Jedediah Spenser Purdy (born 29 November 1974 in Chloe, West Virginia) is an American legal scholar and cultural commentator. In 2022 he became the
Raphael Lemkin Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law, where he teaches courses on Property and Past and Future of Capitalist Democracy.[2] From 2018 to 2022 he was William S. Beinecke Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, teaching courses on American Constitutional Law, Constitutional Law and Democracy and its Crisis.[3][4] He previously taught at Duke University School of Law from 2004 to 2018.[5]
Purdy is the author of two widely discussed books: For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today (1999)[6] and Being America: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in an American World (2003). He is also the author of Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening ― and Our Best Hope (2022), This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth (2019),[7]After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (2015),[8]The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community and the Legal Imagination (2010), and A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom (2009).[9]
^"For Common Things" (Knopf), has become one of the season's meatier cultural chew toys. Kahn, Joseph P. (19 October 1999) "Shooting at the hip; With the assurance of youth, Jed Purdy challenges a culture of 'terminal irony' in an age of cool" The Boston Globe page D-1
^Purdy, Jedediah (2015). After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0-674-36822-4.
^Purdy, Jedediah (2010). A tolerable anarchy : rebels, reactionaries, and the making of American freedom. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN978-1-4000-9584-1.
^Halstead, Ted, ed. (2004). The Real State of the Union: From the Best Minds in America, Bold Solutions to the Problems Politicians Dare Not Address. Basic Books, pp. vii and xiii. ISBN978-0-465-05052-9.
^Morin, Richard; Deane, Claudia (10 December 2001). "Big Thinker. Ted Halstead’s New America Foundation Has It All: Money, Brains and Buzz". The Washington Post, "Style" section, p. 1.