Biography
Joseph Vining, the Harry Burns Hutchins Collegiate Professor of Law, practiced in Washington, D.C., and has served with the Department of Justice and with the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. In 1983 he was a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and in 1997 he was a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellow. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Vining has lectured and written in the fields of legal philosophy, administrative law, corporate law, comparative law, animal law, and criminal law, and he is the author of Legal Identity, on the nature of the person recognized and constituted by law; The Authoritative and the Authoritarian, on the nature of the person speaking for law and the relation between institutional structure and the real presence of authority; From Newton’s Sleep, on the legal form of thought and its general implications; and The Song Sparrow and the Child: Claims of Science and Humanity, on the place of law and the human individual in the modern scientific enterprise. Vining is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School and holds a degree in history from Cambridge University.