Amin Ebrahimi Afrouzi

I have parallel interests in several areas. For information about my ongoing and past research, please visit https://aeafrouzi.com/research

In my dissertation, I argue that the traditions which dominate legal philosophy since at least the Nuremberg trials, namely legal positivism and anti-positivism, raise more questions about our responsibilities under unjust laws than they answer. I then offer an alternative, arguing that legal obligations arise from the value of legally constituted social practices that are integral to human life. On my view, though intrinsic to law, these obligations are nonmoral and defeasible by countervailing moral obligations. This provides a new position in analytic jurisprudence that defends the common-sense view that one should generally follow the law but can never hide behind it to do something immoral.

I received my J.D. and B.A. (in Rhetoric) also from UC Berkeley. Before coming back to Berkeley for graduate studies, I received two master’s degrees, one in Classics from Cambridge and one in Philosophy from Oxford. 

In summer 2016, I was a full-time judicial extern (volunteer law clerk) to the Honorable Susan Illston at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco, CA. In summer 2017, I was a full-time judicial extern to the Honorable Tanya Chutkan at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C.

I held visiting studentships in law at Cambridge (2019-20) and in philosophy at Hamburg (2019, 2021), Köln (2021) and Regensburg (2019) universities. I will be a visiting student in philosophy at the University of Lausanne in summer 2022.

JD, MPhil (cantab), MSt (oxon)