St. John's News
St. John’s School of Law Professor Brian Tamanaha Awarded Fellowship With Institute for Advanced Study
April 25, 2007
Brian Tamanaha, J.D., Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo Professor
of Law, has earned a one-year fellowship to work at the Institute for Advanced Study, one of
the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and
intellectual inquiry and former home to such notable thinkers as
Albert Einstein, John Rawls and John von Neumann.
Membership with the institute, located in Princeton, NJ, is
considered one of the highest honors an academic can receive.
Tamanaha, invited into the institute’s School of Social Science,
joins 19 other fellows hailing from four continents and
representing U.S. universities such as Princeton, Brown and the
University of Pennsylvania.
“Possibly the most coveted fellowship in all of academia, this
honor demonstrates the scholarly and meaningful contributions
Professor Tamanaha has been making to the philosophical discourse
on the rule of law,” says Andrew
Simons, J.D., Associate Academic Dean of the St. John’s School
of Law. “His invitation is not only a great honor and tribute to
him, but it also reflects so directly upon the quality of the
faculty and legal education at our law school.”
According to the institute’s website, the fellowship program was
designed to “provide a space for intellectual debate and
cross-fertilization to flourish.” Members are given personal
offices, living quarters and opportunities to participate in weekly
seminars during which they may present their work.
On his honor, Tamanaha says, “It’s really the ideal opportunity
as an academic. You have the freedom to commit yourself to a major
project, but you are situated in an environment where top people
from different disciplines are brought together.”
Tamanaha says he will use the fellowship to write a book on the
realistic understanding of judging. He already has authored five
books, including, most recently, Law as a Means to an End:
Threat to the Rule of Law, which received a 2006 Honorable
Mention Award from the Association of American Publishers for being
one of the best professional/scholarly books published on law. His
books also have earned him the Dennis
Leslie Mahoney Prize and the
Herbert Jacob Book Prize.