Jedediah Purdy


Jedediah Spenser Purdy is a professor of law at Columbia Law School where he teaches courses on American Constitutional Law, Constitutional Law and Democracy and its Crisis. From 2004 to 2018 Purdy was a professor at Duke University teaching constitutional, environmental, and property law. Purdy is the author of two widely discussed books: For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today and Being America: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in an American World.
He is also the author of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community and the Legal Imagination , and A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom.
Purdy joined the faculty of Columbia Law School in July 2019.

Biography

Purdy, the son of Wally and Deirdre Purdy, was homeschooled in West Virginia until high school. He is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior in 1996 and graduated as a Truman Scholar in 1997. He also graduated from Yale Law School in its Class of 2001.
After law school, he clerked for Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York in 2002-2003. Purdy was a professor of law at Duke University from 2004 to 2019.
He also served on the editorial advisory board of the Ethics & International Affairs. He was a fellow at the New America Foundation, a think tank that has been described as radical centrist in orientation.

Works