Jedediah Purdy

Who is Jedediah Purdy?

Jedediah S. Purdy is a professor of law at Duke University and the author of two widely-discussed books: For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today and Being America: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in an American World. More recently the author of The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community and the Legal Imagination and A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom.

He was home schooled in West Virginia until high school and is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and Yale Law School. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York. He also serves on the editorial advisory board of the Ethics & International Affairs. He has been a fellow at the New America Foundation, a think tank that has been described as radical centrist in orientation.

He is the son of Wally and Deirdre Purdy.