Quain 2025: Back to Principles?

Quain Lectures 2025: Back to Principles? 

Speaker: Professors Jeremy Waldron, NYU Law

Convenors: Professors Jeff King and Kevin Toh, UCL Laws

About the series:

What are legal principles? Where do they come from? What is their role in legal argument? What challenges and difficulties do they pose for jurisprudence? A principle may be a norm—a discrete individual norm like a particular rule or standard. It may be a thread that holds several legal positions together, making sense of them as a “principled” whole. A legal principle may be a way of describing or characterizing an entire legal system. It may be the declaration of some grand moral position. Or it may embody a whole theory of government, as when we talk about the principle of the separation of powers.  

Then, too: what guarantees that a self-styled principle is valid or authentic in relation to a given body of law? On what basis may we insist that our opponents must accept it?  As lawyers and judges, can we just make up a principle for the purposes of legal argument, tailoring it to the results we want to reach?  Or are our choices constrained in this regard? Isn’t there a first time—a first outing—for every new principle admitted to our law books.

This lecture series will consider difficulties and complexities of all these various kinds, showing that the bare idea of a legal principle offers much less to jurisprudence than some legal theorists have supposed. Still, it is worth exploring their domain in as much as they help constitute the environment in which other less question-begging forms of legal reasoning are developed.

Professor Jeremy Waldron’s three lectures will be followed on Friday, 13 June by a seminar to discuss the lectures with the following commentators: David Enoch, the Professor of Philosophy of Law at University of Oxford. Mitchell Berman the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and Nina Varsava, Associate Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Lecture 1: Taking Riggs seriously
In the 1889 case of Riggs v. Palmer, the New York State Court of Appeals cited “general fundamental maxims of the common law” to justify limiting the operation and effect of the statute of wills. A murderer was barred by the Court from inheriting the property of his victim—“No one shall be permitted to profit from his own wrongdoing” was the principle cited—even though the property was left to him by a valid and unrevoked will and even though the statutory law of homicide in New York had no provision for expropriation. Ronald Dworkin made this case the centerpiece of a new jurisprudence of principles that he began to develop in the late-1960s. It is worth revisiting Riggs v. Palmer to consider what principles are, where they come from, and whether Dworkin envisaged their being just made to order, to plug a gap or build a bridge in some legal argument that one wants to construct.

Lecture 2: Non-normative principles
Are we talking about normative provisions on a par with rules and standards?  Not necessarily. The phrase “legal principles” is sometimes used to identify the main characteristics of a given legal order, set out and listed by those who seek insight into what it values and the way it works.  For normative purposes, principles in this sense serve (at most) heuristic and mnemonic functions, reminding us as we make our arguments of the overall tone, tendency, and integrity of the legal order in which we are working. Principles in this sense are most helpful to professionals, and it has sometimes been suggested (e.g. by Henry Hart and Albert Sachs in The Legal Process) that that is true of principles generally: their utility to the layperson is “obviously minimal,” so that perhaps the layperson shouldn’t be trusted with them.  If so, then there might be alarming rule-of-law implications if principles are permitted to play too much of a role in determining the parameters of legal requirements. 

Lecture 3: Grand principles of politics 
What is the jurisprudential status of large-scale principles of politics like the principle of the separation of powers or the principle of the rule of law?  The jurist can’t just put them to one side as artifacts of political philosophy. Plainly they play a role in legal argument, particularly in constitutional law. (Think of the role accorded to the separation of powers in the recent US Supreme Court decision about presidential immunity in Trump v. United States (2024).) But it seems a different kind of role than that envisaged for legal principles in Riggs v. Palmer. Is this just a difference of scale? Can the grand principles of politics really settle anything? (No one ever accused the separation of powers of being clear or determinate.)  Perhaps the credibility of these principles depends on their chameleon-like capacity to adapt to the needs of almost any argument. Once again, we have to ask: can anything be a legal principle and do the work that legal principles are supposed to do? At this scale and for these purposes, can a grand principle of politics be formulated any way we like?

Programme of Events

• Lecture 1: Taking Riggs seriously - Monday 9 June, 6pm | Reserve your ticket here
• Lecture 2: Non-normative principles - Wednesday 11 June, 1pm | Reserve your ticket here
• Lecture 3: Grand principles of politics - Thursday 12 June, 6pm | Reserve your ticket here
• Commentators’ Seminar - Friday 13 June, 1pm | Reserve your ticket here

**Please note that tickets for each Quain 2025 event need to be booked seperately**

About the Speaker

Jeremy Waldron teaches legal and political philosophy at NYU School of Law. Until recently, he was also Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University (All Souls College). A prolific scholar, Waldron has written extensively on jurisprudence and political theory, including numerous books and articles on theories of rights, constitutionalism, the rule of law, democracy, property, torture, security, homelessness, and the philosophy of international law. His books include Dignity, Rank, and Rights (2012), Partly Laws Common to All Mankind: Foreign Law in American Courts (2012), The Harm of Hate Speech (2012), Torture, Terror, and Trade-offs: Philosophy for the White House (2010), Law and Disagreement (1999), and The Dignity of Legislation (1999). Waldron was born and educated in New Zealand, where he studied for degrees in philosophy and law at the University of Otago, and was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 1978. He studied at Oxford University for his doctorate in legal philosophy and taught there as a fellow of Lincoln College from 1980 to 1982.

He has since taught at the University of Edinburgh; the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton University; and Columbia Law School. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and a fellow of the British Academy since 2011, Waldron has given many prestigious academic lectures, such as the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in 2009, the Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School in 2009, the Hamlyn Law Lectures in England in 2011, and the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 2015

About the Commentators

David Enoch is the Professor of Philosophy of Law at University of Oxford, and a Professor of Philosophy and the Rodney Blackman Professor in the Philosophy of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  He works primarily in moral, political, and legal philosophy.  He studied law and philosophy at Tel Aviv University, clerked for Justice Beinisch at the Israeli Supreme Court, and then pursued a PhD in philosophy at New York University.  Since 2003 when he finished his Ph.D. studies, David has been a faculty member at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, on a joint appointment in philosophy and law.  In 2023, he started at Oxford as the Professor of the Philosophy of Law. 

Mitchell Berman is the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.  His work is in American constitutional law and theory, philosophy of criminal law, general jurisprudence, and philosophy of sport. Mitch studied government at Harvard College, then received an M.A. in political science and a J.D. at the University of Michigan.  He then clerked for Judge J. Dickson Phillips, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.  After working as an associate at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C. for a couple of years, Mitch was a long-time member of the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, before moving to the University of Pennsylvania in 2014.

Nina Varsava is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work focuses on adjudication, procedure, legal ethics, and jurisprudence. Nina has a B.A. (English) from the University of Alberta and an M.A. (English) from the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature and her J.D. from Yale Law School. Following law school, she served as a Judicial Clerk for the Colorado Supreme Court, and she has been a faculty member at the Wisconsin Law School since 2019.

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Lecture main image by William Cho, from Pixabay