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\title{AMA Announcement: Monday 9/26 12PM ET - Kenneth M. Ehrenberg (Alabama)
on philosophy of law}



\author[1]{ADefiniteDescription }%
\author[1]{r/Science AMAs}%
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  \date{April 24, 2026}


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\begin{abstract}
As previously announced, /r/philosophy is hosting an AMA series this
fall semester which kicked off with AMAs by Caspar Hare (MIT) and Kevin
Scharp. Check out our series announcement post to see all the upcoming
AMAs this semester. We continue our series this upcoming Monday with
Kenneth M. Ehrenberg, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct
Professor of Law at the University of Alabama. Hear it from Professor
Ehrenberg himself: After getting my JD from Yale in '97 I worked for two
years as a lawyer, one with the NYC Parks Dept and one with the firm
O'Melveny \& Myers (doing first environmental insurance defense and then
a private antitrust case against Microsoft), before going back for my
PhD in philosophy at Columbia. There I studied under Jeremy Waldron and
Joseph Raz and had worked with Jules Coleman at Yale and when he visited
Columbia. My dissertation was about doing legal philosophy by
investigating the functions of law in general and legal systems. Some of
the ideas are reprised in my new book, The Functions of Law (OUP 2016),
although it is a completely newly written work with a completely new
ontological claim. OUP is offering a 30\% discount on the book: UK
addressees can use the code ALAUTH16 and US addressees can use the code
ALAUTHC4 for 30\% off. After finishing my PhD, I took my first tenure
track job at University at Buffalo, SUNY, taking leave to do a term at
Oxford as the HLA Hart visiting fellow in 2010. In 2012 I took a second
tenure track job at University of Alabama, heading up their
jurisprudence specialization. My main areas of interest are in analytic
general jurisprudence (especially the ontology of law and methodology of
legal philosophy), the relation of law to morality and grounds of legal
authority, and the epistemology of evidence law. The following is a
short description of the book. This book seeks to contribute to a legal
positivist picture of law by defending two metaphysical claims about law
and investigating their methodological implications. One claim is that
the law is a kind of artifact, a thoroughgoing human creation for
performing certain tasks or accomplishing certain goals. That is,
artifacts are generally understood in terms of their functions. When
discussing artifacts, the notion of function need not be as mysterious
or problematic as might be the case with biological functions. The other
claim is that the law is an institution, a specific kind of artifact
that creates artificial roles which allow for the establishment and
manipulation of rights and duties among those subject to the
institution. The methodological implication of this picture of law is
that it is best understood in terms of the social functions that it
performs and that the job of the legal philosopher is to investigate
those functions. This position is advanced against non-positivist
theories of law that nonetheless rely upon notions of law's function,
and is also advanced against positivist pictures that tend to
de-emphasize or overlook the central role that function must play to
understand the nature of law. One key implication of this picture is
that it can help explain how law might give people reasons to act beyond
its use of force to do so. AMA Professor Ehrenberg will join us Monday
for a couple hours of live Q\&A on his research in the philosophy of
law. Please feel free to post questions for Professor Ehrenberg here. He
will look at this thread before he starts and begin with some questions
from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please
join me in welcoming Professor Ehrenberg to our community!%
\end{abstract}%



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