Posted April 23, 2008
Constitutional Law Expert Frederick Schauer to Join Law School Faculty
Frederick Schauer, a leading expert on the First Amendment, constitutional law, and legal philosophy, will join the University of Virginia Law School faculty in August. Schauer has served as the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government since 1990, and was previously Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.
Schauer will join the Law School as a David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law, one of the most prestigious chairs in legal academia. The five Harrison Professorships are supported by an aggregate gift of more than $57 million.
“We are delighted to welcome Fred Schauer to the University of Virginia,” said Dean John C. Jeffries Jr. “He is an extraordinarily prolific scholar who combines wide-ranging interests with keen analytic discipline. He will make a wonderful addition to the Law School faculty.”
Schauer is the author of numerous books, including “The Law of Obscenity” (BNA, 1976); “Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry” (Cambridge, 1982); “Playing by the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life” (Clarendon/Oxford, 1991); and, most recently, “Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes” (Belknap/Harvard, 2003). He also co-edited “The Philosophy of Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings” (Oxford, 1996) and “The First Amendment: A Reader” (West, 1992, 1995), and is the author of more than 200 published articles on constitutional law and theory, freedom of speech and press, legal reasoning, and the philosophy of law. He is currently George Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford University and a fellow of Balliol College.
“The University of Virginia Law School is a distinguished institution whose fully engaged faculty and students make it an ideal place for totally committed learning and scholarship. It is a place where serious thought matters, and I look forward to learning from my colleagues and students just as they, I hope, are learning from me,” Schauer said. “And an added plus is that the University is so strong in those disciplines —especially philosophy, psychology, and politics — that have informed my work, and will continue to do so.”
Schauer is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been vice-president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, and was a founding co-editor of the journal Legal Theory. In 2004 he received a university-wide Distinguished Teacher Award from Harvard University, where he teaches courses in evidence and the First Amendment and supervises graduate students in jurisprudence and comparative constitutional law at Harvard Law School. He also has served as academic dean and acting dean of the Kennedy School.
“Fred Schauer is a genuine superstar. He has written on a dizzying array of subjects, and his work is at the forefront of every field that he addresses,” said Law School Professor Caleb Nelson. “His book ‘Playing by the Rules’ remains the best thing ever written about the nature of rule-based decision-making, and his work is equally incisive and insightful on topics ranging from the First Amendment to interpretive theory, from precedent to the role of courts in our democracy.”
A graduate of Dartmouth College, the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, and Harvard Law School, Schauer has lectured and taught in Canada, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Great Britain, Russia, Hungary, Germany, Portugal, Ireland, Finland, Spain, Italy, Saudi Arabia, India, the Netherlands, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, and China, has advised on issues of legal and constitutional development in or for Estonia, Ethiopia, Mongolia, Belarus, South Africa, Vietnam, and the Faroe Islands.
Schauer has also been the John Ewald Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia (1996), Fischel-Neil Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, Morton Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Dartmouth College, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and Distinguished Visitor at the New York University School of Law.
This article is a first in a series on new faculty.
• REPORTED BY mary wood