David B. Lyons

Law Alumni Scholar
Professor of Law
Boston University College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
B.A., Brooklyn College
M.A. and Ph.D., Harvard University
Postdoctoral Work, University of Oxford

Interests: jurisprudence; moral and political theory; race and the development of American law

Before obtaining his B.A. in philosophy and American studies, David Lyons studied engineering and worked for several years as a machinist and draftsman. After earning advanced degrees in philosophy, he taught at Cornell University from 1964 to 1995, where he was a Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, served as chairman of the philosophy department, helped develop the Program on Ethics and Public Life and received the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award. Since coming to Boston University in 1995, Professor Lyons has taught upper-level courses in philosophy of law, legal interpretation, the theory of democracy and political resistance and the history of racial and ethnic relations in North America.

Professor Lyons has received major research fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He has directed NEH summer seminars for lawyers, judges and law professors and has taught in California's continuing judicial education program. His seven books include studies of utilitarianism and moral rights, the nature of law and legal interpretation and the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. His Ethics and the Rule of Law has been translated into Spanish, Polish and Portuguese and a Chinese edition is forthcoming.

A political activist since the 1940s, Professor Lyons has recently helped to organize community-wide forums on behalf of the BU Faculty for a Humane Foreign Policy.