Fellowship / Fellows

Frederick Schauer

  • 2002–2003
  • Law
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Frederick Schauer
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Frederick Schauer, Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, teaches and writes about the philosophy of law and constitutional law. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he was a professor of law at the University of Michigan before coming to the Kennedy School in 1990. Schauer is the author of Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge, 1982), Playing by the Rules: A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision Making in Law and in Life (Clarendon/Oxford, 1991), and numerous legal and philosophical articles on constitutional law, legal theory, freedom of speech, and the theory of rights.

Schauer’s Radcliffe project, supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, will examine the philosophical, legal, and empirical implications of making decisions not individually but in groups. Examining not only rules but also categorization, generalization, profiling, stereotyping, and probabilization, Schauer seeks to illuminate when—if at all—we can and should make decisions on the basis of probabilistically justifiable but nonuniversal generalizations.

Schauer was academic dean of the Kennedy School from 1997 to 2002, and acting dean in spring 2001. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Chicago, Toronto, and Virginia, and Harvard Law School, and has been the Morton Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Dartmouth College. The founding coeditor of Legal Theory, he has served as vice president of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy and chair of the Section on Constitutional Law of the Association of American Law Schools.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

News & Ideas