Joseph Raz

By Sara L. Austin, EdD

Joseph Raz is Columbia Law School’s Thomas M. Macioce Professor of Law Emeritus and a leading expert in moral, legal, and political philosophical thought. He earned a D. Phil from Oxford University and a Magister Juris from Hebrew University.

In 2018, Raz was awarded the Tang Prize in Rule of Law for his trailblazing work in legal philosophy. He is well known for his lectures, the most notable of which are the Minerva lecture on Human Rights, given at Tel Aviv University in 2006, as well as the Plenary Lecture at the World Congress of the International Association for the Philosophy or Law and Social Philosophy in Beijing in 2009. His most recent prestigious lecture was the Howison Lecture, delivered at UC Berkeley in 2018.

Raz has also been a part-time Research Professor at King’s College, London since 2011. He has previously held faculty positions at the University of Toronto, Princeton University, Australian National University, Yale Law School, University of Oxford, Complutensa University in Madrid, and Balliol College. A fellow of the British Academy since 1987, Raz has been the recipient of honorary doctorates from schools such as Katholieke Universieteit of Brussels, King’s College, London, and The Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Academic Website

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Major published works by Joseph Raz:

• Practical Reason and Norms
• Between Authority and Interpretation: On the Theory of Law and Practical Reason
• The Morality of Freedom