Jedediah Purdy
Professor of Law
Jedediah Purdy graduated from Harvard College, summa cum laude, with an A.B. in Social Studies, and received his J.D. from Yale Law School. He teaches in environmental, property, and constitutional law. He writes about how law interacts with and embodies ideas about freedom, social order, and the human relationship with the natural world, and how these ideas arise and change.
Purdy clerked for the Honorable Pierre N. Leval of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City and has been a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, an ethics fellow at Harvard University, and a visiting professor at Yale Law School and Harvard Law School. He is a fellow at the New America Foundation, an affiliated scholar at the Center for American Progress, and a contributing editor at the American Prospect.
Purdy's scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, California Law Review, George Washington Law Review, and Fordham Law Review, among others. He is the author of For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (Knopf 1999), Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World (Knopf 2003) and many essays in publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Op-Ed Page and Book Review, The American Prospect, Democracy, and Die Zeit. His latest book A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom, appeared from Knopf in 2009. The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination, will appear in 2010 from Yale University Press.