Quain 2025: Back to Principles? Taking Riggs seriously - Lecture 1 of 3

Quain Lectures 2025 (Lecture 1 of 3)

Back to Principles? Lecture 1: Taking Riggs seriously

Speaker: Professors Jeremy Waldron, NYU Law

Convenors: Professors Jeff King and Kevin Toh, UCL Laws

Lecture 1:
In the 1889 case of Riggs v. Palmer, the New York State Court of Appeals cited “general fundamental maxims of the common law” to justify limiting the operation and effect of the statute of wills. A murderer was barred by the Court from inheriting the property of his victim—“No one shall be permitted to profit from his own wrongdoing” was the principle cited—even though the property was left to him by a valid and unrevoked will and even though the statutory law of homicide in New York had no provision for expropriation. Ronald Dworkin made this case the centerpiece of a new jurisprudence of principles that he began to develop in the late-1960s. It is worth revisiting Riggs v. Palmer to consider what principles are, where they come from, and whether Dworkin envisaged their being just made to order, to plug a gap or build a bridge in some legal argument that one wants to construct.

About the Lectures:

What are legal principles? Where do they come from? What is their role in legal argument? What challenges and difficulties do they pose for jurisprudence? A principle may be a norm—a discrete individual norm like a particular rule or standard. It may be a thread that holds several legal positions together, making sense of them as a “principled” whole. A legal principle may be a way of describing or characterizing an entire legal system. It may be the declaration of some grand moral position. Or it may embody a whole theory of government, as when we talk about the principle of the separation of powers.

Then, too: what guarantees that a self-styled principle is valid or authentic in relation to a given body of law? On what basis may we insist that our opponents must accept it? As lawyers and judges, can we just make up a principle for the purposes of legal argument, tailoring it to the results we want to reach? Or are our choices constrained in this regard? Isn’t there a first time—a first outing—for every new principle admitted to our law books.

This lecture series will consider difficulties and complexities of all these various kinds, showing that the bare idea of a legal principle offers much less to jurisprudence than some legal theorists have supposed. Still, it is worth exploring their domain in as much as they help constitute the environment in which other less question-begging forms of legal reasoning are developed.

Professor Jeremy Waldron's three lectures will be followed on Friday, 13 June by a seminar to discuss the lectures with the following commentators: David Enoch, the Professor of Philosophy of Law at University of Oxford. Mitchell Berman the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and Nina Varsava, Associate Professor of Law at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

About the Speaker:

Jeremy Waldron teaches legal and political philosophy at NYU School of Law. Until recently, he was also Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University (All Souls College). A prolific scholar, Waldron has written extensively on jurisprudence and political theory, including numerous books and articles on theories of rights, constitutionalism, the rule of law, democracy, property, torture, security, homelessness, and the philosophy of international law. His books include Dignity, Rank, and Rights (2012), Partly Laws Common to All Mankind: Foreign Law in American Courts (2012), The Harm of Hate Speech (2012), Torture, Terror, and Trade-offs: Philosophy for the White House (2010), Law and Disagreement (1999), and The Dignity of Legislation (1999). Waldron was born and educated in New Zealand, where he studied for degrees in philosophy and law at the University of Otago, and was admitted as a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of New Zealand in 1978. He studied at Oxford University for his doctorate in legal philosophy and taught there as a fellow of Lincoln College from 1980 to 1982.

He has since taught at the University of Edinburgh; the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton University; and Columbia Law School. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and a fellow of the British Academy since 2011, Waldron has given many prestigious academic lectures, such as the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in 2009, the Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School in 2009, the Hamlyn Law Lectures in England in 2011, and the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 2015

**Please note that tickets for each Quain 2025 event need to be booked separately**

Lecture 2: Non-normative principles - Wednesday 11 June, 1pm | Reserve your ticket here

Lecture 3: Grand principles of politics - Thursday 12 June, 6pm | Reserve your ticket here

Commentators' Seminar - Friday 13 June, 1pm | Reserve your ticket here