Brian Leiter

Brian Russell Leiter, born in 1963, is an American philosopher and legal scholar who holds the Karl N. Llewellyn chair in jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School, where he founded the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values. He earned a bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1984 and a law degree and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1995, then taught at the University of San Diego and the University of Texas before moving to Chicago. His work reinterprets American Legal Realism through philosophical naturalism, arguing that legal philosophy should be grounded in empirical study of how judges actually decide cases, a position he calls naturalized jurisprudence; a review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews called him one of the most influential legal philosophers of his time. He also created and edited the Philosophical Gourmet Report, a widely used and controversial ranking of English language philosophy doctoral programs, for twenty five years.