J. Colin Bradley

I’m a legal scholar and philosopher, currently a Furman Fellow at NYU Law. Starting July 2026, I will be Assistant Professor of Law at USC Gould School of Law. I write about constitutional law and theory, private law theory, jurisprudence, and political philosophy. My research focuses on the role that moral concepts like freedom and equality play in legal reasoning across public and private law. Here is my cv.

My writing is published or forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal Forum, Oxford Studies in Private Law Theory, Political Philosophy, Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, and NYU Law Review, among other places.

Take a look at some of my published writing here. Or visit my SSRN or PhilPeople page.

I have a JD from NYU Law where I was a Furman Academic Scholar from 2018-2021, and received the Maurice Goodman Memorial Prize, the John Bruce Moore Prize for Law and Philosophy, the Leonard Henkin Prize for Scholarship on Equal Rights, the Weinfeld Prize for Scholarship in Procedure and Courts, and the Aleta Estreicher Prize for Law Teaching. For the 2024-25 term, I was a law clerk to the Honorable Raymond J. Lohier, Jr. on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

I received my PhD from the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University in 2024. My dissertation, “Claiming Independence: Essays on Law, Morality, and Equality,” was supervised by Philip Pettit. In a phrase, it argued that equality requires law.