Hugh Baxter Professor of Law and Philosophy Office: STH 540 E-mail: hbaxter@bu.edu Education: Ph.D.,Yale University; JD, Stanford University Interests: Legal and Social Theory (particularly recent continental theory), Constitutional Law, Tort Law, Law of the Democratic Process

Hugh Baxter's law-school courses concern legal theory, Supreme Court decision making, tort law, and the law that governs American democratic political processes. His publications have been in the areas of legal/social theory and constitutional law. The focus of his research in legal/social theory has been the task of constructing a theory of law's relation to other networks of social communication, such as politics, the economy, science, and morality. Toward that end, he has sought to appropriate critically the work of European theorists, in particular, Jurgen Habermas's theory of law and Niklas Luhmann's theory of "autopoietic" (i.e. self-referential and self-reproducing) social systems. His present project is completion of a book manuscript that sets out and criticizes Habermas's theory of law and democracy.

After completing his Ph.D. and J.D., and before coming to Boston University in 1992, Professor Baxter served as law clerk for (then) Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The next year he clerked at the Supreme Court, with Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. (retired), and during that time he was affiliated with the chambers of Justice Harry A. Blackmun. After his first year in teaching, he took a one-year leave of absence from Boston University to clerk again for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this time during her first term as Justice of the Supreme Court.

Recent major publications:

2002 Habermas's Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, 50 Buffalo Law Review, pp. 205-340.

System and Lifeworld in Habermas's Theory of Law, 23 Cardozo Law Review, pp. 473-615.

1998 Managing Legal Change: The Transformation of Establishment Clause Law, 46 UCLA Law Review, pp. 343-459.

Autopoiesis and the "Relative Autonomy" of Law, 19 Cardozo Law Review, pp. 2087-2190.

1996 Bringing Foucault into Law and Law into Foucault, 48 Stanford Law Review, pp. 449-479.

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