Louis E. Wolcher

Professor Wolcher joined the faculty of the University of Washington School of Law in 1986, after nine years of law practice with the firm of Pettit & Martin, in San Francisco, and three years of teaching at the Rutgers-Camden Law School, in New Jersey. His primary research interests lie in the fields of philosophy of law, legal and political theory, and human rights. Holding an undergraduate degree in history from Stanford University, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1973, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In 1973-1974 he served as a law clerk to Bernard Levinson, a justice on the Hawaii Supreme Court. During his teaching career Professor Wolcher has taught many different subjects, including contracts, torts, civil procedure, federal courts, antitrust, restitution, admiralty, human rights in philosophy and practice, critical perspectives on law, and philosophy of law. He has also taught classes on theories of justice to undergraduates enrolled in the University of Washington’s Honors Program. A member of the editorial board of Law & Critique (Kluwer Academic Publishers), an international journal of legal theory, he also serves on the advisory board of the Slovenian Law Review (University of Ljubljana). His honors include a Fulbright Award to study and teach in Slovenia, an invitation to lecture to the judges of the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg, France, and a philosophical prize in the 2000 International Essay Competition, co-sponsored by the city of Weimar and the European cultural magazine Lettre International. Recognized by the students as Teacher of the Year in 1992 and 1999, he was given the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005. Professor Wolcher has visited and lectured at a number of institutions around the world, including the Institute of Political Science and Management (Uzbekistan), the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (San Francisco), Birkbeck College (London), the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Kobe University (Japan), Osaka University (Japan), Mofid University (Iran), and the University of Bergen (Norway). The author of more than fifty articles, essays and book chapters, his most recent book is Law’s Task: The Tragic Circle of Law, Justice and Human Suffering, published in 2008 by Ashgate. Another of his books, Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy, was published in 2005 by Routledge-Cavendish (Birkbeck Law Press).