Heidi M. Hurd
Ross and Helen Workman Chair in Law
Co-Director, Program in Law and Philosophy
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About
Heidi M. Hurd is a scholar and teacher in the areas of criminal law, torts, environmental law, environmental ethics, and moral, legal, and political philosophy. She is a Member of the American Law Institute, and she served as the College of Law’s eleventh and first woman dean from 2002-2007. She spent the first twelve years of her career as an Assistant, Associate, and then full Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and as the co-Founder and Director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Law and Philosophy. While at Penn, she was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia Law School and the University of Iowa Philosophy Department, and she spent several summers teaching law and political theory in Hungary, Germany, and Ukraine. Before joining the University of Illinois faculty as the David C. Baum Professor of Law (a position she held from 2002-2017), Professor Hurd spent 18 months launching the Institute for Law and Philosophy at the University of San Diego Law School as the Herzog Research Professor. Since joining the Illinois Law faculty, she has held five separate Visiting Research Fellowships at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, and taught in the Soros Foundation Summer Seminar Series that alternated for years between Lviv, Ukraine and the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia. Professor Hurd has also been a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business (in the Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics), the University of Alabama School of Law, the University of Tel Aviv School of Law, the Uganda Christian University School of Law, the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg Program for American Studies, Brazil’s FGV Direito-Sao Paulo Law School, and the National University of Singapore (in the Centre for Legal Theory). In 2005 she was named a lifetime member of the Consejo Académico Honorario of the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires (the Academic Advisory Board for the University of Torcuato Di Tella), a position she held until 2019.
In her capacity as a co-founder and co-director of the Penn and USD Institutes in Law & Philosophy and the Illinois Program in Law and Philosophy, Professor Hurd has organized more than 75 conferences and roundtables at destinations around the U.S. and in multiple foreign venues, including in Sicily, Vietnam, the U.K., Germany, and Australia. She also created and directs a biennial study-abroad program in Costa Rica in partnership with the Monteverde Institute, and she regularly leads faculty and student exchanges and multi-day fieldtrips both abroad (most recently to Luxemburg) and domestically (most recently to West Texas and the Driftless Region of the Upper Midwest).
Professor Hurd has written numerous anthologized book chapters, essays in peer-reviewed journals, and articles that have appeared in the nation’s top law reviews, including the Yale Law Journal, the Stanford Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the University of Chicago Legal Forum, Law and Philosophy, and Legal Theory, among many others. She is the author of Moral Combat (Cambridge University Press, 1999), the co-author (with Michael Moore) of The Morality of Criminal Law (forthcoming from Elgar Press, 2027), and she is the editor of Moral Puzzles and Legal Perplexities: Essays on the Influence of Larry Alexander (Cambridge Press, 2018). With her Illinois Law colleague Ralph Brubaker, she has a contract with Oxford University Press for a book on the moral underpinnings of personal bankruptcy entitled The Virtue of Bankruptcy. She has given over 150 lectures and paper presentations across the United States, Canada, the U.K., Europe, Central America, and South America, as well as at universities in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, East Asia, and Australia, and she has provided testimony before the United States House Committee on the Judiciary on proposed criminal legislation.
Professor Hurd received a B.A. (Hon.) from Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada), an M.A. in Philosophy from Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia, Canada), and a J.D. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Southern California. In 2016-17, Professor Hurd returned for a mid-career M.E.M. (Master’s in Environmental Management) at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Education
PhD University of Southern California
JD University of Southern California
MEM Yale University
MA Dalhousie University
BA Queen’s University
Areas of Expertise
Areas of Expertise
Criminal Law
Tort Law
Jurisprudence
Environmental Law
Moral Philosophy
Political Theory
Environmental Ethics
Publications
Selected Publications
The Normative Force of Consent, in The Ethics of Consent, ed. Peter Schaber, Routledge Press (forthcoming 2017).
Fudging Nudging: Why ‘Libertarian Paternalism’ is the Contradiction it Claims it’s Not, Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy (forthcoming 2017)
Promises Schmomises, Law and Philosophy (forthcoming 2017).
Paternalism and the Criminal Law, in The Philosophy of Paternalism, eds. Kalle Grill and Jason Hanna, Routledge Press (forthcoming 2016).
Stand Your Ground, in The Ethics of Self Defense, eds. Christian Coon and Michael Weber, Oxford University Press (2015).
Untying the Gordian Knot of Mens Rea Requirements for Accomplice Liability (with Michael Moore), Social Philosophy and Policy (2015).
Living with Genius: The Life and Work of Michael Moore, in Legal, Moral and Metaphysical Truths: The Philosophy of Michael Moore, eds. Kimberly Ferzan and Stephen Morse, Oxford University Press (2015).
Interpretation Without Intentions, in Practical Normativity: Essays on Reasons and Intentions in Law and Practical Reason, eds. G. Pavlakos and V. Rodriguez-Blanco, Cambridge University Press, 52-71 (2014).
Finding No Fault with Negligence, in Philosophical Foundations of the Law of Torts, ed. John Oberdiek, Oxford University Press, 387-405 (2013).
The Virtue of Consumer Bankruptcy, in A Debtor World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Debt, eds. Ralph Brubaker, Robert M. Lawless, Charles J. Tabb, Oxford University Press, 317-44 (2012).
Fouling Our Nest: Are (Environmental) Ethics Impotent Against (Bad) Economics?, in East-West Philosophy, eds. Roger Ames and Peter Hershock, East-West Center Press, 82-108 (2012).
See All PublicationsCourses
Courses
Environmental Ethics
Environmental Law and Policy
Environmental Policy
Ethics, Economics & the Environment
Torts