Scott Brewer Named Professor of Law

Scott Brewer, assistant professor at the Law School since 1991, has been named Professor of Law. He specializes in jurisprudence and the philosophical analysis of legal institutions. His recent research has focused on epistemic, logical, and moral structures in different types of legal argument.

"Scott Brewer is an extraordinary scholar and teacher in the areas of jurisprudence and the philosophical analysis of legal institutions," said Dean Robert Clark. "He will bring much to the School in these important areas in the coming years."

Brewer received a B.A. in philosophy and religious studies from SUNY at Stony Brook in 1979, and earned an M.A. in philosophy in 1980 from Yale. In 1988, he graduated with a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal (1987-88) and was awarded an Olin Fellowship (1987). Additionally, Brewer received a Graduate Prize Fellowship from Harvard in 1984-89 and again in 1991-94. In 1997, he received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard.

Before becoming an assistant professor at the Law School in 1991, Brewer was a lecturer in 1988 and 1989. The following year he clerked for Judge Harry T. Edwards of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then went on to clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1990-91. He served as a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School in the fall of 1995. Since 1993, Brewer has been a faculty affiliate at Adams House, and from 1994 on he also has served as a faculty advisor for several student groups at the Law School, including the Harvard Law & Philosophy Society and the Harvard Interracial Law Students Association.

His articles include "The Jurisprudence of Logical Form" (a forthcoming chapter in Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.'s Jurisprudential Legacy); "Law's Discovery of Science," (forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal); "Exemplary Reasoning: Semantics, Pragmatics, and the Rational Force of Legal Argument by Analogy," Harvard Law Review; "Justice Marshall's Justice Martial," Texas Law Review; "Quelques raisonnements theoriques sur des raisonnements pratiques a propos du raisonnement theorique," Fondements Naturels De L'Ethique; "Choosing Sides in the Racial Critiques Debate," Harvard Law Review; "Pragmatism, Oppression, and the Flight to Substance," Southern California Law Review; "Figuring the Law: Holism and Tropological Structure in Legal Interpretation," Yale Law Journal; "Rhetorical Vision and the Rule of Law," Proceedings of the Third Annual W.E.B. DuBois Graduate Colloquium; and "DuBois' Talented Tenth: Its Role in 1984 and Beyond," Proceedings of the Third Annual W.E.B. DuBois Graduate Colloquium.

Additionally, Brewer selected and introduced articles by various philosophers and legal scholars, reprinted in the recently published five-volume set titled The Philosophy of Legal Reasoning (Garland Press, March, 1998).