Lawrence B. Solum
John E. Cribbet Professor of Law and Philosophy
Co-Director, Institute for Law and Philosophy
Professor Lawrence Solum is the John E. Cribbet Professor of Law and Philosophy and co-director of the University of Illinois's Institute for Law and Philosophy. Professor Solum is an internationally recognized expert on legal theory, who works on the philosophy of law, civil procedure, constitutional theory, Internet governance, and a variety of other topics. He is the author of Legal Theory Blog – widely recognized as one of the most influential sources of commentary about the world of legal ideas. Solum's current research focuses on three areas: (1) procedural fairness, (2) the relationship between the philosophy of language and constitutional theory, and (3) the intersection between virtue ethics and the philosophy of law.
Professor Solum’s forthcoming work includes a book on Civil Procedure in the Oxford University Press series on American law, Originalism: For and Against, from Cornell University Press, 法理词典, the Mandarin translation of Solum’s Legal Theory Lexicon, and Originalism Semantico, the Spanish translation of his Semantic Originalism. He recently edited the first anthology on the relationship between virtue theory and the law, Virtue Jurisprudence, with Dr. Colin Farrelly.
Solum recently published a book chapter entitled "Models of Internet Governance" for an anthology (also published by Oxford), an essay entitled “District of Columbia v. Heller” in the Northwestern University Law Review. His recent papers have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Metaphilosophy, the Virginia Law Review, and the Washington University Law Review.
In 2010, Solum will deliver the annual McGlinchy Lecture at Tulane University’s School of Law: his topic will be Can Living Constitutionalism Be Reconciled with Originalism? At the 2009 annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, the program of the Section on Constitutional Law focused on Solum’s “The Interpretation-Construction Distinction.” In January 2010, Solum spoke to the International Law Congress in Ankara, Turkey; his lecture was called, “Remarks on Ideology and Character in Judicial Selection and the Rule of Law.” While in his was in Ankara, Solum also delivered a paper entitled, “Virtue Jurisprudence: An Aretaic Theory of Law,” to the law faculty at Ankara Üniversitesi.
Earlier in September, he delivered a paper entitled “Confucian Virtue Jurisprudence,” at the 24th World Congress, Internationale Vereinigung für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie in Beijing, China, and he delivered a series of lectures on “Aristotelian and Confucian Virtue Jurisprudence” at the National Institute for Advanced Study on Social Science at Fudan University in Shanghai, at Guanghua Law School, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, at Nanjing University Law School, and to the Beijing Society of Jurisprudence. Other recent conference and workshop presentations include appearances at Georgetown University, Harvard University, the Sorbonne, Stanford University, the Universidad Externado de Colombia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Virginia.
Prior to arriving at Illinois, Professor Solum was professor of law and the Herzog Endowed Scholar at the University of San Diego School of Law, where he also co-directed the Institute on Law and Philosophy. Solum has been a visiting professor at Georgetown University, the University of Southern California, and Boston University. He was nominated in 2004 as among the country's top 20 most influential and important legal thinkers by Legal Affairs Magazine. His contributions to Moore's Federal Practice have been cited by the United States Supreme Court and, among numerous others, by every Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. His book, Destruction of Evidence (with Jamie Gorelick and Stephen Marzen), has been cited by a wide array of federal and state courts. His working papers are among those most frequently downloaded from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN): Solum currently ranking 22nd among all legal academics and 2nd among residents of Champaign, Illinois (Professor Ribstein is 1st) for all-time SSRN downloads.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, Solum served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, he did a brief stint at Cravath, Swaine and Moore in New York, and then clerked for Judge William Norris of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Los Angeles prior to beginning his teaching career at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Solum adores music (from Vampire Weekend and Ali Farka Toure to Tord Gustavson and Gustav Mahler). He loves to cook with the incredible fresh local ingredients found at the farmers market in Urbana and is famous for Raspberries Three Ways. He is an avid photographer: his online galleries of photographs from around the world can be found on PBase. Solum's heroes include Aristotle, Hiroshi Sugimoto, John Rawls, Alice Waters, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. His office is hard to find, but don’t give up!
