Professor Mitchell Berman

IAS Fellow, January-March 2027

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Mitchell N. Berman is the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he serves as Co-Director of the Institute for Law & Philosophy and holds secondary appointments in the Department of Philosophy and the Wharton School's Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics. Before joining Penn in 2014, he taught for sixteen years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he held the Richard Dale Endowed Chair in Law and co-directed the Law and Philosophy Program. He has also held visiting appointments at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and University College London. He received his A.B. in Government from Harvard University and his J.D. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Michigan.

Professor Berman's scholarship spans American constitutional law and theory, general jurisprudence, criminal law theory, and the philosophy of sport. Among his principal intellectual contributions are organic pluralism, a theory of American constitutional interpretation; principled positivism, a theory of legal content; prospect retributivism, a theory of criminal punishment; and the jurisprudence of sport, an interdisciplinary field that examines sport through the concepts and methods of legal philosophy.

His publications include more than sixty articles and book chapters in leading law reviews, philosophy journals, and edited volumes. Among his best-known works are Constitutional Decision Rules (2004), Punishment and Justification (2008), Originalism Is Bunk (2009), Dworkin vs. Hart Revisited (2022), Blameworthiness, Desert, and Luck (2023), and How Practices Make Principles, and How Principles Make Rules (2024). He is also the co-author, with Richard D. Friedman, of The Jurisprudence of Sport: Sports and Games as Legal Systems (2021). His current book, To Say What the Law Is: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Nature of Law, is under contract with Yale University Press.

Professor Berman serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Legal Theory and sits on the editorial boards of several journals in legal philosophy, criminal law theory, and the philosophy of sport. His work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Ukrainian. He has presented invited lectures and conference papers at universities and scholarly meetings in North America, Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Asia. His scholarship and teaching have received multiple awards.

During his IAS Fellowship, Professor Berman will contribute to the Institute's Mercy and Justice project, working with Principal Investigators Professors Thom Brooks and Ioannis Ziogas and fellow Fellows Dr Zachary Herz and Professor Arzoo Osanloo.  He also plans to continue developing a project on the nature and structure of normative reasons and their connection to a positivist theory of legal content.