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David Luban
Bacon-Kilkenny Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law

Fordham University School of Law
140 West 62nd Street
New York, NY 10023

Experience

David Luban is University Professor and Professor of Law and Philosophy, and the Acting Director of the Center on National Security and the Law. Luban received his B.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University. He came to Georgetown in 1997 from the University of Maryland. Luban has been visiting professor and Distinguished Senior Fellow in Legal Ethics at Yale Law School, and Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor of Human Rights at Stanford Law School; he has also held visiting appointments at Dartmouth College, the University of Melbourne, and Harvard Law School. In spring 2011, he was a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Luban has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and won awards for his legal ethics scholarship from the New York State Bar and the American Bar Foundation.

In addition to legal ethics and philosophy, his recent scholarship concerns international criminal law, just war theory, human rights, and the US torture debate. Luban has published more than 150 articles; his books have been translated into Chinese and Japanese. They include Lawyers and Justice (1988), Legal Modernism (1993), Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (2007) and, most recently, International and Transnational Criminal Law (2010) (with Julie O'Sullivan and David P. Stewart). Luban has written for Slate.com, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times; he is a member of the group legal blog Balkinization. He is a frequent speaker at universities in the United States, and has lectured in a dozen other countries. Luban served on the DC Bar's legal ethics committee, and chaired the Professional Responsibility Section of the Association of American Law Schools, as well as the American Philosophical Association’s committee on law and philosophy.

Areas of Expertise

  • International Human Rights
  • Jurisprudence
  • Law and Other Disciplines (Philosophy)
  • Professional Responsibility

Education

  • Ph.D.: December, 1974, Yale University, Philosophy. Danforth Fellow; Woodrow Wilson Fellow
  • M.Phil.: December, 1973, Yale University, Philosophy
  • M.A.: December, 1973, Yale University, Philosophy
  • B.A.: June,1970, University of Chicago, Ideas and Methods, with concentration in mathematics. Honors at graduation; Phi Beta Kappa.