Join us for the inaugural lecture of Columbia Law School's Natural Law Series, a collaboration between Columbia Law School and the SOF/Heyman.
Harvard legal theorist Lon L. Fuller once said of the term 'natural law' that it 'still has about it a rich, deep odor of the witches' caldron, and the mere mention of it suffices to unloose a torrent of emotions and fears.' He added that 'our aversion to the term should not be allowed to obscure the fact which the term has been used to describe.' This lecture will ask whether the revival of natural law today by another Harvard law professor, Adrian Vermeule, together with his counterparts in the UK, has such an odor and whether, if it has, Fullerian legal theory can embrace natural law without falling into the caldron.
Speaker
David Dyzenhaus is University Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the British Academy. He is the author of Hard Cases in Wicked Legal Systems: South African Law in the Perspective of Legal Philosophy; The Constitution of Law: Legality in a Time of Emergency; Legality and Legitimacy: Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Hermann Heller in Weimar; Judging the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation and the Apartheid Legal Order; The Long Arc of Legality: Hobbes, Kelsen, Hart; and The War Against Law: What's wrong with common good constitutionalism.