The 2022-23 Wright Lecture

The 2022-23 Wright Lecture  

Jedediah Purdy, Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law at Duke University

“Democracy and Trust”

Does a democratic renewal need political trust? Will movements for deepened democracy fail because citizens mistrust one another too much to rule together? Without trust, are we trapped seeking a democracy we cannot achieve?

Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Biography

A prolific scholar, Purdy teaches and writes about environmental, property, and constitutional law as well as legal and political theory. He is the author of Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening – and Our Best Hope and edited the Norton Library edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden 1854, alongside three of Thoreau's most influential political essays: "Civil Disobedience," "Slavery in Massachusetts," and "A Plea for Captain John Brown."

His legal scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Nomos, and Ecology Law Quarterly, among others. He has published essays on topics ranging from Elena Ferrante’s novels and socialism to natural disasters and the Green New Deal in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Zeit, and Democracy Journal.

Purdy clerked for Judge Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York City. A member of the New York State Bar, he is a contributing editor of The American Prospect and serves on the editorial board of Dissent. He was active in the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina and was voluntarily arrested for civil disobedience in 2013.