Cardozo School of Law is renowned for its faculty scholarship at the intersection of law, philosophy, religion and the humanities.
Our Philosophy, Humanities and Religion Faculty
Professor Peter Goodrich
Professor Goodrich was the founding dean of the department of law, Birkbeck College, University of London, where he was also the Corporation of London Professor of Law. He has written extensively in legal history and theory, law and literature and semiotics and has authored 12 books. He is managing editor of Law and Literature, and was the founding editor of Law and Critique. His most recent book is "Legal Emblems and the Art of Law" (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He also co-wrote and co-produced the award-winning documentary "Auf Wiedersehen: 'Til We Meet Again" (Diskin Films, 2012).
Professor Michel Rosenfeld
Professor Rosenfeld is the University Professor of Law and Comparative Democracy, Justice Sydney L. Robins Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Program on Global and Comparative Constitutional Theory at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Professor Rosenfeld was an associate with both Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Rosenman, Colin, Freund, Lewis & Cohen.
Professor Martin Stone
Professor Stone joined the Cardozo faculty after 10 years at Duke University, where he held a joint appointment in the law school and the philosophy department and was an adjunct professor in the literature program. He has taught at Cornell University, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Michigan, The Committee on Social Thought at University of Chicago, and is currently an adjunct professor of philosophy at the New School University Graduate Faculty.
Professor Suzanne Last Stone
Professor Stone is University Professor of Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Professor of Law, and Director of the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. She has held the Gruss Visiting Chair in Talmudic Civil Law at both the Harvard and University of Pennsylvania Law Schools, and also has visited at Princeton, Columbia Law, Hebrew University Law, and Tel Aviv Law. She is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University Law School and was a Danforth Fellow in 1974 in Jewish History and Classical Religions at Yale University.
Professor Richard H. Weisberg
Professor Weisberg is the Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law. He was an Obama appointee to the Commission on the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad. Professor Weisberg has helped litigate successfully in American federal courts on behalf of Holocaust survivors and their heirs, providing a measure of justice for World War II victims of anti-Semitism. The founding director at Cardozo of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Program and the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy, he writes widely in those areas, including his book Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France and essays on First Amendment developments in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Professor Ekow Yankah
Professor Yankah hold degrees from the University of Michigan, Columbia Law School and Oxford University. His work focuses on questions of criminal theory and punishment and political theory and particularly, questions political obligation and its interaction with justifications of punishment. His work has appeared in law review articles and peer reviewed legal theory journals and books including NOMOS, Ratio Juris, Law and Philosophy, Criminal Law and Philosophy and the Illinois Law Review. He has been a visiting fellow at the Israeli Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS), a Visiting Professor of Law at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and a Distinguished Visiting Faculty Member at the University of Toronto School of Law.
Jacob Burns Center for Ethics in the Practice of Law
The Jacob Burns Center for Ethics in the Practice of Law sponsors courses, programs and events that provoke dialogue and critical thought on ethical and moral issues. The Center also helps prepare students to face, with integrity, the difficult and important questions that arise in all areas of legal practice.
The Center's events discuss these issues and others in depth in an engaging environment. We ultimately ask the question, "will you do the right thing when no one is looking?"
Program in Law and Humanities
The Program in Law and Humanities is designed to bring together, under one rubric, the scholarly and pedagogic strengths upon which Cardozo has built its faculty and reputation. The broad purpose of the program is to instigate, draw together, facilitate, sponsor and publicize work in Law and Humanities within the school and curriculum. Courses, conferences, scholarly symposia, public lectures, publications, a distinguished visitor seminar and joint events and classes with The New School's Department of Philosophy and the New York University Program in Poetics and Theory round out the program.
The Yeshiva University Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization
The Yeshiva University Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law brings together scholars of varied legal traditions and fields, creating a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogue that contributes a distinctively Jewish legal perspective on issues in law and culture. The CJL sponsors a wide range of academic activities, including an innovative curriculum in Jewish law and legal theory, workshops, colloquia and conferences, as well as programs designed to support students and emerging scholars.
Law and Literature
Professor Richard Weisberg is one of the world’s leading scholars of law and literature, seeing an intrinsic value in the use of literature as a means of discussing legal topics. Weisberg believes that literature should be valued for its ability to cause one to relate to others and for the political and social contexts that novels, particularly those dealing with the law, grapple with.
Weisberg uses literature as a way of critiquing social institutions and legal norms, using novels as tools for instructing law students, as well as furthering understanding of legal matters for scholars. He has written many articles and books on the law and literature movement, including The Failure of the Word, When Lawyers Write and Poethics: and Other Strategies of Law and Literature.
Law and Philosophy
The philosophical underpinnings of the law are taught at Cardozo on many levels. Professor Michel Rosenfeld, a world-renowned scholar in comparative law and in legal philosophy, and Professor Ekow Yanko bring philosophy into advanced and required classes including Constitutional Law and Criminal.
Professor Rosenfeld has been an editor of the University of California Press’ Series on Philosophy, Social Theory and the Rule of Law, as well as the Series on Discourses of Law published by Routledge. Rosenfeld is the author of several books, including Affirmative Action and Justice: A Philosophical and Constitutional Inquiry; Just Interpretations: Law Between Ethics and Politics , which was translated into French and Italian; Comparative Constitutionalism: Cases and Materials, (with Baer, Dorsen, Mancini and Sajo); The Identity of the Constitutional Subject: Selfhood, Citizenship, Culture, and Community; Law, Justice, Democracy and the Clash of Cultures: A Pluralist Account; and Democracies sous stress: les defis du terrorisme global (“Democraties under stress: the challenges of global terrorism”)