Professor Oberdiek writes and teaches in 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.
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, among others. He has also chaired the AALS's sections on both 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 spring 2012, he was a visiting professor at the University of Graz, Austria.
In addition, Professor Oberdiek is Vice Dean of the law school, Associate Graduate Faculty in the Rutgers-New Brunswick Philosophy Department, and a Director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy, under whose auspices he has organized several public conferences. He is also Co-Editor of the journal Law and Philosophy and serves on the editorial board of Legal Theory.
Books:
Arguing About Law (Routledge, 2009) (co-edited with Aileen Kavanagh) (600-page anthology of leading articles in philosophy of law and jurisprudence with significant editorial content)
Articles:
"The Ideal of Justice," 4 Jurisprudence __ (forthcoming 2013) (symposium)
"Foreword: Sen's Idea of Justice," 43 Rutgers Law Journal 167 (2012) (symposium)
"The Moral Significance of Risking," 17 Legal Theory 339 (2012)
"Method and Morality in the New Private Law of Torts," 125 Harvard Law Review Forum 189 (2012) (symposium)
"Philosophy of Law: Normative Foundations," in Duncan Pritchard (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy (Oxford 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), reprinted in A. M. Viens and Michael J. Selgelid (eds.), Emergency Ethics: Volume 1 (Ashgate 2012)
"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)
Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts (editor of volume under contract with Oxford University Press, to include more than twenty newly commissioned articles on tort theory)
"Structure and Justification in Contractualist Tort Theory"
"Perfecting Distributive Justice" (under review)
