Law, University of Illinois College of Law.

Robin Bradley Kar is a Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Illinois College of Law. He earned his bachelor of arts magna cum laude from Harvard University, his J.D. from Yale Law School, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he was a Rackham Merit Fellow, Rackham Predoctoral Fellow and Charlotte Newcombe Fellow. He is also a former law clerk to the Honorable Sonia Sotomayor, now an Associate Justice for the U.S. Supreme Court. One of Professor Kar’s primary research interests is in moral psychology, where he has focused on identifying and describing the special psychological attitudes that animate moral and legal systems. To that end, he has developed a general account of the human sense of moral and legal obligation, which draws on recent advances in a number of cognate fields (including evolutionary game theory, sociology, psychology, anthropology, animal behavioral studies, and philosophy), and which provides a more fundamental challenge to economic assumptions about human action than is present in the behavioral economics literature. More recently, Professor Kar has been studying the conditions under which legal systems (including international legal systems) can emerge and remain stable as independent institutions, beginning from the simpler forms of social complexity that typically precede law. Professor Kar also has broad research interests in jurisprudence and moral and political philosophy and in those areas of the law that appear to reflect moral imperatives. His work in these areas proceeds from the conviction that many longstanding jurisprudential and normative questions can only be adequately addressed without a better understanding of moral psychology.