Dennis Klimchuk

Bio

I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy of the University of Western Ontario, cross-appointed to the Faculty of Law. I have taught at UWO since 1996. My main interests are in philosophy of law and the history of political philosophy.

Some Recent and Representative Publications

• "The Normative Foundations of Unjust Enrichment," Rob Chambers, Charles Mitchell and James Penner (eds.), The Philosophical Foundations of Unjust Enrichment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 81-99.

• "Restitution and Realism," Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 20:1 (2007), 225-240. (Review of Hanoch Dagan, The Law and Ethics of Restitution)

• "Unjust Enrichment and Reparations for Slavery," Boston University Law Review 84:5 (2004), 1257-1275.

• "Three Accounts of Respect for Persons in Kant's Ethics," Kantian Review 8 (2004), 38-61.

• "Necessity, Deterrence and Standing," Legal Theory 8 (2002), 339-58.

• "Aristotle on Necessity and Voluntariness," History of Philosophy Quarterly 19 (2002): 1-19.

Current and Future Research

I am working on a paper on excuses for an upcoming conference at Osgoode Hall Law School on criminal law theory.

I begin a sabbatical on July 1. My plan is write a series of papers investigating some issues in philosophy of law through an examination of the foundational work on these issues in the early modern period. Topics on which I plan to work include: the idea of the original community of property in the 17th century, Grotius and Pufendorf on necessity, equity in Hobbes's legal theory, and the conception of arbitrary power in Locke and the Levellers before him.

Another project on which I hope to work is a consideration of whether Fuller's claim that a legal system cannot aim to realize substantively unjust ends without violating principles of the rule of law is borne out in the case of U.S. slavery law. This involves asking whether a legal system can coherently treat a person as a thing and thus as a possible object of property.