Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Kevin Toh
Home institution
University College London
Country of origin (home institution)
United Kingdom
Discipline(s)
Philosophy
Theme(s)
Democracy, Citizenship, Governance
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Kevin Toh attended Harvard College, where he concentrated in Social Studies, and then went to the University of Michigan where he studied both law (J.D. 1997) and philosophy (Ph.D. 2003). Toh was an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Indiana University in Bloomington, and then an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. He moved to the Faculty of Laws, University College London in 2016, and is currently a Professor of Philosophy of Law there.
Research Project
The Geometry of Legal Thought
Legal philosophers and practitioners tend to think of the law of a community as consisting of rules – where this last notion is conceived broadly to include standards or norms of many varieties. Kevin Toh’s project is aimed at constructing a new theory of the nature of law that recognizes legal examples as constituents of the law of any legal system. One subsidiary goal of the project is to explain the nature of examples in such a way as to show how we reason based on them. A second subsidiary goal is to understand the interplay between, and the co-evolution of, rules and examples in legal systems. A key move is to conceive legal examples as multi-dimensional vectors, or equivalently points mapped on multi-dimensional topological spaces, and to think of their similarities and differences in terms of distances between them in such spaces.
Research Interests:
Philosophy of Law, ethics, constitutional theory