The Third Annual Cotterrell Lecture in Sociological Jurisprudence will be held on 16 March 2017, with reception to follow, and will be delivered by Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU), the renowned British born, Ghanaian–American philosopher and cultural theorist. The first lecture was delivered by Professor Brian Tamanaha in 2015 and the second was delivered by Professor Eve Darian-Smith in 2016.

This lecture is entitled: "Honor, Citizenship and the Law".

The Lecture will be chaired by Professor Phoebe Okowa (QMUL).  

About the speaker

Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. He specialises in moral and political philosophy and has also written several novels. He holds joint appointments in the Schools of Law and Philosophy at New York University to which he moved after more than a decade at Princeton where he had been the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy. Prior to this, he had been a professor at Harvard for more than a decade. He has published widely in African and African-American literary and cultural studies on race, identity, Afrocentricsm, history, colonialism and morality. His award-winning book In my Father’s House explored the role of African and African American intellectuals in shaping contemporary African cultural life. His many books have been translated into numerous languages including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish. Professor Appiah was named as one of the top 100 global thinkers by Foreign Policy and listed in the top 100 Global Thought Leaders Index by the The World Post. He has received honorary degrees from a wide range of universities. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995 and is now a member of the board of directors. In 2012, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama and in 2016 he received the Spinozalens Prize from the Spinoza Foundation, a biennial prize given to renowned scientists, philosophers and writers who have made their mark in researching society’s ethical principles. Professor Appiah gave the 2016 BBC Reith Lectures which explored the sources of confusion in four identities: Creed , Country, Colour, and Culture.

About the Lecture Series

The Cotterrell Lectures in Sociological Jurisprudence are named in honour of Professor Roger Cotterrell. ‘Sociological jurisprudence’ is understood broadly, as encompassing any theoretical aspect of socio-legal studies, any serious effort to relate jurisprudence and legal theory to changing social and historical conditions, or any topic linking law and social theory.