Alec Walen has taught Criminal Law, Counterterrorism Law, the Philosophy of Rights, and the Philosophy of Criminal Law. He holds a
joint appointment in the Rutgers Law School, and the philosophy department
and the program in criminal justice at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His recent
work focuses on the philosophical foundations of moral rights and the
criminal law.Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, Professor Walen was a
research scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at
the University of Maryland. He has also taught at the University of
Heidelberg (Germany), Aachen University (Germany), the University of
Baltimore, Harvard University, and Lafayette College. He was a fellow at
the Center for Ethics and the Professions at Harvard University,
1996-97, and more recently was a Laurance S. Rockefeller fellow at the
Center for Human Values at Princeton University, 2014-2015.Professor
Walen earned his B.A. summa cum laude at the University of Maryland,
College Park, in 1987. He then won a National Melon Fellowship in the
Humanities, and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of
Pittsburgh in 1993. He earned his J.D. from Harvard in 1998. After law
school, he clerked for District Court Judge Nancy Gertner (1998-99), and
worked as an associate for the D.C. office of what was then Mayer,
Brown & Platt (1999-2000), before entering the academic track in 2000.
His
academic work focuses on the philosophical foundations of moral rights.
It can be grouped under three headings: (1) purely philosophical work
on the nature of moral rights; (2) application of the theory of rights
to topics in and connected to criminal law, ranging from the
justifications for detention and punishment to the standard of proof for
a criminal conviction; and (3) application of the theory of rights to
just war theory.
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