Archived Biography: Jedediah Purdy joined the Duke Law faculty in 2004. He graduated from Harvard College, summa cum laude, with an A.B. in Social Studies, and received his J.D. from Yale Law School. Professor Purdy teaches in property, constitutional, and environmental law. His other areas of interest include American politics, and intellectual history/political theory and law. His scholarship concentrates on the theory and history of property law and the place of public values in the private economy. He has also written on politics and demographics, methodological debates in social inquiry, and the prospects of American progressivism.
Before joining the Duke faculty, Professor Purdy clerked for the Honorable Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City and was a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. In 2006-2007 he was an ethics fellow at Harvard University and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. In 2008-09 he will visit at Yale Law School. He is a fellow at the New America Foundation, an affiliated scholar at the Center for American Progress, and a contributing editor at the American Prospect. Professor Purdy's scholarship has appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, California Law Review, and George Washington Law Review, among others. He is the author of For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (Knopf 1999), Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World (Knopf 2003) and many essays in publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Op-Ed Page and Book Review, The American Prospect, Democracy, and Die Zeit. He is now at work on two books, one on ideas of freedom and the common good in American life, the other on property and freedom.