Professor Leo Zaibert

Professor Leo Zaibert

JD PhD

Leo Zaibert is a lawyer and philosopher who researches our responses to wrongdoing. He is especially interested in punishment and forgiveness, both in the political and the personal contexts.


 

Professor Leo Zaibert

Leo Zaibert holds a law degree from the Universidad Santa María in Caracas, Venezuela (where he briefly practiced law after working as a student clerk in several criminal courts) and a PhD in philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo. As a lawyer, his formal training was in the "civil law" legal tradition; as a philosopher, his formal training was in the Anglo-American "analytical" tradition.

He is the series editor of Hart's Studies in Penal Theory and Ethics. He serves on the editorial boards of leading journals in his field, including Law and Philosophy and Criminal Law and Philosophy. He has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College and an H.L.A. Hart Fellow at Oxford University.

Immediately before moving to Cambridge in 2022, he was the William D Williams Professor of Philosophy, Law and Humanities at Union College, where he also chaired the Department of Philosophy for twelve years.

As the name of his Professorship suggests, Leo specialises in penal theory and ethics. In particular, he seeks to bring penal theory into closer contact not only with ethics as such but with relatively neglected currents within ethics. He has argued that progress in penal theory involves engaging with the morality of punishment in general, and not only with the morality of state punishment. He sees punishment as a moral dilemma, and as the sort of dilemma that often leaves important remainders, even after the dilemma gets “resolved”, even after punishment has been “justified”. He has suggested that the notion of “justification” typically at play in penal theory is much more complex than customarily assumed.

He argues that penal theory is importantly enriched if we relate it to the specialised (and recent) literatures on the problem of dirty hands, moral luck, and value pluralism, and to other areas of moral psychology and moral phenomenology. Thus, he pays attention to famous authors that tend to be overlooked by penal theorists: from Aristotle, Seneca, and Anselm, to Isaiah Berlin, P F Strawson, and Bernard Williams (and including many in between, such as Leibniz, Brentano, Weber, and G E Moore).

He is particularly interested in the tension between punishment and forgiveness. While this debate was of great interest to thinkers of the past, ever since the Enlightenment scholarly interest in forgiveness (or mercy) has waned. Leo’s recent work seeks to show why this classical debate continues to be important.

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