Frederick Schauer Full Biography

Profile Home

FREDERICK SCHAUER is Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he served as Academic Dean from 1997 to 2002 and as the School’s Acting Dean in the Spring of 2001. Formerly Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, he has also been the Cutler Professor of Law at the College of William and Mary, Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, William Morton Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities and Visiting Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, Ewald Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, Professor in Residence at the New York University School of Law, and Visiting Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School.

Schauer is the author of The Law of Obscenity (Washington: BNA Books, 1976), Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Playing By the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, and in Italian as Le regole del gioco, published in 2000)), co-author of The Philosophy of Law: Classic and Contemporary Readings With Commentary (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996) and The First Amendment: A Reader (St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1991, 1996), and author of more than 150 articles on constitutional law, the philosophy of law, legal reasoning, the theory of rights, and freedom of speech and press in legal and philosophical journals. His latest book, Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes, was published by the Harvard University Press (Belknap Press) in November of 2003.

Schauer’s work has been the subject of numerous commentaries, including four law review symposia and a book (L. Meyer, ed., Rules and Reasoning: Essays in Honour of Fred Schauer (1999)) devoted exclusively to commentaries on his scholarly contributions to legal reasoning, constitutional law, freedom of speech, and the philosophy of law. Formerly Chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Constitutional Law, he has been Vice-President of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, is a founding Co-Editor of the journal Legal Theory, and has been a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In addition to appearing before many congressional committees on issues of freedom of speech and constitutional law, he has in recent years taught and advised on issues of legal and constitutional development in Australia, Belarus, Chile, Estonia, Mongolia, South Africa, and the Faroe Islands, and has also lectured on legal theory and constitutional law in Canada, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Schauer is a 1967 graduate of Dartmouth College, a 1968 graduate of the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth, and a 1972 graduate of the Harvard Law School.