This conference aims to explore the emerging connections between contemporary epistemology and the law. Epistemological questions are pervasive in the law, ranging from evaluating the epistemic requirements of evidence law to considering how beliefs about legal norms are generated and justified. Despite these clear connections, relatively little attention has been paid to how contemporary epistemology can affect the law. The aim of this conference is to provide a forum for the exploration of these connections in a series of presented papers.
This workshop is expected to highlight the importance of epistemology for understanding the concept of ‘knowing the law’. This central concept in jurisprudence and everyday legal practice (what it exactly means and how it relates to knowledge of other phenomena) has received little attention. Examining how knowledge about law is produced, how beliefs about law are produced and sustained by judges and lawyers, and what is the role of previous court decisions—does it play the role of evidence of law?; or, does it play a normative constraint for our beliefs?— will critically impact whether previous decisions are constraining current ones and under what conditions.
As such, a central aim of this workshop is to kindle philosophical debates with untapped practical legal relevance. The dissemination and discussion of the relevant research will help identify fruitful areas of further inquiry for both philosophers and legal theorists. The workshop focuses on a relatively underexplored topic, and it aims to bring together legal theorists with strong philosophical background and philosophers.
Speaker bios:
- Amalia Amaya (Edinburgh) joined the School of Law at Edinburgh University in 2019 with a British Academy Global Professorship Award. Professor Amaya completed a B.A. in Law at the University of Alicante and a B.A. in Linguistics at the University of Barcelone. She obtained an LLM and a PhD from the European University Institute and an LLM and a SJD from Harvard Law School. In 2007 she joined the Institute for Philosophical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she has a position as Research Professor. She has also held visiting appointments at the University of Texas at Austin, University College at Oxford University, and Queen Mary University of London. Professor Amaya works primarily in philosophy of law, with a particular focus on legal reasoning and epistemology, theories of justice, and international normative theory. Her prior work has aimed at analyzing the role of coherence in legal reasoning.
- Mark Greenberg (UCLA) is the Michael H. Schill Endowed Chair in Law and Professor of Philosophy. His areas of expertise include philosophy of law, philosophy of mind and psychology, ethics, and criminal law. He is co-director of the UCLA Law and Philosophy Program.After receiving his BA from Johns Hopkins University and his JD from Boalt Hall School of Law of the University of California, Greenberg served as law clerk to the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was subsequently a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University where he earned both his BPhil and DPhil in philosophy. In addition, he has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Stockholm, a research fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University, and a Harrington Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. His article, “How Facts Make Law” won the American Philosophical Association’s 2007 Berger Memorial Prize for work in philosophy of law published in 2004 and 2005, and his article, “The Meaning of Original Meaning” (co-authored with Harry Litman) was the runner-up for the 2001 Berger prize.
- Lewis Ross (LSE) is a philosophical and legal researcher, working in the
Department of Philosophy, Logic & Scientific Method at the London School of Economics. He is the Director of LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS). He has been at the LSE since 2019, and he is currently an Associate Professor there. He received my PhD from the University of St Andrews, working in the Arché Philosophical Research Centre. Most of his current work is about law and criminal justice. He is interested in fundamental topics in legal philosophy and applied questions about how we should administer justice in society today. He also has broader research interests in epistemology and political philosophy. And he sometimes tackles doctrinal legal scholarship – recently, he has been working on issues in mental capacity law. - Courtney Cox (Fordham) joined the Fordham faculty directly from Ropes & Gray LLP, where she represented clients in complex appeals and intellectual property disputes. Cox clerked for then-Chief Judge Sandra L. Lynch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Cox graduated with highest honors from the University of Chicago Law School, where she was a Rubenstein Scholar. She holds a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, where she studied as a Clarendon Scholar; and was a dual major in Engineering Sciences (Electrical) and Ethics, Politics, & Economics at Yale. She previously taught philosophy as a lecturer at Oxford’s Hertford College and served as a Yale Fox Fellow at Fudan University in Shanghai. Her article, ‘The Uncertain Judge’, published in the University of Chicago Law Review, was named 2024 Article of the Year by the AALS Jurisprudence Section.