Xi specializes in legal theory, and works in the intersection of legal, moral, and political philosophy with particular focuses on normativity and reason, theory of value, relational ethics as well as political obligation and authority. Besides, Xi’s research and teaching interests also cover topics of transnational legal and political theory, jurisprudential methodology, experimental jurisprudence, and law & emotion. In Xi’s doctoral dissertation, he deploys the idea of relational ethics to explore the topic of associative obligation along conceptual, metaethical, and political dimensions. In particular, he elaborates a valuing-based account of reasons of partiality from the perspective of practical reasoning, aiming to address the question of what we owe to our intimates and associates whom we are interrelated with through special relationships and group memberships in a partial fashion. Advancing from the personal realm to the political sphere, he further elaborates a valuing-based associative theory of political obligation, which constitutes an alternative account of associative obligation in the political community.
Besides research, Xi has been an instructor for three upper-level reading groups on various topics at NYU Law from Spring 2022 to Spring 2024. In addition, Xi has presented his academic works at NYU Law and elsewhere in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Turkey, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. In particular, Xi has also remained an active presence in the jurisprudential community in China, and initiated the Chinese Jurisprudential Discussion Group in Summer 2022. Xi’s paper “The Positional Nature of Valuing” has been published in Journal of Value Inquiry, an earlier version of which titled “Valuing, Valuable, and Reason” was awarded the winner of the Australasian Society of Legal Philosophy Essay Competition in 2021. Xi’s other works also appear in Legal and Political Philosophy Review and Yenching Legal Studies (both peer-review journals in Chinese).
Contact Information: xz2196@nyu.edu