John F.K. Oberdiek

John Oberdiek writes and teaches in torts and tort theory, as well as in legal, political, and moral philosophy more broadly. He is a graduate of Middlebury College, and studied philosophy and law as a postgraduate at Oxford and New York University, from which he holds an M.A., and the University of Pennsylvania, which granted him his J.D. and Ph.D. through its dual-degree fellowship program. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty in 2004, he practiced law at the Washington, D.C., firm of Arnold & Porter. 

Professor Oberdiek has presented his work widely in colloquia, including at Yale, UCLA, and Toronto, and at major conferences, including Kings College London's Moral Values and Private Law conference, The New Private Law conference at Harvard, Northwestern's Ethics and Politics conference, and the Analytic Legal Philosophy Conference. He is a past chair of the AALS's sections on both jurisprudence and scholarship. In 2005-06, he was a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. In spring 2012, he was a visiting professor at the University of Graz, Austria. From 2014 to 2016, he served as acting dean and then acting co-dean, leading the merger that created Rutgers Law School, following a two-year term as vice dean.

In addition, Professor Oberdiek is a member of the associate graduate faculty in the Rutgers University-New Brunswick Department of Philosophy and a director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy, under whose auspices he has organized several major conferences. He is also coeditor of the peer-reviewed professional journal Law and Philosophy, serves on the editorial board of Legal Theory, and is an adviser on the American Law Institute's Restatement (Fourth) of Property.