Philosopher in Residence

Michael Halberstam investigates theory and practice of governance

Halberstam says his research style fits with UB Law's focus on interdisciplinary work.
"It's becoming something that law schools are increasingly cultivating, but UB Law has had that tradition for a longer time."

World War II may seem the stuff of textbook history, but Michael Halberstam notes that he was born in Germany less than 20 years after the war's end – "closer," he notes, "than our own proximity to the civil rights era in the United States." His family is Jewish – his father was American, his mother German. Apart from growing up bilingual, what he calls his "complicated relationship to Germany" gave rise to a deep interest in German thought and culture, and to research into the roots of totalitarianism. Halberstam's book Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics, published in 2000 by Yale University Press, has received attention in the United States and abroad.

Halberstam joins the UB Law faculty this fall, on the heels of a yearlong research fellowship at Columbia Law School. Among his work there is a major article on the Voting Rights Act – which currently faces a constitutional challenge before the Supreme Court – and the extent to which it intrudes on state and local government autonomy.

In the classroom, he brings to UB Law memories of his own experience at Stanford Law School, where he was articles editor of the Stanford Law Review and a co-founder of the Legal Theory Group.

"Law school was a lot of fun," Halberstam says. "I went there with many interests and questions." Halberstam believes that "if you approach the things you are learning with a theoretical framework or with theoretical interests, then you tend to get a better sense of why they are interesting and important.

"I appreciated that the Stanford faculty were very conscious about pedagogy and worked very hard at their teaching. Some teachers would come into a class of 60 and know students by name on the first day. The students, in turn, recognized that they were being taken very seriously and that the law school was a very special environment. I hope that I can give that to my students at UB as well."

Halberstam received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University, then taught philosophy as an assistant professor for four years at the University of South Carolina. It was after he was assigned to teach a course in the philosophy of law in a criminal justice program at the University of South Carolina, he says, that he became interested in the law."I realized that getting a more detailed understanding of governance and the language of governance would be immensely helpful and interesting," he says. "I recognized that as a political philosopher I did not have a good understanding of how governance actually works."

After completing his work at Stanford Law School in 2003, Halberstam clerked for a year in federal court for the former chief judge of New York's Southern District."It's the best job in the world if you're clerking for a judge you like," he says, "because you have an enormous amount of responsibility and an enormous amount of delegated power, while ultimately it is the judge who makes the decisions. I was involved in some of the most interesting cases in the nation."

Then he worked as a litigation associate for the New York City firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison – "a very progressive firm," he says, "well-known for its litigation department." For three years he focused on civil litigation in the fields of securities, banking, directors and officers' liability, bankruptcy and other complex business disputes. Among other cases, he worked on litigation arising out of the collapse of Enron Corp. As part of his pro bono practice, he also shepherded a major voting rights case from complaint to trial.

Halberstam says his research style fits with UB Law's focus on interdisciplinary work. "It's becoming something that law schools are increasingly cultivating, but UB Law has had that tradition for a longer time," he says. "Academic work is often work that you do by yourself, but not always. I hope that I will be able to collaborate on projects at the Law School."

Halberstam is married to Kate Brown, a scholar of Victorian literature who until recently taught at Emory University and will be taking up a position at UB's English Department in the fall. They have 3-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. "I try to speak German to them," he says.