Cardozo School of Law is renowned for its faculty scholarship at the intersection of law, philosophy, religion and the humanities.
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”)