Andrei Marmor
Maurice Jones, Jr. - Class of 1925 Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy
Director

B.A. & LL.B, University of Tel Aviv, D.Phil., University of Oxford.

Professor Marmor's research is in legal and moral philosophy. Prior to joining USC he taught jurisprudence at the University of Tel Aviv Faculty of Law. Professor Marmor was a long term visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School and he has also taught at the University of Virginia Law School, Cardozo Law School, and at University College, Oxford. Professor Marmor's publications include his books Interpretation and Legal Theory (1994) & Positive Law and Objective Values (2001), both published by Oxford, and articles on "Exclusive Legal Positivism", "Do We Have A Right to Common Goods?", "Equality and Minority Cultures", "Legal Conventionalism", "The Separation Thesis and the Limits of Interpretation", "On the Limits of Rights", "An Essay on The Objectivity of Law", "Authorities and Persons" and others.

Professor Marmor's Homepage

Scott Soames
Professor of Philosophy

A.B., Stanford University; Ph.D. Philosophy, M.I.T.

Professor Soames specializes in philosophy of language and the history of analytic philosophy. His research interests include truth, vagueness, reference, meaning, propositions and propositional attitudes, the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, the nature of linguistic theories of natural language, and more recently, philosophical issues in everyday life. His books include Reference and Description, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century,
Volumes 1 and 2, Beyond Rigidity, and Understanding Truth. Professor Soames has taught at Yale University and Princeton University.

Professor Soames's Homepage

Scott A. Altman
Vice Dean and Virginia S. and Fred H. Bice Professor of Law

B.A., University of Wisconsin; J.D., Harvard University. Clerked for The Honorable Dorothy Nelson, Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Dean Altman's scholarly interests are jurisprudence and family law. He has written articles on judicial candor, commodification, coercion, blackmail, threats to litigate child custody, and equality norms applied to child custody. His publications include "Should Child Custody Rules Be Fair?," "Divorcing Threats and Offers," "Child Custody & Justice," "Beyond Candor," and "A Patchwork Theory of Blackmail."

Marshall Cohen
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Law, University Professor Emeritus, Dean Emeritus of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

B.A., Dartmouth College; M.A., Harvard University; M.A., Oxford University.

Professor Cohen's scholarly interests are in moral and political philosophy, jurisprudence and the philosophy of art. Professor Cohen is founding editor of the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs and is vice chair of the board of directors of the American Council of Learned Societies.

Ronald R. Garet
Carolyn Craig Franklin Professor of Law and Religion

B.A., Harvard University; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Religious Studies, Yale University; J.D., University of Southern California.

Professor Garet studies the role of interpretation in law, theology, and literature and in the legal and moral rights of social groups. Prior to joining the USC faculty, he taught at Yale University in the Divinity School and in the religious studies and sociology departments. His recent scholarly work includes "Creation and Commitment: Lincoln, Thomas, and the Declaration of Independence;" "Dancing to Music: an Interpretation of Mutuality;" and "Gnostic Due Process." Professor Garet has served as the faculty advisor to the Public Interest Law Foundation.

Gregory C. Keating
Associate Dean and William T. Dalessi Professor of Law

B.A., Amherst College; M.A. Politics, Princeton University; J.D., Harvard University; Ph.D. Politics, Princeton University.

Professor Keating specializes in torts, professional responsibility and legal reasoning. Prior to joining the faculty, he practiced law in Massachusetts. His publications include  "Pressing Precaution Beyond the Point of Cost-Justification",  "Rawlsian Fairness and Regime Choice in Tort Theory" and "Reasonableness and Rationality in Negligence Theory." He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School and teaching fellow at Harvard and Princeton Universities. He has served as an officer of the Section on Jurisprudence of the American Association of Law Schools.

Edward J. McCaffery
Robert C. Packard Trustee Chair in Law and Professor of Law, Economics
and Political Science

B.A., Yale University; J.D., Harvard University; M.A. Economics, University of Southern California. Clerked for The Honorable Robert N. Wilentz, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of New Jersey.

Dean McCaffery specializes in tax and property law. His most recent book is Taxing Women ; his other writings include "Cognitive Theory and Tax," "Framing the Jury: Cognitive Perspectives on Pain and Suffering Awards" (with Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Spitzer), and "Slouching Towards Equality: Gender Discrimination, Market Efficiency, and Social Change."  Professor McCaffery has served as an official consultant to the Russian Federation to help design a comprehensive tax code.  Prior to joining the USC faculty, Dean McCaffery practiced law with a San Francisco law firm.

Michael H. Shapiro
Dorothy W. Nelson Professor of Law

B.A., M.A., University of California, Los Angeles; J.D., University of Chicago.

Professor Shapiro specializes in bioethics and constitutional law. His work in bioethics deals with the convergence of legal, ethical, and medical concerns in the context of new medical technologies. Among his publications are "Law, Culpability and the Neural Sciences," Bioethics and Law: Cases, Materials and Problems , and "Who Merits Merit? Some Problems in Distributive Justice Posed by the New Biology."

Christopher D. Stone
J. Thomas McCarthy Trustee Professor of Law

A.B., Harvard University; J.D., Yale University.

Professor Stone studies environmental issues, the regulation of corporations, and law and philosophy. His writings include Law, Language, and Ethics ; Should Trees Have Standing--Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects ; Where the Law Ends ; Earth and Other Ethics ; The Gnat is Older than Man: Global Environment and Human Agenda ; and a collection of his writings, Should Trees Have Standing? And Other Essays on Law, Morals, and the Environment . He has been a principal investigator for the U.S. Department of Energy in legal, institutional, and financial aspects of geothermal resource development, and counseled the U.S. Sentencing Commission on corporate crime. He has taught at Yale University and the University of Michigan.

Gideon D. Yaffe
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law

A. B. Harvard University; Ph.D. Philosophy, Stanford University.

Professor Yaffe's scholarly interests in the law concern the philosophical foundations of criminal responsibility. He also works on philosophical issues about free will, moral responsibility and the nature of action, as well as the history of 17th and 18th century philosophy. Among other topics, he has written on mens rea, coercion and indoctrination, and the nature of intention. His publications include "Conditional Intent and Mens Rea" (forthcoming), "Indoctrination, Coercion and Freedom of Will", "Recent Work on Addiction and Responsible Agency" and books on John Locke and Thomas Reid.