The Squire Law Library and the Faculty of Law are pleased to announce that a further entry for Professor David Dyzenhaus has been added to the Eminent Scholars Archive.
Professor Dyzenhaus is the Arthur Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science for the academic year 2014-15. He is currently Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Professor Dyzenhaus was interviewed on 16th January 2015 and again on 20th July 2015 in the Squire Law Library. He was born and grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era, and experiences during his student days at the University of Witwatersrand have strongly influenced his outlook on a positivist account of law and of the role of judges in a legal order. He has written extensively on these matters, and his summaries during the interviews are a valuable insight into the South African legal regime during this period, including the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Professor Dyzenhaus talks of his time at Oxford, where he obtained his D.Phil, and his subsequent career in Canada at the universities of Kingston and Toronto. He also gives details of his teaching and research activities as the incumbent of the Goodhart chair, including his recent research on Thomas Hobbes and his article “What is a constitution? A plea for Staatsrechtslehre”.
This is the ninth in a growing collection of interviews with the Goodhart professors, previous interviewees being Professor Martti Koskenniemi, Sir Robin Auld, Justice Paul Finn, Professor Leslie Zines, Professor Jane Stapleton, Professor Peter Cane, and Professor Spyridon Flogaitis and Professor Gerald Postema.