About

Charles Barzun is a Professor of Law and Joel B. Piassick Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law. He joined the faculty in 2008 and serves as the director of the Program on Legal and Constitutional History. His areas of interest include constitutional law, torts, evidence, and the history of legal thought. Barzun also serves as a faculty advisor for the Dual-Degree (J.D./M.A.) Program in Legal History. He holds an A.B. in government from Harvard University, received in 1997, and earned a J.D./M.A. degree from Virginia in 2005. Prior to his academic career, he worked in corporate and product development at CNET Networks in San Francisco and clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Before joining UVA Law, he was a Climenko Fellow and lecturer at Harvard Law School. His scholarly work includes articles, book chapters, and essays on topics such as legal realism, natural law, constitutional law, and the history of legal thought, contributing to ongoing debates and discussions within legal theory and jurisprudence.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Computer Science
• Law and economics
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Philosophy
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Is Law an Intellectual Practice?:  A Review of Scott Hershovitz’s Law is a Moral Practice

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• <span>Progress and Process</span> 

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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• Clash of the Titans: Hercules vs Dennis Martinez (Reflections on the Fish-Dworkin Debate)

  2023-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
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• Alzheimer’s, Advance Directives, and Interpretive Authority

  The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine · 2023 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Epistemology

  Philosophers have debated whether the advance directives of Alzheimer's patients should be enforced, even if patients seem content in their demented state. The debate raises deep questions about the nature of human autonomy and personal identity. But it tends to proceed on the assumption that the advance directive's terms are clear, whereas in practice they are often vague or ambiguous, requiring the patient's healthcare proxy to make difficult judgment calls. This practical wrinkle raises its own, distinct but related, philosophical question: what criteria may the proxy bring to bear when making such interpretive judgments on which the patient's life may depend? After defending a general policy of enforcing advance directives on normative (rather than metaphysical) grounds, I argue that when advance directives are vague, a patient's proxy may permissibly make her own fresh evaluation of the patient's life as a whole and, in so doing, consider how the patient's character as a demented person contributes or fails to contribute to that life.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Pragmatism, logic and law</i>. By Frederick Kellogg. Washington, DC: Lexington Books, 2020. 204 pp. $45.00 paperback

  Law & Society Review · 2021-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Clash of the Titans: Hercules v. Dennis Martinez, or Why Dworkin and Fish are Both Wrong

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-05-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced little of lasting intellectual value. The two scholars, both giants in their fields, seemed to talk past each other time after time, making it difficult to discern the stakes of their quarrel. It would thus be easy to reach the conclusion that their debate should be happily forgotten, along with the mullets and headbands that marked the style of the decade in which they wrote. But that conclusion is only half right. There is a sense in which Fish and Dworkin talked past each other. Yet a real question lies at the heart of their dispute, and the impasse their exchange produced reveals well why neither theorist offers a satisfying answer to it. The question at stake is whether law is a genuinely intellectual practice—that is, a practice in which ideas matter, for explaining both individual judicial decisions and legal change over time. That question is hard and important. But neither Fish nor Dworkin offers an adequate answer to it because both are handicapped by their assumption that efforts to reflect theoretically on law necessarily take place either “inside” or “outside” of legal practice. Thus, although the two theorists purport to reach diametrically opposed conclusions about the intellectual integrity of law, their two accounts turn out to be just mirror images of each other—two sides of the same methodological coin. Only by abandoning the “inside/outside” dichotomy to which both theorists cling is it possible to get beyond the stalemate they reach and to begin to make sense of what it is to genuinely learn in and about law.

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• Quentin Skinner v. Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reasoning in History, Philosophy, and Law

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  One can ask two different questions about a given social, political, or legal practice. First, one can ask whether, and if so how, the ideas embodied in that practice explain its development or current prevalence. Second, one can ask whether the practice should be advanced, abandoned, or altered in some way. According to today’s disciplinary conventions, the first question is an historical or explanatory one, whereas the second is a philosophical or normative one.\nThis essay is about the relationship between these two questions. In particular, it asks the following: How, if at all, do the answers to these questions depend on each other? That is, to what degree, if any, must one evaluate or assess a practice in order to explain its social acceptance? And conversely, how, if at all, should the historical explanation of a practice bear on our normative evaluation of it?\nThese latter questions – which are really questions about questions – are large and deep ones. They have been long debated by philosophers and historians and are thus ones to which I cannot give conclusive answers. The task of the essay is therefore less to answer them definitively than to suggest what certain answers to them reveal about the modes of reasoning in the disciplines of history and philosophy—and law. It does so by examining a dialogue that took place over several years between the historian Quentin Skinner and the philosopher Charles Taylor. That dialogue nicely illustrates the assumptions of each scholar’s home discipline because both scholars give voice to, yet also challenge, those assumptions. Indeed, I will argue that Skinner and Taylor end up forging common methodological ground with respect to the relevance of historical explanation to philosophical evaluation and vice versa. More specifically, both scholars end up seeing a closer connection between the two disciplines than either historians or philosophers typically do.

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• The Common Law and Critical Theory

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Because common-law doctrines have long served as targets for critical theorists, it would be easy to see the common law and critical theory as essentially antagonistic with each other. But that would be a mistake. In fact, both critical theory and the common law—or, at least, one interpretation of the common law—license a quite similar, and similarly holistic, form of reasoning. Specifically, they both draw normative inferences from explanatory claims and vice versa. This symposium essay uses a case study to illustrate this quite general point. Catharine MacKinnon’s revolutionary argument that sexual harassment constitutes sex discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a vivid example not only of critical theory but also of an holistic interpretation of the common law. Because common-law reasoning and critical theory are analytically compatible in this way, I conclude by suggesting that each tradition has something to learn from the other.

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• The Constitution and Genealogy

  2020-07-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• The Tale of Two Harts; A Schlegelian Dialectic

  eYLS (Yale Law School) · 2020-06-29

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I]t is simply our total character and personal genius that are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our individual aptitude or incapacity for moral life.From this unsparing practical ordeal no professor's lectures and no array of books can save us. 1[I]t is only through personal, self-reliant participation, by trial and error, in the problems of existence, both personal and social, that the capacity to participate effectively can grow.Man learns wisdom in choosing by being confronted with choices and by being made aware that he must abide the consequences of his choice. 2Good lawyers earn the big bucks you all hope to make by putting their butt on the line, by exercising the best possible judgment in circumstances where answers are unlikely and advice only possible in terms of better or worse alternatives. 3

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Frequent coauthors

• Michael D. Gilbert

  University of Virginia

  2 shared

• Dan Priel

  York University

  2 shared