Jeremy Waldron b. 1953

Jeremy Waldron is a New Zealand-born British and American legal and political philosopher, University Professor at the New York University School of Law and emeritus Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. Law and Disagreement defended a strong democratic case against judicial review of legislation on rights, on the basis of his thesis that reasonable disagreement on rights is an enduring feature of any free society and so should be settled by the political institutions in which equal citizens disagree as equals. His later The Harm in Hate Speech, Dignity, Rank, and Rights, and One Another's Equals have extended his concerns to dignity, hate speech, and the philosophical foundations of basic equality.

Jeremy Waldron was born at Lower Hutt in New Zealand in October 1953. He took his bachelor of laws at the University of Otago in 1974, taught briefly there, and completed his bachelor of philosophy and doctor of philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1986 under Ronald Dworkin and Joseph Raz. He has held chairs at Edinburgh, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton, Columbia, and from 2006 New York University, where he is University Professor; from 2010 to 2014 he concurrently held the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford.

His books include The Right to Private Property (1988), Liberal Rights (1993), Law and Disagreement (1999), The Dignity of Legislation (1999), God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (2002), Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs (2010), The Harm in Hate Speech (2012), Dignity, Rank, and Rights (2012), Political Political Theory (2016), and One Another's Equals: The Basis of Human Equality (2017).

Waldron has defended the moral authority of legislation against fashionable judicial supremacism, argued that the basic equality of human beings requires a substantive grounding rather than a mere axiom, made the strongest contemporary case for legal regulation of hate speech as protection of dignity, and drawn out the surprisingly Christian foundations of Locke's egalitarianism. He is one of the most widely read and most institutionally influential legal philosophers of his generation.