People

Joshua Cohen (cross-appointed in Philosophy and Political Science) is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley, where he spends one day a week and co-hosts the Kadish Center Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory. Cohen specializes in political philosophy, especially issues concerning democratic theory, free speech, religious freedom, and global justice. Before affiliating with Berkeley, Cohen taught for many years at MIT and then Stanford University, where he also joined the faculty of Apple University (where he remains on staff). He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University.

David Singh Grewal is a Professor in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the Law School and has a below-the-line appointment in the Political Science department. His teaching and research interests include legal and political theory, including constitutional theory; intellectual history, particularly the history of economic thought; global economic governance and international trade law. His first book, Network Power, offered a social theory of globalization. He is finishing his second book, The Invention of the Economy, an intellectual history of economics.

Kinch Hoekstra specializes in the history of ancient, Renaissance, and early modern moral, legal and political thought, with a particular focus on Thucydides and Thomas Hobbes, and additional expertise in the history of constitutionalism. Author of many articles in the history of political thought, his monograph on Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes and the Creation of Order is forthcoming from Oxford. Hoekstra has a D.Phil. (Philosophy) from Oxford University, and is also on the faculty of Political Science, and has a below-the-line appointment in Philosophy.

Christopher Kutz specializes in moral, legal, and political philosophy, including the moral foundations of the criminal law and international law. His most recent book, On War and Democracy (Princeton 2016), considers the law of war through the lens of democratic theory. He is currently working on, among other topics, the ethics of climate change politics and the value of life. Kutz has a J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. (Philosophy) from UC Berkeley. He has below-the-line appointments in the Philosophy and Political Science Departments.

David Lieberman is a historian of social theory and political thought, from the 18th century on, with a particular interest in the history of criminal justice thought. His most recent work as focused on Jeremy Bentham and William Blackstone. Lieberman has a D.Phil. (History) from Cambridge University, and has a below-the-line appointment in History.

Sarah Song works in political philosophy and democratic theory as well as feminist theory. Her recent work has focused on issues of immigration and the boundaries of citizenship and democracy. She is the author of Immigration and Democracy (Oxford 2018) and Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism (Cambridge 2007). She has an M.Phil (Politics) from Oxford and PhD (Political Science) from Yale University. She holds below-the-line appointments in Political Science and Philosophy.

Kathryn Abrams works now on topics including law and the emotions and feminist jurisprudence. Her most recent work explores social mobilization, and the use of emotions, in debates around immigration. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.

Meir Dan-Cohen works in moral, political and legal philosophy, with special attention to issues of dignity and autonomy in criminal law, and of individual and collective perspectives on morality. His most recent book is Normative Subjects: Self and Collectivity in Morality and Law (Princeton, 2016). Dan-Cohen has a JSD from Yale Law School and has done graduate work in Philosophy, where he has a below-the-line appointment.

Jonathan Gould works on topics in public law, legislation, and democratic theory. His recent scholarship focuses on legislative procedure and legislative representation. He received his J.D., A.M., and A.B. from Harvard, where he is also completing a Ph.D. in Government.

Eric Rakowski specializes in tax law in particular, and distributive justice more broadly, with additional interests in bioethics and moral philosophy. His book Equal Justice (Oxford, 1991) was a major statement of “luck egalitarian” views. Rakowski holds a D.Phil. from Oxford University.

Niko Kolodny specializes in moral and political philosophy. He has done much works on rationality, and more recently on the foundations of democratic thought, including its institutional manifestation in voting practices. Kolodny taught at Harvard University before joining the UC Berkeley Philosophy Department, where he received his Ph.D.

Véronique Munoz-Dardé, who is also Professor of Philosophy at University College, London, is in residence at Berkeley every fall semester. Her main interests lie in moral and political philosophy. In recent years she has written articles on the importance of numbers in practical reasoning, on the political ideal of equality, on responsibility, and on distributive justice. Her current work focusses on connections between the political and the personal, and is provisionally titled Bound Together. She has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the European University Institute.

Jay Wallace works mainly in moral philosophy, but he also has deep interests in political and legal philosophy. His research has focused on responsibility, moral psychology, normative ethics, and the theory of practical reason. His latest book, The Moral Nexus (Princeton, 2019), is a study of the relational structure of moral thought. Wallace has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University, and has taught at Wesleyan, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Mark Bevir studies ethics, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. His work on public policy focuses on organization theory, democratic theory, and governance. His methodological interests cover philosophy of social science, history of social science, and interpretive theory. His most recent book is A Theory of Governance (University of California Press, 2013). He holds a D.Phil. from Oxford in Politics.

Wendy Brown studies the history of political theory, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, critical theory and theories of contemporary capitalism. Her most recent book explores the roots and significance of neoliberalism in contemporary thought, in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2017). She has a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, and was a member of the faculty at Williams College and UC Santa Cruz.

Daniela Cammack studies the history of political thought, with special interests in ancient Greek and Roman political ideas and practices, political economy (including Marx), and the history of democracy. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in Political Theory, Polis, History of Political Thought, Classical Quarterly, Classical Philology, and the Journal of Political Philosophy. She has degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard, and is working on a book on ancient Greek democracy.

Desmond Jagmohan specializes in the history of American and African American political thought, American intellectual history, and the history of political thought. At present, his research concerns political and moral agency under conditions of extreme oppression. He is completing his first book, Dark Virtues: Booker T. Washington’s Tragic Realism (under contract with Princeton University Press), which draws on several years of archival research to recover Washington as a virtue theorist of the oppressed. His second book project reads Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative as a work of moral and political theory.

Daniel Lee specializes in the history of political and legal thought in the ancient (Roman) and early modern periods. His most recent book is Popular Sovereignty in Early Modern Constitutional Thought (Oxford, 2016), and he has a forthcoming book, also with Oxford, on the legal theory of Jean Bodin, The Rights of Sovereignty. Lee holds a PhD from Princeton University (Politics).

David Bates works on two tracks: one on the history of legal and political ideas, and the other on the relationship between technology, science, and the history of human cognition. He is working now on a book on the history and idea of intelligence, natural and artificial, with particular applications to cybernetic warfare. Bates has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago.

Phenh Cheah studies 18th-century Continental political thought, with an emphasis on post-colonial theory. He is completing a book entitled The Politics and Rights of Life: Toward a Biopolitical Theory of Human Rights and a collection of essays on the changing character of power in contemporary globalization and the role of culture and comparison in these transformations with special reference to postcolonial Asia. He has a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University.

Marianne Constable studies legal rhetoric, philosophy and legal history. Her most recent book, "Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts," (Stanford University Press, 2014), focused on the performative character of law, how subjects and facts are brought into being through legal speech. Her forthcoming work studies the exoneration of woman murderers in Chicago, through an “unwritten law.” She holds a Ph.D. in Jurisprudence & Social Policy from UC Berkeley.

Samera Esmeir works at the intersection of legal and political thought, Middle Eastern history and colonial and post-colonial studies. My central intellectual focus thus far has been to examine how late-modern colonialism, with a particular focus on the Middle East, has introduced liberal juridical logics and grammars that in turn shaped modalities of political praxis, and how those have persisted in the post-colonial era and have traveled in different countries in the Middle East.  Her current work looks at the links between legal thought and revolution. She holds a Ph.D. in Law and Society from NYU.