William Ewald
John J. O’Brien Chair of International Law; Professor of Philosophy; Co-Director of the Institute of Law & Philosophy
William Ewald is an internationally recognized scholar in legal philosophy and comparative law.
He is the author of an often-cited article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review on the philosophical foundations of comparative law, “What Was it Like to Try a Rat?” and is currently at work on a book, The Style of American Law, that examines, from a comparative perspective, the distinctive character of American law. This work has led him to write on the legal philosophy of James Wilson, the first professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania.
He also works in the philosophy of mathematics and is the editor of a standard source-book in philosophy of mathematics, From Kant to Hilbert (Oxford, 1996). He received an award from the John Templeton Foundation to pursue research in the foundations of mathematics.