Hello! Thanks to Warren and the rest of the Table for having me here–I’ll try not to disappoint!

Warren did a fantastic job introducing me, so I’ll just add a couple things…

First, I come to law through economics and philosophy, and I am fortunate to teach courses in both law-and-economics and legal philosophy. My main interests in law are punishment (retributivism in particular) and jurisprudence (especially Ronald Dworkin’s law-as-integrity). I have a new edited volume out (or nearly out) from Oxford titled Retributivism: Essays on Theory and Policy, which I will blog about here, as well as a monograph coming soon from Stanford, Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character, which plants the seeds for a Kantian-Dworkinian synthesis that I hope will be the topic of my next book. (More about that later too if you’re interested–I invoke it a bit in my chapter in the retributivism book also.)

Second, I blog several other places: Economics and Ethics (where I focus primarily on news and research in those areas, but also law and philosophy more broadly), The Comics Professor (where I talk about one of my passions, comic books, usually in terms of philosophy, as in my books like Batman and Philosophy), and Maybe It’s Just Me, But… (my blog at Psychology Today, where I go on about just about anything, including legal issues such as the insanity defense,  wrongful convictions, and most recently employment discrimination). I’m also on Twitter, where you can find updates about all of these things.

Finally, a look at my table. My latest book acquisition is David Luban’s Legal Ethics and Human Dignity, and on the “read soon” pile are:

• A few new Kant books (Lara Denis’s Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide, Sharon Byrd and Joachim Hruschka’s Kant’s Doctrine of Right: A Commentary, and one I’ve been excited about for a while, Lawrence Jost and Julian Wuerth’s Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics),
• Bennett W. Helm’s Love, Friendship, and the Self: Intimacy, Identification, and the Social Nature of Persons (given my interest in individualism and sociality, discussed in chapter 3 of Kantian Ethics and Economics and blog posts like this), and
• Ethan Leib’s Friend v. Friend: The Transformation of Friendship–and What the Law Has to Do with It, which I plan to blog about here and at Psychology Today.
• Plus a ton of comics I won’t bother you with (unless you ask).

And currently playing: Louis Armstrong, Louis in New York, preceded by The California Concerts.

Once more, thank you for having me here, and I look forward to hearing from you!

Its my pleasure to introduce Andrew Adler, who will be blogging at the Table. Andrew currently practices intellectual property law and general commercial litigation in New York, but more important for Table readers, has been actively involved in the [inter]discipline of Law and Literature Studies. An article that Andrew wrote that you might check out is Can Formalism Convey Justice?: Oaths, Deeds, and Other Legal Speech Acts in Four English Renaissance Plays, 72 St. Johns L. Rev. 237 (1998). Please join me in welcoming Andrew to the Table.

Please join me in welcoming to the Table Patrick O’Donnell. Patrick also contributes at Ratio Juris and Religious Left Law. Amongst the things we can look forward to are Patrick’s fond descriptions of Chinese and Japanese poetry, contemporary Vietnamese poetry, haiku, and classical Sufi poetry. WOW!

Patrick, Please have a seat at the table!