Biography

Professor Oberdiek teaches courses and seminars on torts and tort theory, administrative law and its theoretical foundations, and legal and political philosophy.  He is a graduate of Middlebury College, and pursued graduate study in philosophy and law at Oxford, NYU, from which he holds an MA, and the University of Pennsylvania, which granted him his JD and PhD through its joint-degree fellowship program. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2004, he practiced law at the Washington, D.C. firm of Arnold & Porter.

In recent years, Professor Oberdiek has presented his work at the Analytic Legal Philosophy Conference, held at Yale Law School, the University of Toronto Legal Theory Workshop, the Society for Ethical Theory and Political Philosophy at Northwestern, the UCLA Legal Theory Workshop, the NIH's Department of Bioethics, Harvard Law School, and the University of Pennsylvania's Colloquium in Law and Philosophy.  He has also chaired the AALS's sections on jurisprudence and scholarship. In 2005-06, he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow in the University Center for Human Values and a Fellow in the Program in Ethics and Public Affairs, both at Princeton.  

In addition, Professor Oberdiek is Director of Faculty Research at the law school, Associate Graduate Faculty in the Philosophy Department at Rutgers­–New Brunswick, and a Director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy, under whose auspices he has organized several public conferences. He is also Associate Editor of the journal Law and Philosophy.

Publications

Books:
Arguing About Law
(Routledge, 2009) (co-edited with Aileen Kavanagh)
A 600-page anthology of leading articles in philosophy of law and jurisprudence with significant editorial content.

Articles:

"Method and Morality in the New Private Law of Torts," 125 Harvard Law Review Forum __ (forthcoming 2012) (solicited)

"Forward: Sen's Idea of Justice," 42 Rutgers Law Journal ___ (forthcoming 2012) (symposium)

"The Moral Significance of Risking," 17 Legal Theory ___ (forthcoming 2012)

"Philosophy of Law: Normative Foundations," in Duncan Pritchard (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy (Oxford, forthcoming 2012).

"Specifying Constitutional Rights", 27 Constitutional Commentary 231 (2010) 

"Risk," in Dennis Patterson (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Second Edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)

"Towards a Right Against Risking," 28 Law and Philosophy 367 (2009)

"Philosophical Issues in Tort Law," 3 Philosophy Compass 734 (2008) (solicited)

"What's Wrong with Infringements (Insofar as Infringements are Not Wrong): A Reply," 27 Law and Philosophy 293 (2008)

"Specifying Rights Out of Necessity," 28 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 127 (2008)

"Culpability and the Definition of Deontological Constraints" 27 Law and Philosophy 105 (2008).

"Moral Evaluation and Conceptual Analysis in Jurisprudential Methodology," in Michael Freeman and Ross Harrison (eds.), Current Legal Issues: Law and Philosophy (Oxford, 2007) (with Dennis Patterson).

Review of Law and Risk, edited by the Law Commission of Canada, 44 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 590 (2006) (solicited).

"The Ethics in Risk Regulation: Towards a Contractualist Re-Orientation," 36 Rutgers Law Journal 199 (2004) (symposium).

"Lost in Moral Space: On the Infringing/Violating Distinction and its Place in the Theory of Rights," 23 Law and Philosophy 325 (2004).

"Reasons, Motivation, and Sexism: A Comment on John Robertson's 'Preconception Sex Selection'", 1 American Journal of Bioethics 38 (2001).

Work-in-Progress:
Imposing Risk: A Normative Framework (monograph under contract with Oxford University Press, for inclusion in new Oxford Library of Legal Philosophy series edited by Timothy Endicott, John Gardner, and Leslie Green)

"Perfecting Distributive Justice" (under review)