Spring Semester 2026
All sessions for Spring 2026 will be held in person in Room 132, Law Building, on Fridays from 12:10 pm-2:00 pm. Papers for upcoming talks should become available to download in the table below one week before their respective colloquium dates and will be taken down after their colloquium has concluded. Please note that we can only distribute each paper during the week of its colloquium session.
Colloquium Description:
A colloquium for presenting and discussing work in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The central aim is to provide an opportunity for students, faculty, and members of the general public to engage with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues of potential interest to philosophers and political theorists.
The theme for Spring 2026 is recent work in legal and political philosophy and we will host scholars working in Philosophy, Law, and Political Science. We have no specific theme for this term’s colloquium, but we wanted to highlight the best recent work by more junior scholars (i.e., those who received their doctorates within the last decade) working in political philosophy, jurisprudence, and legal theory.
This semester, the colloquium is co-organized by Josh Cohen and David Singh Grewal.
Each session of the workshop will open with a student commentator providing a 15-minute comment on the paper. The presenter will have 5-10 minutes to respond and then we will open up the discussion to everyone in the audience.
The first open meeting of the colloquium will be on Friday, January 23, 2026. We will not meet on Martin Luther King Day.
If you wish to be added to the Kadish Center contact list to receive a copy of the speakers’ papers during the week of their visit with us, please contact dkoss@berkeley.edu.
Zoom is available for those who cannot attend in person, and can be accessed here.
Our Spring 2026 tentative schedule can be found below:
| Jan. 23 | Felipe Jimenez, USC Law | “The Institution of Contract” |
| Jan. 30 | Sabine Tsuruda, U. Toronto Law | “Workers’ Freedom of Association” |
| Feb. 6 | Wendy Salkin, Stanford Law | “Writers Are Not Congressmen” |
| Feb. 13 | Pinchas Huberman, Berkeley Law | “The Coverage of Ordinary First Amendment Standards” |
| Feb. 20 | Greg Conti, Princeton | TBA |
| Feb. 27 |
Oded Naaman, Hebrew Univ. |
“Morality and Necessity at War” |
| Mar. 6 |
Kate Vredenburgh, LSE |
“Moral Understanding, Opacity, and Worker Freedom” |
| Mar. 13 | Lily Hu, Yale |
“Discrimination, Causation, and Detecting Normative Phenomena” |
| Mar. 20 | Renée Jørgensen, Michigan |
“Stereotyping, Statistical Discrimination and Wrongs of Disrespect” |
| Mar. 27 |
MLK Holiday Observed |
No Workshop |
| Apr. 3 | Annette Zimmermann, Wisconsin | “Sanction the Broligarchs” |
| Apr. 10 | Crescente Molina, Rutgers Law | “Normative Powers and Permissive Right” |
| Apr. 17 |
Natasha Piano, UCLA |
“Schumpeter’s Dare: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy in the 21st Century” |
| Apr. 24 |
Linda Eggert, Oxford/Stanford |
TBA |