Jedediah Purdy

Jedediah Spenser Purdy (born 29 November 1974 in Chloe, West Virginia) is an American legal scholar and cultural commentator. In 2022 he became the Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law, where he teaches courses on Property and Past and Future of Capitalist Democracy.^[2] From 2018 to 2022 he was William S. Beinecke Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, teaching courses on American Constitutional Law, Constitutional Law and Democracy and its Crisis.^[3][4] He previously taught at Duke University School of Law from 2004 to 2018.^[5]

Jedediah Purdy
Born	Jedediah Spenser Purdy (1974-11-29) November 29, 1974 (age 49)[1] Chloe, West Virginia, United States
Alma mater	Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College Yale Law School (Class of 2001)
Scientific career
Fields	Law
Institutions	Columbia University Duke University

Purdy is the author of two widely discussed books: For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (1999)^[6] and Being America: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in an American World (2003). He is also the author of Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening ― and Our Best Hope (2022), This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth (2019),^[7] After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015),^[8] The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community and the Legal Imagination (2010), and A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom (2009).^[9]

Early life and education

Purdy, the son of Wally and Deirdre Purdy,^[10] was homeschooled in West Virginia until age 13, high school. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior in 1996^[11] and became a Truman Scholar in 1997. He graduated from Yale Law School in its Class of 2001. From 2001 to 2002, he was a fellow at the New America Foundation,^[12] a think tank that has been described in the Washington Post as radical centrist in orientation.^[13]

Career

After law school, Purdy clerked for Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York in 2002–2003. From 2004 to 2019, Purdy was a professor of law at Duke University teaching constitutional, environmental, and property law.^[5]

He also served on the editorial advisory board of the Ethics & International Affairs.^{[citation needed]} Purdy joined the faculty of Columbia Law School in July 2019.^[3]

Works

• For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, Knopf (1999)
• Being America: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in an American World, Vintage (2003)^[14]
• A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom, Knopf (2009)
• The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community and the Legal Imagination, Yale University Press (2010)
• Purdy, Jedediah (March 25, 2014). "The Accidental Neoliberal". n+1. Brooklyn, NY: n+1 Foundation, Inc. Retrieved October 16, 2023.
• After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, Harvard University Press (2015)
• This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth,^[15][16] Princeton University Press (October 15, 2019) ISBN 978-0691195643

Notes

1. "Jedediah Purdy". Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors (Collection). Gale. 2016. ISBN 9780787639952. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
2. "Jedediah Purdy". Duke Law. Retrieved January 11, 2023.
3. "Columbia Law School Welcomes Five New Members to Its Faculty". Columbia Law School. Retrieved February 29, 2020.
4. "Jedediah S. Purdy". Columbia Law School.
5. "Jedediah S. Purdy". Columbia Law School. Retrieved February 29, 2020.
6. "For Common Things" (Knopf), has become one of the season's meatier cultural chew toys. Kahn, Joseph P. (19 October 1999) "Shooting at the hip; With the assurance of youth, Jed Purdy challenges a culture of 'terminal irony' in an age of cool" The Boston Globe page D-1
7. "Jedediah Purdy - Bibliography | Duke University School of Law". January 2022.
8. Purdy, Jedediah (2015). After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-36822-4.
9. Purdy, Jedediah (2010). A tolerable anarchy : rebels, reactionaries, and the making of American freedom. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-1-4000-9584-1.
10. Sella, Marshall (September 5, 1999). "Against Irony". The New York Times Magazine.
11. "Jedediah Purdy" (PDF). Duke University School of Law.
12. Halstead, Ted, ed. (2004). The Real State of the Union: From the Best Minds in America, Bold Solutions to the Problems Politicians Dare Not Address. Basic Books, pp. vii and xiii. ISBN 978-0-465-05052-9.
13. Morin, Richard; Deane, Claudia (10 December 2001). "Big Thinker. Ted Halstead’s New America Foundation Has It All: Money, Brains and Buzz". The Washington Post, "Style" section, p. 1.
14. Joy Press (2003-03-11). "Return of the Jedediah". Retrieved 2022-01-18.
15. Klinenberg, Eric (2020-04-23). "The Great Green Hope". The New York Review of Books.
16. Jedediah Purdy (November 26, 2019). "Jedediah Purdy on This Land is Our Land". Retrieved 2022-01-18.

External links

• Columbia Law School faculty profile
• Sella, Profile: "Against Irony", New York Times Magazine, 5 September 1999
• Liberal Empire: Assessing the Arguments by Jedediah Purdy, Ethics & International Affairs, Volume 17.2 Carnegie Council, September 16, 2003
• Washington Post profile, "A Super-Scholar, All Grown Up and Still Theorizing", April 10, 2006.
• Todd Pruzan, "Jedediah in Love", McSweeney's, 12 October 1999