Robin B. Kar
Associate Professor of Law and Deputy Director
of Center for Interdisciplinary and Comparative Jurisprudence
Contact Information
Phone: (213) 736-1089
Fax: (213) 380-3769
E-mail: robin.kar@lls.edu
919 Albany St.
Los Angeles, CA 90015-1211
Educational and Professional Background
BA, magna cum laude, Harvard University
JD, Yale Law School
PhD, University of Michigan (Rackham Merit Fellow, Rackham Predooctoral Fellow and Charlotte Newcombe Fellow)
While in law school, Kar was an editor of the Yale Law Journal and Yale Journal of International Law, a Thurman Arnold Prize finalist in moot court and a participant in the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, the Capital Punishment Clinic and the Prisoners' Rights Clinic. He has clerked twice in Manhattan, first for the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then for the Honorable John G. Koeltl on the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. He has also worked for three New York law firms: Davis Polk & Wardwell, Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison and Debevoise & Plimpton.
Kar obtained his PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan, where he focused on issues in ethics, philosophy of law, social and political theory and game theory. He completed his dissertation ("Legal Parallelism") as a Newcombe Fellow, awarded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for "original and significant study of ethical or religious values in all fields of the humanities and social sciences."
Kar has broad research interests in jurisprudence and moral and political philosophy and in those areas of the law--like the common law--that appear to reflect moral imperatives. He has more particularized interests in the role of contract law and markets in modern political society, and in responses to the now-dominant accounts of these phenomena found in the law and economics literature. Kar has also developed a general account of our sense of moral and legal obligation, which draws on recent advances in a number of cognate fields (including evolutionary game theory, sociology, psychology, anthropology, animal behavioral studies and philosophy), and which provides a more fundamental challenge to economic assumptions about rational action than is present in the behavioral economics literature. Kar joined Loyola's faculty in 2004. In 2006, he was an Associate Faculty member at Yale's Center for Law and Philosophy. and in 2008, he was a visiting Professor at University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign.Admitted to the New York Bar in 1998.
American Philosophical Association.
Southern California Law and Philosophy Discussion Group
External Peer Reviewer for Legal Theory (Cambridge University Press).
Society for the Evolutionary Analysis of Law
"Contractualism About Contract Law," (forthcoming).
"Review of Brian Leiter, Naturalizing Jurisprudence," (forthcoming in Notre Dame Philosophical Review).
Legal Parallelism and the Separation of Law and Morality (work in progress).
"Contract Law and The Second-Person Standpoint: Why Efficiency-Maximization Principles Can Neither Explain Nor Justify the Expectation Damages Remedy," 40 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review (2008).
"The Second-Person Standpoint and the Law: Symposium Introduction," 40 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review (2008).
"Hart's Response to Exclusive Legal Positivism," 95 Georgetown Law Journal 393 (2007)
"How an Understanding of the Second Personal Standpoint Can Change Our Understanding of the Law: Hart's Unpublished Response to Exclusive Legal Positivism," Loyola-LA Legal Studies Paper No. 2005-16 (Idea Paper). This paper was selected for presentation at Yale's Center for Law and Philosophy in 2006.
"The Deep Structure of Law and Morality," 84 Texas Law Review (2006).
Legal Parallelism, UMI Dissertations (2005).
Harm: Its Meaning in Ethics, encyclopedia entry in Ethics (2d rev. ed.) (Salem University Press 2004).
H.L.A. Hart, encyclopedia entry in Ethics (2d rev. ed.) (Salem University Press 2004).
Commentary on Gideon Yaffe, "Mens Rea and Conditional Intent" (presented at the University of Michigan's Spring Colloquium in Philosophy on Moral and Legal Responsibility) (2003).
The Ethics of Judicial Interpretation (speech) (with Judge Sonia Sotomayor) (presented by Judge Sotomayor as an introduction to the National Conference on Legal Ethics, held at Hofstra University School of Law) (2001).
"What Can Bankruptcy Law Tell Us about Article III and Vice Versa?," 60 Montana Law Review 415 (1999).
The Extent of Our Responsibility, in The Eighteenth Century: A Critical Bibliography (1998).
"Legal Analysis and the Perversions of Theory," 106 Yale Law Journal 2685 (1997).
Jurisprudence; Contracts; Justice; Morals, Markets and the Law