Paul W. Kahn

Paul W. Kahn (1952–) is the Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities at Yale Law School and the Director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights.

Kahn's work draws on a variety of philosophical sources, including Plato, Kant, and Husserl, to elaborate a reconstruction of the meaning inherent in the American constitutional tradition. His method, which he has described as a cultural study of law, has led him to reevaluate the usefulness of the language of political theology to describe the instances of sacrifice that lie at the center of the political compact and, in consequence, of the legal order. Similarities can be drawn between his work and that of other contemporary scholars such as Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben.

Professor Kahn teaches courses on constitutional law, human rights, and political theology.

Biography

Kahn received his B.A. degree from the University of Chicago in 1973, Ph.D. from Yale University in 1977, and J.D. from Yale Law School in 1980.

After graduation, he clerked for the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White from 1980 to 1982. He joined the faculty of Yale Law School in 1985.

Works

• Legitimacy and History: Self-Government in American Constitutional Theory, Yale University Press, 1993
• The Reign of Law: Marbury v. Madison and the Construction of America, Yale University Press, 1997
• The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship, University of Chicago Press, 1999
• Law and Love: The Trials of King Lear, Yale University Press 2000
• Putting Liberalism in its Place, Princeton University Press, 2005
• Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil, Princeton University Press, 2007
• Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty, University of Michigan Press, 2008
• Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty , Columbia University Press, 2011

External links

• Kahn's profile at Yale Law School
• Kahn on American Exceptionalism