Prof. Jeremy Waldron

Jeremy J. Waldron, Maurice and Hilda Friedman Professor of Law, will deliver the spring University Lecture on Monday, April 24 in Low Rotunda. His topic will be "God, Locke and Equality: The Problem with Tolerating Atheists."

The 8:00 p.m. lecture, sponsored by the Offices of the President and Provost, is free and open to the public.

Waldron is the director of Columbia's Center for Law and Philosophy. He works in the area of overlap between jurisprudence, the theory of politics and moral and political philosophy. He is interested in liberal theories of rights, and his most recent books--The Dignity of Legislation (Cambridge, 1999) and Law and Disagreement (Oxford, 1999)--have addressed a number of difficult issues about law, constitutionalism, and judicial review that are raised by the existence of widespread disagreement about what rights we have and what they require.

Waldron is also interested in issues of economic and social justice, and the basis of our political ideals in a multicultural society.

This University Lecture is based on the Carlyle Lectures he delivered at Oxford last year. It explores the grounds of John Locke's commitment to basic equality, particularly his later work from 1680 to 1704. Locke's theory of natural rights remains enormously influential in modern political philosophy, and Waldron will ask whether Lockean equality can be separated from Locke's specific religious beliefs, and what we are to make of his denial of tolerance to atheists.

A native of New Zealand, Waldron holds a B.A. in philosophy and an LL.B. from the University of Otago, and a doctorate from the University of Oxford. Prior to coming to Columbia, he was Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics at Princeton. He has also taught at UC-Berkeley and Oxford, and regularly returns to New Zealand to teach at Otago and the University of Auckland. Waldron was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.