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Orientations of the Rule of Law
The rule of law serves as both a guiding ideal and a framework for evaluating the conduct of citizens, lawmakers and governments. This lecture explores how these distinct perspectives relate to one another and how they can deepen our understanding of the rule of law.

This talk is sponsored by the Law Commission of Canada | Commission du droit du Canada

*reception following event 

Professor Waldron was educated in New Zealand and at Oxford, and his career has included appointments at Edinburgh, Berkeley, Princeton, and Columbia. Until recently he combined his position at NYU with the Chichele Chair in Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. Professor Waldron is well known for his work on constitutionalism, human dignity, historic injustice, national security issues, and the rule of law, as well as the history of political philosophy.  His books include Law and Disagreement (Oxford, 1999), The Dignity of Legislation (Cambridge 1999), Torture, Terror and Trade-offs: Philosophy for the White House (Oxford, 2010), and The Harm in Hate Speech (Harvard, 2012). A collection of his essays on political institutions, entitled Political Political Theory was published by Harvard in 2018. Some of his essays on the Rule of Law were published in Thoughtfulness and the Rule of Law (Harvard 2023). 

Professor Waldron was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998 and, in 2015, to the American Philosophical Society (which also awarded him its Phillips Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Jurisprudence). He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2011.  He has delivered major lectures around the world from Buenos Aires to Jerusalem, including the Storrs Lectures at Yale, the Holmes Lectures at Harvard, the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley, and the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh. (Professor Waldron’s Gifford Lectures, One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality, were published in Spring 2017.) 

Jean Thomas is an Associate Professor at Queen’s Law. She is joint convenor of the Colloquium in Legal and Political Philosophy. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto with a Master of Arts in English Literature and a Juris Doctor, as well as of New York University, with a Master of Laws and a doctorate in law. Prior to joining Queen’s, Professor Thomas was a Post-doctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s McCoy Center for Ethics in Society and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Jacob Weinrib is an Associate Professor at the Queen’s Faculty of Law. He teaches and researches constitutional law, administrative law, and legal theory.  

Weinrib is the author of two books, Dimensions of Dignity: The Theory and Practice of Modern Constitutional Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Impasse of Constitutional Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2025). His articles have appeared in the Modern Law Review, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Law & Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Ratio Juris, Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, Supreme Court Law Review, and the University of Toronto Law Journal.

Weinrib has received multiple awards for his research and teaching including the Canadian Association of Law Teachers Academic Excellence Award, the Professor Les Green Prize for Excellence in Research, the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy Essay Prize and the Stanley M. Corbett Award for Excellence in Teaching (2019 and 2023).  

Prior to joining the Queen’s Faculty of Law, Weinrib graduated from the Combined JD/PhD Program in Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, where he studied as a Vanier Scholar and received the David Savan Dissertation Prize. He held a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the New York University School of Law as a Global Hauser Research Fellow in the Center for Constitutional Transitions (2013-4) and as a Dworkin-Balzan Fellow in the Center for Law and Philosophy (2014-2015).